Chapter 1
Cecily
JUST ONE...MORE...LINE.
There. My drawing was complete.
Rafail Slutsky, in all his bold, naked glory.
At least, Slutsky as I imagined him. I’d never seen him naked. But the whole world had seen him as near-as. That was Olympic swimmers for you.
To say it was a beautiful drawing was an understatement. A full monty take, complete with imagined (and ridiculously huge) cock, it showed every inch of Slutsky’s perfectly proportioned, magnificently muscle-bound body in profile. I’d used my Wacom drawing tablet to hand-draw him, then added shading to set off my favorite of his major muscle groups. It would make an awesome black-and-white addition to The Slutsky Files.
I exported the file, then went into BodyDraw to upload it. I guess it says something about me that I was always logged into the BodyDraw forum.
I placed the file in the public space. If you were logged in, you could see all the explicit, loving details of my drawing. If you visited the forum as a guest user, you’d see a fig leaf overlay where his cock would be.
And that was the other reason I was always logged in. Fig leaves were utterly pussyblocking.
BodyDraw had started as a stalker forum, a fan art site for popular sports personalities. I was one of its founding members. From the start, my favorite dude to idolize was Rafail Slutsky. Some of the first drawings ever posted were my interpretation of the gorgeous blond’s famous, studly body in...oh, about fifty unlikely poses.
Over the years, the forum had evolved into much more. Now it was a general figure-drawing forum with thousands of registered members. Our big thing was the Model Salon, where members placed nude pictures of themselves for other artists to use as references. The forum administrators made sure nobody got sleazy and uploaded porn or anyone’s pics without consent. But otherwise, the rule was, any nude pose goes.
I’d never put photos of myself there. I'd draw anything and anybody, but I didn’t want anybody drawing me. Nobody on the forum even knew what I looked like. My avatar was a picture of Slutsky’s tight ass clad in a white Speedo.
File uploaded, I went to the members list.
I saw right away that ThinkTank was online. And instantly my heart began pounding.
I almost clicked out of the forum to go huddle, cowering, in a dark corner, like the wimp I was, but then I remembered my promise. My big, bad resolution.
On New Year’s Eve, I’d done a stupid. I'd been lamenting how my life was in a rut just when the text message came in from Stacy, past president of our Mi Alpha Alpha sorority:
Remember, ladies. Do it. Whatever it is you want to do. Wherever you have wanted to go. Whatever you want to try, to taste, to feel, to live....do it. This is our year.
Maybe because of my recent family drama, her message struck a chord with me. It felt like fate. A sign that I should take the new year seriously. Most years I drunkenly vowed to lose those extra twenty pounds, just for the sake of having a resolution. Then I’d put it out of my mind.
This year, Stacy's text got me thinking...and I came up with the perfect resolution. I'd stop waiting for that mythical day in the future when I’d work up the nerve to try to make friends with ThinkTank, a guy I liked from the BodyDraw forum.
No more waiting. This would be the year I would do it...get down and personal with him. And this time I wouldn't flake out.
Rushing for Mi Alpha Alpha was one of the most daring things I'd ever done. I was the oddball sister in the sorority house, with my hermit ways, spending most of my time in my room or the library. Since graduating from college, it had been work, work, work. These days I hardly even dated. So for me, deciding to poke my head out of my shell was radical.
My fellow sorority alums rolled their emoji eyes. They thought it wasn’t enough to reach out. They thought I should chase poor ThinkTank down wearing a trench coat and stilettos. But ugh. Not this turtle.
I hardly even knew the man. Sure, yeah, ThinkTank gave my posts thumbs-ups sometimes, and from what I could see, I was special that way, but that was it as far as bonding went. I didn’t know his real name. He'd never posted a picture of himself. I had no solid proof he was even a man. He was just this dude I sort of knew from the forum.
He was an artist, I presumed, like the rest of us. Not the best artist. Actually he was pretty terrible. If I were a mean, critical person, I’d say he couldn’t draw worth shit.
What I liked about him was his sense of humor. Also, his posts were thoughtful yet forthright. And he brought up lots of interesting points about anatomy. I could tell he was a thinker, a contemplative sort like me.
Plus I liked his avatar, a dorky cartoon face. It made me think he was as geeky and shy as I was.
See, I believed some people were meant to be doers, and some were meant to watch from the sidelines. People like me and ThinkTank? We’re the sideliners. It's the sad reality.
I’d wanted to send him a private message, to find out more about him and see if he were my kind of wallflower, for ages. But you weren’t supposed to PM people unless you’d been invited to.
Mostly, though, I was afraid he’d think me some kind of crazy stalker.
Recently, ThinkTank had mentioned in a thread that a highway sign had blown onto a rooftop and caused a small fire near his new condo.
I’d just read on the news the same thing had happened in my city in one of the trendy, upscale neighborhoods I couldn’t begin to afford on my wage from the frame shop where I worked.
I was shocked. It couldn’t be a coincidence. It meant he lived in the same city I did.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I went back and forth with thoughts like, If he lives in that posh area, he’s out of my league, but then, He could be a sweet, nerdy guy who’s moved in with his parents.
I wasn't sure why I was convinced he was a nerd. Maybe it was the way he talked about muscles; he really studied them. He didn’t talk about growing his muscle mass the way jocks did. He said stuff like, "I asked six people to perform isometrics and I can't buy your assertion about the hamstrings." Like I said, nerdy.
I sent my sorority friends a text:
Fine. As my New Year's resolution, I resolve to ask ThinkTank for permission to send him a PM.
I was proud of this. This I could do. And if he said no or just "sure" in a harassed, who-the-fuck-are-you way, I’d dive into the bathtub and hide under a towel and never come out for the rest of my life. Easy-peasy.
I got back:
What? You’re not going to find out if he's cool in a PM!!
And:
Come on, Cecily, you’ll never know unless you meet him if he’s a total dweeb.
Clearly, my girlfriends didn't get that I was okay with a dweeb. Wasn’t I a dweeb? If anything, I was afraid he wasn’t a dweeb. The idea of putting myself out there like that without knowing for sure if he could match me for dweebiness was not acceptable.
I went to his latest post, then clicked Reply.
I typed:
Hi, @thinktank. Been thinking about you. How was your New Years Eve?
Before I could think twice about it, I hit post.
I stared at the live post I’d just created and suddenly blushed. Could I look any more needy and obvious?
I frantically checked out the title of the thread I’d just posted on. It was: Tech Help—Applying Filters to Layer Stacks—Suggestions From GIMP Experts?
Omigod, omigod. It wasn’t even topical.
I went to delete the whole post.
At the last minute, I decided not to delete it but to add on an appropriate, topical reply.
I submitted the changes.
When I read back over everything, I groaned. My post was still cringeworthy, especially the part where I said, "Been thinking about you."
That had to go. I deleted "been thinking about you," then switched stuff around so the part answering the original poster's question was first and the part tagging ThinkTank was last.
There. Now it looked like saying hi to ThinkTank was a casual afterthought. Very suave. Much better.
I jumped up and zoomed to the freezer, whipped out some ice cream, and plopped back down, already stuffing my face.
And moaned in shame.
ThinkTank had already replied! He must have seen and copied my original post before I’d changed it. He quoted everything I’d originally written, including the "Been thinking about you." Now my embarrassing post would live on forever; it would never die; my kids and grandkids would see it and hang their heads in shame for their pathetic granny.
He said:
It was good, @Slutskys2Hot. How about you?
I stared. Gulped. Then typed fast, with my eyes shut so I wouldn’t lose my nerve, and sent it off.
Finally I opened my eyes to check what I'd posted.
It was OK I didnt go anywhere I had a quiet night chatting online with friends and eating popcorn dont you love popcorn
Oops. No punctuation. And oh crap...could I sound anymore like a ditz? Leading with popcorn? Really?
I swung around in my chair, shoveling creamy pecan praline goodness into my mouth until the rush of panic dissolved. I turned back to my desktop to find that he had replied to me. I was filled with drop-jawed excitement.
Oh, wait.
No, he hadn’t.
He had replied...but not to me, just to the thread's original poster.
My message he’d merely given a thumbs-up.
A thumbs-up was what you gave somebody when you were done talking with them.
So.
So.
So, okay.
A voice niggled at me. It was like I could hear my friends getting on my case.
Tough shit. If you quit now, it doesn’t count. You’ll henceforth be known as a resolution-slacker.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
I took a deep breath of courage, then typed:
Mind if I ask you something via PM, @thinktank?
I sent it as another post, in the same thread. Cringing all the while.
There was no reply.
None.
I waited for twenty minutes, only to find he’d logged off four minutes after I posted. Which meant he had plenty of time to see my pathetic post and decide not to reply.
So. Right.
That was that.
Operation Publicly Humiliate Yourself With ThinkTank was complete.
And now I could go shoot myself with the knowledge of a job shittily done.