Tessa Hunt ducks under an awning hanging over the street to check her phone. There’s rain splashing in the puddles around her feet, and her phone illuminates her face with bright light. Probably unflattering, but she’s too focused on her screen to worry about it. A slow smile crosses her lips when she sees who the sender is.

 

D: MAYDAY!! JUST WALKED IN ON MY FRIENDS HAVING A 4SOME. I AM TRAUMATIZED SEND HELP

 

Tessa covers her mouth so that she’s not laughing out loud in the middle of the street. It’s not the weirdest thing that people in Chicago would have seen, but she’s dedicated a lot of time to keeping herself as well-put-together as possible. It’s a habit she keeps up even when she’s alone. But D always manages to slip through her façade.

Glancing around, Tessa makes sure that no one is coming—she’s standing in front of a bakery, but when standing near Water Tower Place, there’s always a chance of a swarm of tourists running a girl over—and types out her reply.

 

Tessa: Holy shit, which friends?

 

Then she tucks the phone back into her pocket and covers her head with the hood of her jacket. Tessa’s blonde hair is relatively long, but she can gather it easily into her hood so the rain doesn’t send it into a frizz-frenzy. It would serve her right if it did, considering she’d spent forever trying to wrestle it into artful, loose waves that morning when she should have been working on her portfolio. Loose waves won’t get her a job, and D keeps telling her to embrace the straight hair.

As though he would know, he’s never even seen her hair.

Tessa slides out the way of a big guy in a suit on her travels to the train station. She spent too much time at the library, and now she’s running late to make dinner. It was worth it, she thinks, as she skips around another slow walker and ducks an umbrella before it knocks her head off. Her backpack is now crammed with new books.

When Tessa was getting her degree in English Lit, she knew that the job market would be terrible. In fact, her dad had offered to pay for a full ride for literally any other major. But she’d been determined. If she was going to put herself into massive debt, then she was going to do it because it was something that she loved.

Her dad didn’t end up paying her tuition, but only because he couldn’t afford it. With a big family like theirs, there was only so much he could do for his eldest.

Either way, Tessa figured every major came with a risk. Business BAs were washing pots in restaurants all over Chicago. Accounting majors were begging in the streets. Nothing was guaranteed anymore. So if she was going to get a degree, then it might as well be in something that she was good at, that she enjoyed, and that she could consider herself doing for the rest of her life. At least that was what she’d told herself when she’d walked onto the stage to shake the Dean’s hand and receive her diploma.

Her phone buzzed again in her pocket, but she had to wait until she was safely on the train station platform before she could check her message.

 

D: I HAVE TO BURN MY EYES OUT AND YOUR ASKING ME THAT??

D: I JUST

D: i cant

D: it was Tommy + Slate + their girlfriends

 

Tessa has to physically restrain herself from correcting his incorrect use of ‘your’ and ‘cant.’ Instead, she straightens her black skirt and quickly types back.

 

Tessa: Could be worse? Could have been Logan?

D: Jesus, dont even joke about that

 

Logan is D’s brother. Tessa has been trading texts with D every day for the past five months, and she knows the people around him almost as well as she knows her own family. Logan is his brother who’s dating Mikayla. Tommy and Slate are their best friends and basically D’s brothers, who are dating Sersha and Harper respectively. She knows that Tommy and Slate like to joke about group sex, but D has never actually witnessed it. Apparently, it’s something terrifying.

 

Tessa: Pics or it didn’t happen.

D: u horny wench

Tessa: Did they have the door closed?

D: thats beside the point

Tessa: I think the real lesson here is not to walk into someone’s room without knocking first

D: I CANT BELIEVE YOU ARE TAKING THEIR SIDE I HAVE BEEN VISUALLY ASSAULTED

 

Tessa smothers her laughter again and quickly puts her phone away so that she can actually get on a train. She’s having a harder and harder time of putting her phone away nowadays. Tessa’s dad has started to notice that his daughter spends way too much time with her eyes glued to her phone. She doesn’t know how she could possibly explain that she started texting a guy when he sent her a dickpic by accident late one night and that she now considers him her best friend. Or that she knows who everyone around D is, but she doesn’t know his real name. And he doesn’t know hers. Because that’s not the sort of thing, they need to know about each other. They’re happy to exchange ideas, pics, and funny stories. At this point, a real name doesn’t even matter.

Telling herself that she’s supposed to be getting on the train instead of giggling at D’s antics, Tessa quickly checks through the gate and skips past a couple kissing on the escalator, her backpack swinging dangerously with the weight of her books.

Once she’s finally on the train—snagging a seat in the corner by sheer luck—she quickly opens her backpack and pulls out the first book she sees: Hokkaido Highway Blues. A guy hitchhiking around Japan? Sounds awesome! She quickly settles herself down with the book in her lap and takes a moment to reread the blurb, because that’s the best part. That’s the part that hooks readers.

If only she could write like that…

She would probably still be broke.

But the thought of escaping to another place—to Japan, or Russia, or the Netherlands, or just anywhere that isn’t Chicago—excites her. Tessa has always loved reading because when she reads, she can imagine she’s somewhere else.

When she was a kid, she could imagine that she was in Hogwarts, Middle Earth, or even Narnia. Now that she’s older, she can still imagine that, and also imagine that she’s in another country or another time. Someday, when she can afford it, she’s going to see the world.

Her phone rings in her pocket, and for a moment her heart leaps into her throat. She nearly drops the book as she fumbles for it, a sudden anxiety clutching her before she sees the screen. For a moment, she feels a tiny spike of disappointment, but then she answers, “Hey Dad… I’m on my way home,” she says, pressing the phone to her ear and ignoring the dirty look she gets from the woman in front of her.

Jesus. Relax your flaps, woman.

It’s not Tessa’s fault her father called her, or that the other woman decided to catch the train that day. She’s just glad that she’s still got reception down here.

She tells herself that she shouldn’t be disappointed. D has never called her. That’s the one thing they’ve never done. No matter how many nights she would have liked to hear the noises he claimed to be making or to just hear his voice—calling always seemed to be the one line they didn’t cross. That, and showing their faces. The fact that he’s apparently having a crisis over the fact he saw his friends having sex shouldn’t change that. The closest she will get to D is reading his messy texts. And she’s okay with that.

“Was the train late?” Dad asks. He sounds a little tired.

“No, I just… got a call.”

“A call? From one of the jobs?”

Tessa hates the excited tone of his voice. She deliberately doesn’t look down at the waitress uniform she’s wearing, because that’ll only make her more depressed. All those hours she’d spent working on her resume, all those hours trekking through the newsrooms and trawling online for writing work, and she’s still making stupid orders at Starbucks in the middle of the city.

“No, nothing like that,” she says, thinking quickly for something to change the subject. “How did Jackie go in practice?”

“Yep… she’s coming home with a few bruises, but I think she’s pretty proud of herself.”

Tessa grins, even as she has to brace herself for a Yuri!!! On Ice marathon when she gets home. Her little sister became obsessed with ice skating after she saw that anime for the first time, and now she likes to practice as often as she can. Getting her to the rink every day is a bit tough, but luckily Tessa’s brother, Scott, just got his license. He’s still in that phase where any driving is fun, even if it’s driving his kid sister to the other side of town and watching her spin around on the ice for hours.

Of course, Tessa had to take another shift at Starbucks to pay for the fees. But Jackie is worth it.

“She came so close to pulling off a Salchow,” Dad goes on. “Scott got it on video.”

“I’ll have to check it out on Facebook.”

“Or… ask him to show it to you?” her dad says slowly, as though she’s a bit slow.

She sighs. “It’ll be almost an hour before I get home.”

Dad just clicks his tongue at her. He’s getting used to Facebook, but he still doesn’t understand why his children use it to communicate when they all still live at home.

“Could you grab some milk?” Dad asks.

“Sure,” she replies absently. The train is moving, and she can see the lights from the tunnels cutting through the window. “I can swing by the store. Is there anything else we need?”

“Nope, that should be it.”

“Okay. Love you, Dad.”

“Love you too, honey.”

She hangs up, reflecting again that her dad sounds really tired lately. He’s been working double shifts at the factory now that two of his kids are in college. Tessa graduated, but her brother and sister started their freshman year, and neither of them can work on their scholarships. So Tessa and her dad have had to pick up the slack.

Six siblings. One parent. She often wonders if her mother had done the math before she left.

Her phone buzzes in her palm, and she tears her eyes away from the window to look down.

 

D: comfort me

 

She rolls her eyes at him, even though he can’t see it.

 

Tessa: :*

D: :D

 

Tapping the phone with her index finger, Tessa finds herself mimicking the emoji that he sent. D loves his emojis. And his dickpics. But mostly his emojis.

She tries to conjure an image of the man that she’s become so close to over the last few months. Tessa doesn’t have a lot to go on. She knows from his pictures that he’s got pale skin. That he’s muscular from the pecs down. There’s a nice roundedness to his muscles that keeps him from looking like a weightlifter. And there’s a tattoo of a rose curling around his neck and part of his chest. His cock is… quite frankly, massive. When Tessa got the first picture, she’d thought someone had photoshopped it, or Googled ‘big cock’ and sent it to her as a joke.

She’d replied asking who it was, and D had realized pretty quickly that he’d sent it to the wrong person. His reaction had been the only proof she’d needed that it was a legit pic, which had led to a lot of questions. Namely—Has he ever hurt anyone with that thing? Could he use it as a weapon in a jail break? Now that would be a fun story to write.

He’d been adorably flustered, which she could tell even through his texts, and by the time he’d stopped apologizing she’d been intrigued enough to continue the conversation. He’d even been kind enough to send her more pics. In exchange for a few of her own.

What had started out as a mutually-beneficial picture exchange became an actual friendship. Tessa doesn’t really know how that happened. One day she was enjoying some of his raunchier suggestions, the next she was complaining about her second-youngest sister’s hogging the bathroom. D had fired back with a long rant about his older brother stealing his guitar so he could sing a sappy romance song to his girlfriend. They’d exchanged more pics, more information about their families, more… everything. This was the closest relationship she’d even had with anyone in her life, and she still has no idea what the man’s real name is.

For all she knows, she’s being catfished.

What if she’s being catfished?

That thought gets smothered immediately, because if she’s being catfished, then it would have backfired on her before now. It’s been five months, after all. With the amount of personal shit she’s told D, he’s enough information to ruin her, and enough pictures to make his own stop-motion porno. He hasn’t. So she can only assume that this is real. D is real.

If only she had the courage to ask him to meet up. But that’s a line that she’s not sure she’s ready to cross. Because it’s one thing to tell a guy everything about her when she knows that she’ll never see him, but it’s another thing entirely to actually look him in the eye. Some nights, when she’s laying alone with her siblings surrounding her in their own rooms, she wonders what it would be like to be in his arms. It’s an exhilarating and exciting thought. She both hates and is grateful for the fact that D lives in Manhattan with his brother and friends. Manhattan is well out of reach for a broke college grad, who’s never even left her home town.

Her phone buzzes again.

 

D: check this out

 

He sends her a link to a Vine video. Tessa opens the link and bursts out laughing in the middle of the carriage, making the woman in front of her tsk with annoyance. But Tessa can’t bring herself to care. That corgi’s butt is adorable. He always knows how to make her laugh.