He arrived home from what had started out to be an eagerly anticipated brunch/lunch date a little after 1:00 on Sunday afternoon. He had been looking forward to meeting the woman with whom he had had a short, but promising email correspondence about the possibility of a relationship. She was younger, very pretty, had similar goals and purposes to his own and didn't seem to be put off by the considerable difference in their ages. The brunch had been pleasant and the conversation stimulating…they were comfortable and easy together. But it had ended badly--with a whimper, not a bang--but badly nonetheless. The letdown had been gentle, kind and even filled with a tenderness that in the end made it all the more painful.
Now, with nothing more than an afternoon's work facing him, his mood matched the gloomy pallor of the skies viewed from his apartment window. He had neglected an important deadline and now there was nothing for it but to tackle the project and finish it straightaway…
But in hopes of delaying the inevitable, he turned on his computer to check his email before buckling down to work. Amidst the usual pile of junk emails he was pleasantly surprised to see that C had returned his earlier email. He always enjoyed hearing from her…
C was someone he had met on the Internet… in one of "those" chat rooms where the curious, the timid, the bold, the adventurous come together in a kind of sexual primordial soup…driven by the sometimes frantic, sometimes languid pressures of desire. In the beginning he couldn't quite put his finger on his attraction to her. But it was definitely there, and from the start. Something indefinable perhaps, a kind of spiritual connection with her, that he felt from the moment they had first started chatting. He had actually been surprised at how their "relationship" (he always felt it a bit strange to characterize these cyber-only liaisons as "relationships" of any kind…) had progressed. Starting with innocuous, easy and pleasant chitchat: their respective situations/stations in the "real world," ages; even a smattering of flirtation concerning their respective sexual proclivities. Promising, a little titillating even, but hardly passionate. He had filed her under the "nice--possible good friend" category (where he himself had been deposited earlier in the day). They had signed off with the typical cheery promise to stay in touch and chat more later.
After their initial contact, and for the first week or two, he saw, or rather heard from her, only occasionally. For those not familiar with the process, it can be difficult to find time to find moments for conversation when lives are so far separated, time zones intervene, schedules don't align, etc.
Then, one day he received a message on his computer from her that startled him with its simplicity and directness. She had written: "I'm looking forward to cybering with you soon." Again, for the uninitiated, the verb "to cyber," as in "cybersex," implies more than just innocent chatting. It moves the conversation (relationship??) into an overtly sexual realm—an eventuality that he before not seriously considered with C. Her initiative and directness shocked him a bit. But her message did have a definite, and, he thought, surprisingly powerful impact on him. The sudden change in status found him contemplating the possibility of moving the friendship to a sexual level and he was amazed at how electric that possibility felt. It was as though all the easy comfort he had felt prior was suddenly, instantaneously even, converted to pure sexual energy.
Several days passed with just an occasional hello/how are you/gotta run exchanged between them as they lived their separate lives on opposite sides of the country… Actually they lived in different countries altogether—he in the US—California and she in Canada on the east coast. He began to consider that he had probably misinterpreted her message about "cybering" and that perhaps she was just a "newbie" (a beginner not familiar with the finer points of the jargon surrounding erotic chat) and had just meant to continue along with their innocent and social chitchat.
Until, that is, he ran into her at work one day--*that* day that had changed everything. She had hailed him across the Internet during her lunch hour. She worked as a teacher…a kindergarten teacher for god sakes…! And she was saying hello to him from a computer in the faculty lunch area during her lunch hour.