When the truth finally came out, it was no more a surprise than finding out that the sky was blue; I'd known, or heavily suspected, for weeks that Ashley wasn't a fan site model, and never really had been. The JustAdmirers Fuckdoll Certification was a real thing, she just wasn't working on it. In fact, she'd never even been eligible; you had to actually have a profile on the site to enroll in the program, and the steady stream of supposed rejections that she was piling up just didn't add up. I'd wasted half my life away watching and worshiping porn in all of its various forms, and Ashley's mouth alone should have easily classified her among the greats of all time. Her failure to complete even a handful of the qualification's requisite tasks didn't track. It was all bullshit, but I so didn't care.
This was fantasy. All of it. For her, I assumed the thrill of pretending to be something so perverse was the main attraction. I don't doubt that some part of her was genuinely enjoying the sex, but the whole thing must have been just part of an elaborate roleplay for her. She got to be the filthy little fuckdoll that she wanted and didn't have to worry about her family or friends finding out, or whatever else kept her from actually committing to the bit.
I don't think I need to tell you what was keeping me from calling her out.
And so it was, on a hot summer's night some two months after she'd casually strolled into my life, that the hammer finally dropped on our little charade. We'd perfected the routine, our little game of make-believe, by then; we'd spend the weekend violating each other in the most unspeakable ways, all on film, she'd 'send the videos in' to be verified by the JustAdmirers officials, and some time later in the week she would fake her disappointment to find that her application to complete one of the hundred tasks had been denied for some reason or another. She'd put on a show of pouting at her phone, which I was never allowed to see, saying that we'd have to redo the shot, I'd fake disappointment, and we'd do the whole thing over again.
This time, she sneezed.
I don't know why having to face the reality of her deception mattered; I'd made my mind up that the truth of her fantasy wouldn't change the way that I felt about her, but I still pulled a face. I know I did. She sat, as she did most nights, curled up in a blanket fortress on my bed while I wrapped up some work, scrolling through her 'emails', loudly sighing before launching into her practiced routine of disappointed apologies to me for having to suck my dick again. But then she sneezed. The phone tumbled from her hand, arcing through the air in a dreamy trajectory to land, face up, on the floor between us to reveal the JustAdmirers rejection email that looked suspiciously similar to a calculator app.
She looked at me in horror.
I grimaced, slightly.
She squeaked.
I opened my mouth to speak.
She flew out from beneath the covers, snatched the phone up in a hurry, and raced out my room, past my roommate in the living room that she'd been desperate to hide herself from since she started coming around, and disappeared through the apartment door altogether.
And just like that, as abruptly as she'd come into my life, she was gone.
"Who the fuck was that?" yelled my oblivious flatmate down the hall.
I didn't bother answering. It didn't matter anymore.
*******
I languished in my heartbreak for longer than you'd expect, considering I'd only known Ashley for 7 or 8 weeks. Still, despite our refusal to broach the topic of whether we were an actual item or not, it felt like a breakup, and I absolutely rotted in the squalor of my misery. The sex had been otherworldly, but I knew in my heart that it was more than that. I'd only just begun to admit to myself that it was a whole lot more, and now there was nowhere to direct it.
I'd never experienced much of a breakup before, so I very likely overdid it. Determined not to let myself be shackled to my own orbit of lonely masturbation disguised as a hobby, I began with a purge. All of it, every megabyte of porn, every magazine, every collector's edition DVD, and pair of panties I'd ever ordered was either deleted or tossed. The regret hit me like a ton of bricks almost immediately, but it was really for the best; I was sure of that. I stopped blowing off my roommate's invitations to go out on Friday nights, and managed a pathetic rebound hookup with a girl who gave the single laziest, saddest handjob of all time. I doubled down at work, slamming projects off my to-do list at a rate that, frankly, began to alarm my boss; I was 'encouraged' to take a week off just to avoid flaming out.
"You're no good to us if you're dead," my boss joked one Friday afternoon late in August, "why don't you go fuck around for a week and we'll talk about getting you some real projects when you get back, eh? And maybe we can talk about an adjustment to your comp package while we're at it, yeah? Gotta make sure we keep you around a while if you're going to keep putting out like this!"
I dreaded having to face that much time by myself, but resignedly accepted his offer.
*******
In truth, there wasn't anything remarkable about the city itself; it was just sort of a default option after I'd graduated a few years prior. I'd taken an offer from a local tech company to help out with their project management team and opted to settle in for a while before exploring other options. The work was fine, and the town was familiar, so I just let myself enjoy the comfort of being somewhere I knew. Five years had skipped by just like that.
Even so, the week off grew stale by that Thursday. There's only so many times you can drive downtown and mindlessly wander in and out of local bookshops or coffee joints. I should have left town, maybe visited my parents.
Still, the late summer meant a return of the students, which my dorky ass roommate fondly referred to as a 'refresh of the talent pool'. He wasn't wrong, even if it was a little crude; sipping my inexplicably overpriced coffee as I drove back to the apartment to mindlessly waste the rest of my day in the lobby of a game I didn't even really enjoy, the sights of a thousand fresh-faced coeds packing the streets, supervising their dads and boyfriends as boxes or sofas were heaved up stairs into dorms, did warm my heart a little. One sprightly thing, wearing nothing so much as a bandana for a top while she waited for a crosswalk light to turn green, reminded me fondly of Ashley. Her tits weren't as perky, but they were close.
"Hey dick nuts," my roommate greeted me as I let myself in, "where've you been?"
"Same place as usual," I replied, "absolutely fucking nowhere."
"Oh cheer up you sad sack of shit, you can't mope around all summer. I mean, you kinda did, but still, how bad can it be? Huh?"
"I dunno man," I said halfheartedly, crossing the living room to stand by the window, "I'm just bored I guess." I'd told him all about Ashley, minus some of the more intimate details, after she'd scurried out that day, but his sympathy only extended so far.
"Well come on," Jeff said, mashing the buttons of his game controller with artless ferocity, "let's go out tonight, yeah? The college girls are moving back in this weekend; why don't we go do the polite thing and show some of 'em a good time?"
"Yeah I guess," I offered in distracted reply, watching a small van back into the parking lot, "if you want."
"We can do Gabe's, or Hawk's maybe?"
"Uh huh, yeah," I said, still not really listening as he continued to plate up his mediocre suggestions; the van doors opened, disgorging a teenaged kid and his parents. He looked young to be starting school.
"I'll give Jason a call and see if he's up for it too; you know that fucker pulls!" he laughed. Another figure climbed out of the van as the dad yanked the back hatch up.
"Oh fuck!" I exclaimed, squinting down in disbelief.
"Yeah? Yeah! Okay, I'll text him now then! Should we pre-game here then? we'll start nice and early, maybe like 2:00 you think?" my roommate asked excitedly, misreading my enthusiasm as interest in his half-baked plan.
"I don't think I can man, sorry," I explained, tossing my cup toward the trash on my way back out the door, "I'm think I'm busy!"
His confused barrage of curses followed me even through the slammed door.
*******
I had no real plan at all, but figured that I could just insert myself into the situation somehow and wing it from there. Tearing a ream of paper towel from the dispenser in the building's laundry room and plundering a pail from the adjacent maintenance room, I aimed to improvise the world's shittiest car wash.
"Sweetheart, did you really need to pack all of this?" called her father, beholding the mountain of boxes facing him in the rear of the vehicle.
