But so far, there wasn’t even a nibble. She should know. She checked every hour. All the responses were immediately sent to her Yahoo email account.
Not one single nibble. And she even checked her ‘junk’ messages just in case some of them landed there. No one found her pretty or interesting enough to write to. Was that how she really was? Sooner or later, she had to come to terms with the fact. No one wanted to date her the way she was, even when she was competing against like-sized women.
Argggh!
Desperately, she scrolled through the website and clicked on the other profiles there. Photo after photo of big, beautiful women came up, all smiling, all phenomenally attractive in their way. Caption after caption of likes, preferences, opinions. Every one of them seemed more interesting than her own.
Maybe she had come across as being too opinionated.
Looking for a guy who will accept her for the way she is and not try to change her, and she’ll do the same for him. Very much into monogamy and believes in saving it all for ‘the one’.
Who wrote that kind of thing on a caption?
(Oh yeah, Lyla did.)
Maybe every guy had some innate need to change a woman and she was coming across as defiant and recalcitrant.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
With each passing hour, Jessica felt her spirits sinking lower and lower into despondency.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WEB
Kyle hated to do this. Really.
If only it wasn’t a family commitment. If only it weren’t absolutely essential that he had to do it for the greater good.
He stared at Jessica’s photo again.
God, she was pretty.
He knew most men wouldn’t give her a second glance because of her size. He had been one of those males himself, until he was drawn into this at an early age. Since then, he had learned to appreciate women in plus-sizes and their outer (in addition to inner) beauty and charm. He had learned to admire their soft curves, their dancing eyes, their demure laughter and to see them for what they really were – big, beautiful and huggable.
So, as the web administrator, that was why he was blocking all those messages that came from actual guys out there. There were over a hundred so far. Once the guys had a look at her devastatingly pretty photograph and read her honest, heartfelt caption, they wanted to know more about her.
Just like him.
He read some of their (blocked) queries:
“Hi Jessica. You sound so interesting and mature, unlike so many girls I meet. Please write me. I would love to get to know you better. Sam.”
He pressed ‘Delete’. The message dropped off into cyberspace, eaten by the digital gods forever.
“Hi Jessica. You are incredibly beautiful. I hope you would consider going out on a date with me. Fergus.”
What sort of a name was ‘Fergus’ anyway?
He pressed DELETE.
“Jessica. That’s a beautiful name. I was very touched by what you wrote about saving yourself for ‘the one’. I hope I can be that one. Please write me. Gerald.”
Touched smouched. Get in line, pal.
DELETE, DELETE, DELETE.
Soon, he had a whole pile of deleted messages in his virtual trashcan. It had been a whole day since Jessica posted her profile. She had to be clawing at the walls by now, wondering why no one wrote her. He knew the psychology. She had to be questioning her self-worth, having all sort of self-doubts, and her confidence would be plunging like a bathyscaphe into ocean depths.
Soon.
He would make his move. He didn’t have a choice.
FIRST CONTACT
Jessica woke up that morning feeling groggy. The sunlight flitted through the windows of her dorm room and she blinked and groaned. What day was today? Oh thank God it was Friday. That meant her first class wouldn’t be until ten o’ clock and she could sleep in for a bit.
Why was she so sleepy again? Oh yes, she had stayed up till two trying to study. (Yeah, right.) Study and constantly checking her emails after every sentence she read of her Microbiology textbook.
Lyla had already gone. Her bed was unmade, as always, because she didn’t see the point of making a bed every morning only to have it mussed up by night.
Jessica groaned again. Her mouth tasted like something the cat brought in and she didn’t really feel like making it to her ten o’ clock class either. Professor Smythe talked in monotone, and it was difficult to listen to her drone about the creative habits of rod-shaped bacteria when you didn’t have your morning coffee.
Her Dell laptop lay open on her study desk. It was on hibernate mode.
No, don’t go there.
She made herself pad to the bathroom. She took a piss, looked at herself in the mirror, suppressed the urge to scream, brushed her teeth, splashed water on her face, and padded out again.
The laptop sat there like a siren calling Odysseus to his uncertain fate.