Undersold(2)

I couldn’t believe I just did that. Sexting was one thing, but sending someone a sexy picture of myself was completely new for me. I knew a lot of girls did it, but I had never met a guy that made me want to undress for him this badly until now. Not to mention I didn’t really know who was even on the other end of the connection.

That’s exactly what I want, he wrote back. I couldn’t believe he was being so forward, but it was exciting. We didn’t even know each other. Then again, after the things we had described, I guessed it wasn’t that weird. We knew certain things about each other, like how I wanted him to fuck me with my hands pulled behind my back, and how he wanted me to suck him off.

My phone buzzed again. When can I meet you?

I had no idea. I checked the clock and my heart almost stopped. I had work in a half hour, which was the bare minimum I needed to get ready and get there on time. What I thought was too early in the morning, turned out to be way too late. That’s what I got for sexting all night with a hot stranger. Phone forgotten, I rushed to get ready, and went out into the city.





2.


The day shift passed like it usually did: slow and boring. I kept thinking about the hot stranger that wanted to meet me. His name was Rex Blue, and if he was even half as good looking in person as he was in his pictures, he was still by far the most attractive man I had ever met. His name was a little odd, but I didn’t mind it. I was meeting a man through the internet, after all, so there was bound to be something a little weird about him. I guessed I was a little weird myself for even considering this, but every new message he sent made me want to meet him more.

“Amy?” My manager’s voice cut into my daydreaming. It was getting near closing time, and the café was starting to empty.

“Hey, sorry Jim. What’s up?”

“Just wanted to make sure you still were taking tomorrow off.”

“Yep, all day. Why?”

He shook his head. “Nothing, don’t worry. App time, huh?”

Jim Sleeter was a few years older than I was, and he was one of the few nice guys that worked at Swirl Café. It was mostly a hipster place, and the other employees cultivated a distant and too-cool attitude. That was never my thing, and it wasn’t Jim’s, either. Him and I got along pretty well. I told him about my after hours app programming, and he told me about his rock band. I heard them play once, and they weren’t that bad. Very late 90s emo, but in an updated, cool way. He was a little goofy and awkward, but it was endearing, and he was probably my only friend in the city.

We became close because of our unfulfilled dreams. We liked to joke that we were in the losers club together. Jim was cute in a boyish way, with long brown hair and big brown eyes, but I was never attracted to him. Most nights, we closed the café together, and spent a lot of time talking about our past. Jim grew up in rural Pennsylvania, and his parents never approved of music. I told him about the accident when I was young, the accident that changed my life forever. I told him about my father’s encouragement when I wanted to get a degree in computer science, and about his cancer. I was the first person in my family to go to college, and my father’s look when I received my degree from Columbia University was one of the best days of my life. I learned he was sick not long after that.

I didn’t have much growing up. My dad drove a delivery truck, and my mother died when I was young. My two brothers helped out as much as they could, but we were constantly just getting by. I always had a job too, but my family, especially my brothers, encouraged me to stay in school and to go to college. Still, even as I was graduating from high school with an acceptance to Columbia, I felt like an imposter. That never got any better when I was actually living in New York.

Instead of staying in the big apple after graduating from college, like all of my friends did, I moved back down to Philadelphia to be closer to my father. He lived in a suburb outside of the city, in the same house that I grew up in. There weren’t many big tech companies in Philadelphia, and I didn’t want to waste my time grinding out hours of code every day for some random big box store, so I took a job at Swirl Café and wrote my own apps on my own time. It had the benefit of free coffee, and wasn’t too stressful.

Jim was one of the first people to encourage me. It was him who told me my idea for an app that connected low-income kids that needed help in school with cheap and friendly online tutors was a good one. He was like a big brother to me, who also happened to give me my paycheck. He showed me around Philly when I was still getting used to living in a new city, and he introduced me to his friends when I had none. Maybe in some ways, Jim was the reason Adstringo was going to buy my app for thousands of dollars. It was because of his kindness that I had the courage and stability to spend my off hours working on my dream.