Author's Note:
I was sitting in the library doing some work and this vignette popped into my mind. I wrote it in an hour. It's barely 2,000 words so it is a quick read. Please enjoy, please vote, please comment. Thank you.
*****
Tim kicked his shoes off as soon as he got inside his apartment. The shoes smashed into the wall above the small rubber mat by the door. Well, he'd would wash those fucking marks off the fucking wall later. He settled onto the chair at the kitchen counter with a sigh. Both a beer and the laptop were popped open.
"Leadership" picked the boss's cousin for the newly-opened management position today. The guy had been there for half a year. Tim, who hit all his metrics and knew the business in and out was passed up. Two years of effort and development and now this. He had seen commiseration in his coworkers' eyes when the name was announced.
Janet: "That's too bad, Tim. I thought they were going to put you in charge after Mariam retired."
Chris: "If you want to go get some beers and smash some golf balls after work, I'm down."
Trevor: "If you plan on quitting with outrage, I'll follow you to whichever company you end up, man."
Beverly: "You don't need a fancy title for us to know who really leads the group."
But on to other things.
Tim would now settle down, watch some porn, drink a beer or six, and recover for work on Monday. Still, it was shitty. His fingers danced across the keyboard with a mind of their own entering name and password. Moments later the main screen showed up and the usual girl (nude) held her sign welcoming him back to the site.
Tim always first clicked on the MESSAGES icon at the top of the main page. His eyebrows went the message looked like an actual comment. All the messages so far had been poorly-written notes from beautiful 20-year old virgins who lived right down the street and who wanted to fuck him and he didn't even need a credit card.
"Saline, MI?" the title asked.
Tim, indeed, lived in Saline. It was a farming community south of Ann Arbor, an hour west of Detroit. The population hovered around a few thousand people clustered around a mile's worth of 'downtown' Michigan Avenue. Tim was surprised someone identified it from his one picture. He had a more generic "SE Michigan" as his location. He was doubly surprised someone was contacting him even though the porn site was geared to be as much social as it was visually stimulating.
He clicked red envelope icon and read.
Hello
, it started
, I recognize the background of your profile pic from Saline and I'm curious if you're still there? I have a proposition for you if you are. My name is Nancy
.
Tim clicked on the link to the profile. There was no headshot. The profile pic was shadowy outline of a person holding binoculars, reserved for the semi-serious voyeur. There were no pics or videos submitted by the profile but their favorites were exhibitionist and voyeuristic in nature. The first few favorited pictures were nude men at beaches, standing in windows of buildings, and in public places. The favorited videos featured women being groped, flashing their breasts, and nude beaches. The first video showed a woman in a small closet, arms coming through holes in the walls. The hands attached to those arms roamed all over the woman's body.
Tim couldn't do much more research but the person, "Nancy," had been a member on the site for over a year according to the profile information. Maybe she (he?) was legit. Today's work events left Tim feeling frisky and daring so he did something he had never done online before.
He responded.