One click is all it takes, one click: and we connect:
‘Is it Love that you’re after…or just a good time? Tell me, Baby,’ she sings.
This isn’t Love. But I’m her Baby. Captivated by her. In her trance. I hear Gaby calling. I try to mute her. Furtively glancing round. Tearing my thin, greying thatch. Did I close the door? It creaks open. Course, it does: the door needs oiling. A suffocating grief wells up deep inside me: Toby, our little boy, left us in 2005. Since then, I’ve been searching for a reason. I get down now. I eat too much.
My heart’s up and running. My stomach growls at the sweet smoke creeping upstairs. Gaby’s baking cookies. Any minute now, she’ll breeze in with a crumbly, chewy brace, a steaming mug of skinny Arabica coffee, four sugars. What if the screen freezes? I’m flustered, dripping sweat. She’ll see red when she finds me like this: compromised.
‘How long have you been seeing her,’ she’ll ask, stunned, “How long have you been meeting her, like… this?’
The screen’s frozen. Damn! I hear Gaby’s steps on the staircase. I start to twitch and shake.
‘I didn’t lift a finger,’ I’ll say, ‘Honestly, it was an accident.’
‘Of course, it was Adam,’ she’ll retort, ‘Like your last online lover and the one before that.
The screen comes alive. I’ll just click EXIT…
She’s reining me in, sending me a strawberry mivvi kiss. I taste her nectar lips, all drippy, and sticky. My secret lover, melding her rouge ice cream lips to mine. The screen extrudes like stretch-blown glass. The screen plasticizes, around my petrified head. The screen sucks me in.
‘Is it Love that you’re after…or just a good time? Tell me, Baby,’ she insists, as I embrace her in my new-found, bendy, ethereal state. Her perma-plasmolysis, plasticized, embryonic Baby!
‘Can we start by having a good time, and work at it?’ I ask, furling up inside her.
