Running through my head

My choices for this entry were either post a three-page novel, or split it up. Since I have the attention span of a gnat right now, you get a split.

Today's story: the backstory.

About, oh, January of 2003, perhaps, I broke up with J. At that point, we'd been going out for three and a half years, give or take, and I was fed up with his lackadaisical attitude towards responsibility and upward mobility. So, at the beginning of my last semester in college, I broke up with him. I'd threatened to do so at Halloween, but didn't work up the resolve until January.

He of course wanted to remain friends - and get me back, if he could. Our relationship was odd. I was so used to having few boundaries with him, and it was difficult to put some in there. But at the same time, I didn't want him around. I recall being surprised and sad that he showed up to my departmental graduation ceremony that spring, after we hadn't been dating for four months already.

During that time, though, that halcyon semester of freedom and complete disregard for studies (once I'd figured out that I could flunk everything and still graduate), a few weird things happened.

The most important for the purposes of this story has to do with the return of JS into my life. JS is a male 8 years older than I am, who I originally met on a very prominent and popular internet forum attached to a humor site. For the savvy, that narrows it down to two, really, and there's one that I won't even link to. Anyway, we met in person about a year after I started posting there. J and I drove out to where he lived - in the same state, but an hour or two away - picked him up from work, ate dinner, went to a diner, and then retreated to his apartment. We met his snakes and his cats, and I fell asleep on the floor with the cats as the menfolk played some game or other until sunrise.

We had a great time, and after that, I occasionally heard from him. I'd relegated him to the fringe of my mind for a while, until we were both tapped to be writers for a humor site run by our mutual friend, Cecil (another person I met from the internet). We traded barbs and the occasional private message on the forums attached to that site, and I usually got first crack at reading anything he wrote. We were close, in that not-close way. Deepest secrets weren't shared, but average stuff was. Eventually we moved to emails, so that we could express longer thoughts, as well as have an easier way for him to transmit his novel and short story attempts to me. Contact was still infrequent, but he still rated above some of the people I knew from school in terms of the close-friend hierarchy.

I didn't publicize my breakup with J in any way at all - in fact, most people thought we were still going out. We still had the same circle of friends, activities, etc. JS found out that I'd broken up with J from Cecil, whom he was visiting at the time.

Out of the blue, JS IMs me. The story is he's bored because Cecil is sleeping, and just wanted to say hi. Oh, and to let me know that he had always thought I was phenominally attractive and that he wished he still lived in my state because then he would really have a chance, now that I was free again.

I was flattered, of course, and taken aback as well. It wasn't that sexual tension had never been an element of our relationship before, it was that this was more than I was prepared for. I expected a bit of sexual undercurrent in my relationships with any straight male, from my closest friend right down to the guy in my biochem study group. It was odd to me, that men found me attractive - that didn't happen until college - but not bad. Just... interesting. Anyway, JS and I got into some hardcore flirting and sexualized conversation before I had to leave for class or something and cut it off.

Since men in general fascinate me - and men who are apparently interested in me are even more fascinating, of course - the next time I saw him online I took the opportunity to flirt a little bit. The conversation got to the point where I mentioned that I was still naked. "Still naked?" he asks, and it comes out that I sleep in the nude, and was sitting in front of my computer in such a state. All bets were then off, and we wound up setting up our webcams for a little naked show-off mutual masturbation show across a few thousand miles.

Tomorrow: fleshing out the relationship dynamics further: why I like JS, and why JS likes me. Also, what happened after that first little episode of web debauchery.