the Adam/Micah slash fanfic (no matter how hot) at any moment set me apart. Loved or hated, praised or feared, I would never really be one of them. Maybe that was why Ash still called me in to be the bad guy. She’d made too many friends to do the dirty work.
I opened the popular photo thread where the fan girls shared their favorite pictures of smoldering hot Adam Copeland. On a good night, they’d find new pictures to share, but on a slow night, like tonight, they never tired of recycling through the oldies.
I didn’t mind the view myself, and to better connect with the community, I threw in a comment of my own. After a few minutes, someone replied to my comment, but they appealed to my role as admin, asking me to turn the picture into a new banner. Maybe it was my imagination, but sometimes I thought they humored me like the kid their mom made them hang out with. They might have been sincere, but I’d never be quite sure.
I opened my photo editor and dragged in the photo, thinking about how I’d let this kind of exchange pass for friendship for far too long.
Back home, my only real friend had gotten engaged to my brother. At my last job doing social media for a pharmaceutical company, I couldn’t connect with the ambitious sales reps enough to make any friends. I shared more common interests with Fergus, a sixty-year-old customer service rep who still played in a band. Close, but no cigar really.
As for romance, sometimes I’d get set up on a date with someone’s single friend. That was a whole other hell.
It didn’t help that I pretty much lived on the Internet where I could interact while remaining in perfect anonymity. There’s an immediate intimacy that you reach with people you only know through words, through their thoughts, their likes and dislikes. Online, we pretended to be who we wanted to be, or maybe we shared our truest selves. It never mattered if someone was twenty years older or younger when we both agreed that Walking Disaster’s third album was arguably the most technically proficient, but their second album had more heart.
But I couldn’t go to bed with a shared opinion, and I needed a social life.
Yeah, if I’d put forth any effort, I could have made better in-real-life friends with the fan forum people. I did occasionally crash their get-togethers when they’d meet before a show for dinner, but I’d never tell them who I was. I mean, I’d tell them I was a lurker named Layla, never revealing that I was the site admin, Pumpkin. I liked being one of them for a little while.
I had a lot of experience pretending to be myself.
Three knocks sounded on my door. I set my laptop down at my side and flung my feet off the bed just as the door cracked open a fraction.
“Is it okay to bring your suitcases in?” Micah’s familiar voice through the narrow opening brought home how totally out of place I was.
I hopped up. “Come on in.”
He rolled my larger suitcase behind him while lugging both my smaller duffel bag and cosmetics case in one hand. His bicep flexed, and I swallowed down unbidden thoughts about a guy who’d been no more than pixels to me until very recently. Except for when I saw him on a stage commanding a crowd of thousands, he’d never been flesh and blood until tonight.
Without noticing my cartoon-like popping eyes, he set all the luggage up against one wall, dusted his hands, and faced me. His chest swelled at his job well done, then he exhaled, shoulders dropping. “And now you can finally settle in for the night.”
I wasn’t sure if I should move toward him, hug him, shake his hand, or what, so I wrapped my arms around myself and said, “That was really nice of you to bring my things over.” Heat rushed up the skin along my chest and neck. I could talk to normal guys as well as I could talk to anyone else, which honestly wasn’t saying much, but while I’d felt fairly invisible in the group setting, this one-on-one thing left me tongue-tied and awkward, like I had too many limbs.
Micah, bless him, took it in stride. “Hey, it’s no problem. We gotta watch out for each other, right?”
Jesus, what a nice guy. “Mmm-hmm,” I squeaked. My lips folded into my mouth, and I couldn’t think of