All the Best
Ivy choked on her $19 smoothie, a tiny bit crawling up into her nose as she begged her body to shut up and please don’t shoot cold fruit out of its nostrils while people were staring at her in disgusted horror. Grabbing a napkin and taking a sip of water, she smiled and nodded at the couple across the communal table, assuring them that yes, she was a bit of a mess, but she didn’t require medical intervention.
When he walked through the sliding glass door, casually glancing around the store as he evaluated the scene, it had caught her so off guard that her body briefly shut down. Ivy never thought she’d see him in the 3D world, much less roaming in the wild. Hiding behind her laptop, she attempted to blend into the chaos of the overpriced grocery jungle to stare at him shamelessly.
Walking confidently through the prepared food section, he was on the hunt for a meal that would leave him feeling both satiated and under the impression he was caring for his body by spending more than any human should on half of a breakfast burrito. Ivy was also guilty of this with her million-dollar juice filled with hipster potions, so she had no leg to stand on.
This man had appeared in her life as a series of disappearing images on her phone, entwined with many erotically long phone calls, and Ivy had enjoyed the way he made her feel like the most beautiful woman in the world. Panting into her headset, he said things to her she never knew she needed to hear. As her hands explored her body, touching herself in the exact ways he instructed her, they were as close as two people could be who weren’t real humans.
No one actually existed on the internet.
Especially him.
Yet there he was under the glow of artificial lighting in a baseball cap and jean jacket like a normal person who bought toilet paper, drove to work in traffic, and occasionally cried actual tears when he slammed his shin into the edge of the dishwasher.
Ivy had never swiped YES on someone in the app, but something about him felt familiar and urgent. Necessary. She couldn’t explain it to herself, but as she flipped through his photos again and again, she decided it was time to take the leap.
The two had been an immediate match.
“Now what?” she thought while she considered deleting the app from her phone and tossing the whole thing in the trash. However, before she could erase the entire event, a message popped up, and a warmth spread across her chest at the thrill.
“Hello,” was all it took.
For two days, they texted more than was reasonable, and she found herself thinking about the way his hands would feel on her body. Ivy dreamt of his lips kissing her in a myriad of locations, ranging from parking lots to the back of her shoulders and into her shower.
Once, while waiting in line to buy tampons at Target, he texted “Where are you right now?” and asked if he could drive there and kiss her properly in the aisles the way she desperately desired him to.
“I’m on my way somewhere,” she smiled at her phone, considering canceling her plans for the rest of her life so she could live in this imaginary world.
“You can still go…after I kiss you,” he typed.
“As if I could,” she replied, knowing she would not be capable of letting go if she had the chance to tangle her body with his. The idea of running her lips along his jawline and smelling his skin gave her full-body goosebumps.
The truth was that they were both a little scared. Reality is never as good as fantasy, but what if this time it was?
On the third day, he called her while she was driving through a car wash, and the sound of his voice seized her through the phone. Two minutes and one and a half orgasms later, she returned to her errands with a massive smile on her face.
Days four, five, and six were a lather, rinse, repeat of the carwash. Lunchtime sessions that were part text, mostly phone, then more texts. He loved to send her images, and she devoured them as soon as they arrived. As a woman who had an ingrained dislike of the photos men sent, mostly unsolicited, she was thrilled by the ones she received. It surprised her how much they turned her on, and she wondered if she was a bad feminist.
A man so powerful that he made photos of phalluses sexy. What a world. Plus, the way he said, “good girl,” made her salivate, something she never knew would grip her the way it did.
Then, unexpectedly, on day seven, Ivy woke to discover he’d packed up and left at 3 am. Only a few hours after an intense and extended session of passion by phone, he’d pulled his shoes on and run while she slept. With a few kind words, he said farewell and closed the door behind him. Just like that, he was gone, vanished back into the interwebs where he once again floated about with no skin or beating heart.
He punctuated his sweet farewell with “all the best to you.”
It was kind, but businesslike in a way that simply didn’t hit the way it was intended to.
“But, wait,” Ivy whispered to herself as it sunk in.
Ivy had mourned the loss of this presence, a virtual lover that was always there when she needed him. Bedtime was lonely; the little checkmarks on the reply she sent would never light up as received.
It had been weeks without a peep, and she’d become accustomed to the silence. Yet now, as she sat watching him order food and interact with a human person, her body longed for him against her will.
Ivy stared, there was nothing else she could do, and her being needed to take in every ounce of him and store it away for later.
Then, without warning, he looked directly at her. Eyes locked, she smiled and gave a subtle nod, touching the wood of the table to remind her brain this was real. Both bodies froze, the world buzzing around them, and her instinct was to reach for her phone, but she didn’t. Her cheeks warmed, a trickle of sweat caressing her back and dripping into her thong, but she did not move.
If the building were collapsing around her, she would not let go of this moment until consciousness was slapped from her body.
As the person behind the counter handed him a container, he broke eye contact, and she was so overwhelmed that she thought about running. If she took her laptop in one hand and the smoothie in the other, she could head straight for the door and be in her car before he was finished paying. Or she could leave the smoothie behind. No, not the million-dollar magic smoothie, she wasn’t ready to let go.
The split second of deliberation distracted her, and when she brought herself back around, he was gone. The place where he stood moments ago was occupied by someone else.
Vanished. Again.
Ivy smiled at the ridiculousness of the entire situation as she chewed her straw and stared into the breeze outside the window. It was crazy to think that mere months ago, he was not a being that drew breath in her world. People come, people go, and we are never the same afterward.
On the short walk to the car, her phone buzzed.
“You are even more beautiful than I imagined,” it said.
Ivy didn’t respond, just slid the phone into her purse and tossed her bag on the passenger seat of her car. Taking a right onto the freeway onramp, she had never been so excited to get home and be alone with the man inside her mobile.