trust

Staying Ordinary

/ Sophie Nova / Leave a comment

Nothing collapsed the next day. The world continued without rearranging itself.

from Chapter 23.

Nothing collapsed the next day.

I was tired.

Of course I was tired. What had started around eleven the night before as a photo session had somehow ended with neither of us getting much sleep.

But when Ken messaged me, he was still Ken.

He asked if I’d slept at all. I laughed and told him not much. He admitted the same.

And then we talked about work.

About our day.

About whatever our friends were doing.

The world had not rearranged itself overnight.

There is photographic evidence of this.

By the next night, I was back out with friends.

Ken was too.

We didn’t disappear from our friends afterward.

Wain was still Wain. Arya was still Arya. There were still clubs to go to, music to hear, and people doing ridiculous things in local chat.

Ken and I went back to all of it.

Except now I knew what it felt like to be alone with him.

Something between us had changed.

Or maybe it had been there and I had simply been the last person to notice.

A message from Ken wasn’t quite the same anymore. I knew what he looked like now. I knew I was attracted to him. And after Wednesday night, pretending there was nothing between us would have been ridiculous.

But he didn’t act as though what had happened entitled him to anything more from me.

He didn’t pull away either.

He was simply Ken.

I knew intimacy could change the rules quickly.

So I waited for something to change.

Nothing did.

We talked the way we had before. Shared music. Complained about work. Joined our friends. Sometimes we stayed up too late.

Wednesday wasn’t ignored. It just wasn’t turned into something we had to immediately define.

That was new for me.

Neither of us knew where this was going. And neither of us pretended we did.

At some point, Ken said it more simply than I could.

“I like what we have. I don’t want to rush it. I just want to be here with you.”

I liked what we had too.

That was enough.

We weren’t pretending Wednesday hadn’t happened.

We weren’t pretending we were only friends anymore either.

We just weren’t ready to tell everyone else.

Not yet.

The Night We Didn’t Sleep, Wednesday

/ Sophie Nova / Leave a comment

Fun – friends – shenanigans. That was exactly what the night had been.

Until it wasn’t.

from Chapter 22.

The night before, we had exchanged real-life photographs.

Sending mine hadn’t felt flirtatious. By then Ken knew a great deal about me, and sharing a photograph felt like another way of saying, This is me. This is the real person behind Sophie.

I wasn’t wondering whether he would find me attractive. The truth is, it never occurred to me that he would.

Too many years of being hurt had changed the way I saw myself. Whatever other people may have seen when they looked at me, beautiful wasn’t a word I easily applied to myself.

Then Ken sent me his.

That was different.

I immediately messaged my SL sister.

He’s incredibly hot…Like model hot.

Apparently my ability to recognize attractiveness worked perfectly well in the other direction.

Even then, though, I didn’t assume anything had changed between us.

As far as I knew, Ken and I were friends.

The next night was Wednesday.

There was nothing particularly romantic about it. We were doing what we had been doing for weeks—hanging out with friends. Earlier that night, I’d posted a picture from Club Zero with Ken and another friend.

Fun – friends – shenanigans.

That was exactly what the night had been.

Until it wasn’t.

It was late, around eleven, when Ken suggested we take some pictures together. This was his idea, not mine.

I warned him that my pose inventory wasn’t exactly designed for friendship. I had couples poses. Intimate poses. Sexy poses. Apparently I had been much less diligent about collecting poses for two people who just wanted a nice picture together.

He still wanted to. So we left the group.

We moved somewhere quieter, where I could control the light. Photography was familiar territory for me, and at first that was exactly what it felt like.

We tried poses. Adjusted angles. Changed hair, then changed it back. We laughed at animations that didn’t cooperate.

The poses were closer than the ones we’d used around friends, but I’d warned him about that.

And then Ken suggested we take off our clothes.

For an artistic photo.

Of course.

I agreed.

At some point, the photographs stopped being the point.

The poses became more intimate. A hand resting somewhere it hadn’t before. Bodies angled toward one another instead of away. The kind of proximity that becomes difficult to explain as artistic experimentation once neither person is wearing clothes.

I paused.

Not because I was uncomfortable.

Because now I was aware.

“How far do you want to take this?”

“I’m enjoying this,” he said. “I didn’t expect it. It’s a surprise.”

We talked about what we were comfortable with and what we weren’t.

And then we kept going.

Afterward, we stayed. We talked.

About what had happened, yes, but also about work the next day and the increasingly obvious fact that neither of us was going to get much sleep.

Neither of us seemed particularly interested in saying goodnight.

At some point, Ken told me he was happy.

I was too.

Eventually, morning began to creep into the room.

I had to work. So did he.

This had started around eleven o’clock the night before with the perfectly reasonable idea that we would take a few pictures.

Instead, neither of us had slept.

I finally went to bed tired, happy, and more than a little surprised by what had happened.

But I wasn’t afraid of what would happen next.

That might have surprised me most of all.

When Calm Holds

/ Sophie Nova / Leave a comment

I noticed patterns before I noticed feelings.

from Chapter 21.

After that, I started seeing him more often.

That wasn’t unusual. We were moving through the same circle now. Someone was always going somewhere—a club, a set, a clan event, somebody’s sim. Most of the time when Ken messaged me, he was already with other people.

Come join us.

So I did.

We went to clubs. Listened to music. Talked in groups. I wasn’t being pulled away from everyone else or singled out for his attention. I simply became part of the group.

Nothing about it felt like flirting. And yet, he was always there. Not hovering. Not waiting. Just present.

I noticed patterns before I noticed feelings.

The invitations kept coming.

A club. A DJ set. Something happening with the clan. Sometimes nothing more complicated than a group of us standing around talking until someone suggested somewhere else to go.

Wain was often there. Arya too. For a while, the four of us became a familiar combination.

Somewhere along the way, Ken and I started talking outside those gatherings too.

Nothing dramatic.

Music. Work. Second Life. Whatever ridiculous thing had happened that night.

Ken kept showing up.

He said goodnight when he left. If he was busy, he told me. If we didn’t talk for a while, nothing terrible happened when we talked again.

I paid attention. I also didn’t entirely trust it. I’d seen this rodeo before.

People could be kind in the beginning. Attentive. Patient. They could make you believe you’d finally found someone different right up until the moment they weren’t.

I wanted Ken to be different.

I wanted very badly to believe there were still good people in the world. But wanting something to be true and trusting it were two different things.

So I watched him.

Not deliberately, exactly. I didn’t have a checklist.

He listened. He remembered things.

He didn’t suddenly become someone else when a conversation got more personal.

And the next time I saw him, he was the same person he’d been the night before.

Then the night after that.

And the night after that.

Ken continued just being Ken.

Eventually, some of those conversations followed us out of Second Life and onto Skype.

There was no ceremony to it. It’s easier to talk there sometimes.

We didn’t turn on cameras. There was no performance implied. Just text at first, then eventually voice.

I remember hesitating before that first call. Hearing someone changed things. An avatar could be anything; a voice belonged to a person.

Then Ken spoke.

And we talked.

About work. Family. Music. Peru. Wisconsin. The differences between our cultures and languages. Second Life the way people talk about somewhere they’ve both lived.

Sometimes we talked late into the night. Sometimes we didn’t.

No tally was kept.

That was the part that unsettled me most.

There was no sense that time together had to be maximized to be valid. No anxiety about gaps. No urgency to define what we were doing while we were doing it.

One evening, after we logged off, I noticed something before I understood it. And without planning to, I began telling him things.

Pieces of my real life. Things I didn’t tell everyone.

He didn’t try to fix them.

Mostly, he listened.

I still thought of us as friends.

The Second Meeting

/ Sophie Nova / Leave a comment

He said hello. I said hello. Again. This time, we actually talked.

from Chapter 20.

The second meeting did not announce itself either.

It arrived sideways—through other people, through the gentle insistence of friends who knew me well enough to notice when I was withdrawing too far.

I had been pulling back again. Not from Second Life exactly. I was still taking photographs, hosting, doing the things I enjoyed.

I was pulling back from people. Declining invitations. Spending more time alone.

Wain had other ideas.

He was a relatively new friend then, and his approach to sadness was fairly straightforward: get out of the house – or, in our case, the virtual equivalent of it.

Wain had recently convinced me to come back to Bloodlines, this time as Sophie. He wanted me to join the clan he belonged to, meet some people and have something else to do. Ken was one of the clan’s royal members.

Wain’s other strategy was simply showing up.

That was how Ken returned to my awareness—not as someone I was looking for, but as part of a group already in motion.

Sanctuary of Rock was familiar territory. I was working a hosting shift, welcoming people as they arrived, keeping an eye on local chat, talking with friends while the DJ did what DJs do.

Wain came by. Ken was with him.

I remembered Wain mentioning him wanting to meet me after joining the clan. We’d actually met once before, although I’d talked more to his girlfriend that night than I had to him.

He said hello. I said hello. Again.

This time, though, we actually talked.

Not alone. Not at first.

There were other people around us, conversations overlapping in local chat, jokes and comments about the music. Ken joined in.

He didn’t flirt with me. I don’t remember thinking he was interested in me. I certainly wasn’t looking at him that way.

I just liked talking to him.

At some point, the conversation moved into private messages. We talked about music. Work. Second Life. Nothing particularly important.

But the conversation was easy.

At some point, I asked about his girlfriend. How was she doing? Where was she?

They had broken up. I hadn’t known.

We kept talking.

I wasn’t trying to figure him out. I wasn’t wondering where the conversation was going. I wasn’t reading something into every sentence. I was having a conversation with a man I barely knew.

And enjoying it.

Time passed faster than I expected. Eventually, he said goodnight. Before he logged off, he sent me a friend request. He said it would make it easier to invite me along when the clan was going to parties or events.

I accepted.

Then he logged off.

I stayed a while longer before logging off myself.

I went to bed.

I didn’t lie awake wondering what any of it meant.

As far as I knew, I’d made a new friend.

Looking Back at Her

/ Sophie Nova / Leave a comment

As I have been writing and editing my book, it has been a mixture of emotions.

Remembering the reasons I came to Second Life, and why I continued to come back.

Reliving trauma I survived.

Escaping abuse in my real life, only to find it again in a virtual world.

And remembering how, eventually, I began to break the cycle.

Looking back at her now is strange.

I know how frightened she was.

I know how badly she wanted to believe him, and how carefully she kept one hand on the door anyway.

She didn’t know what I know.

She didn’t know that eleven years later, the man she was studying so carefully would still be beside her.

She couldn’t know.

She had to find out the only way any of us ever do.

One day at a time.