Distance
Chapter 1

Copyright© 2018 by Jason Samson

Summer had been hard; hard to forget her, hard to move on. But the first week of uni completely helped change that. I was over her. I had forgotten her. Now, at uni, surrounded by new normal people, I could look at all the new normal attractive girls. I was saved.

My phone buzzed. She’d sent me a text:

“Wanna talk? Tomorrow 9pm ok with you? Z”

Z was Zoe. You wouldn’t believe the crap you get as a girl online, so Zoe went by the sexless handle ‘Z’. I’d teased her about Zed the gay biker in the movie Pulp Fiction a few times but she stuck with ‘Z’. And going to uni was supposed to be my escape from Zoe.

Christ, I’m making her sound like a monster, an abusive monster. Well it isn’t anything like that; nothing like that at all! Zoe is an angel. A very weird different angel, but an angel nonetheless.

A bit of back-story: Zoe and I were in sixth form together; sixth form is what we call the two years at school between high-school and uni in England. She was the frumpy quiet shy tiny girl hiding in the corner who never approached anybody, never talked, never got noticed. And if anyone tried to approach her she would have been rude and cold and uninterested. People were so not her thing.

Back when we were put together for our first team assignment she surprised everyone by approaching the teacher at the front and asking if she could work alone! There was a hush as she approached and asked, the whole class listening intently to see how it panned out. This couldn’t be personal since she didn’t even know me; it wasn’t me, it was her who had the problem. When the teacher gave us all a stern loud lecture on the importance of teamwork and communication I almost felt sorry for her.

It took at least half of that first assignment before she began to thaw. She was like Hermione Granger, which is a reference she’d appreciate because Zoe loves her fantasy books and Harry Potter is one of her favourites. We became friendly.

We never really talked, but we chatted online. After the first term it became all the time. We’d be sitting across a desk from each other, laptops open, chatting away without talking. Being computer science students, Zoe had developed her own chat web app called Zit. Actually, normal computer students don’t do that kind of thing: Zoe was an over-achiever. I think us two were the only users.

Online, Zoe was talkative; boy could she talk! She’d even make boring conversations interesting by play word games such as going the whole morning where every chat message was based on lines from a Beatles lyric or something.

“I can’t believe its happened to me. I can’t conceive of any more misery. Netflix was down”

I mean, how can you not fall in love with a girl like that?

Houston, we have a problem: boys and girls can’t ‘just’ be friends. One or the other always wants more. I wanted more. Beneath those frumpy clothes was actually a petite little pixie that enchanted me. She had a pretty little face hidden behind that boring boyish bowl-cut dirty-blonde hair. I fantasised about the rest of her, hidden beneath the frumpy baggy jumpers and jeans and sensible boots.

I lived for those moments when she would stretch. Every time our chat conversation petered out she would lean back in her chair, close her eyes and push her arms straight up behind her head, tugging on one wrist with the other hand to straighten her body out even more. And every time she did this I would get a glimpse at the hint of two tiny mounds in her woolie jumper, a reminder that there under all that unsexy garb was a girl, a real girl. Sometimes, despite the guilt, I’d deliberately engineer me sitting diagonally across from her and engineer extra many stretch pauses.

I was truly deeply in love with Zoe. Not just lusting after her body, but loving her mind, her conversation, her self. But I never ever did anything about it. Zoe oozed asexuality. She seemed completely utterly uninterested in both boys and girls, uninterested in relationships, uninterested in me in that way. She seemed to treat me only as a friend. We were, right under our classmates noses, secret best friends. I was her true friend. How could I betray that, risk losing that, by showing my feelings?

We never discussed it but I think she is somewhat autistic, or at least very definitely somewhere on the scale in that direction. Very high-functioning, though. She has a cracking sense of humour, can laugh at and point out very perceptive things about other people’s actions and motivations, and even blush. Its just that she’s completely lacking the social friendship warmth side that makes humans, well, human? How can you fall in love with someone whose mind works like a cross of Freud and Data from Star Trek? You can: I know because I did.

She never confirmed it but I think I was her only friend. Not that, as I’ve explained, she seemed to need any friends; sometimes I got really depressed at the thought she didn’t even need me. I had been sure that when we went our separate ways she’d hardly even remember me. Was she really feeling any kind of connection to me like I felt for her?

And now, after a summer of abstinence, she’d sent me a text. Reaching out to me. Bursting the bubble of distance I had put between us. I had actually chosen this particular uni because she’d already told me which uni she was going to and I wanted to get away from her. That sounds mean but its a self-defense thing. I needed to meet and fall in love with a normal girl and have a normal relationship.

I wasn’t sure if I should answer. Perhaps I should just quietly never reply? I had just started uni, was staying in the uni halls of residence with the other freshers, surrounded by healthy normally-functioning girls with normal bodies with healthy dispositions to display them, and I was loving it. Admittedly loving it from afar - I hadn’t yet really made many friends, more just acquaintances in my hall, but it was early days and there were distinct possibilities...

Who was I kidding? I was still madly deeply in love with Zoe, the feelings welling up in me just from getting a single simple message, and tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough.


Tomorrow came, 9 pm came. It came slowly. The waiting took forever. I sat in my room with my laptop open and my phone ready, not sure how Zoe would reach out to me. I opened the Zit webpage: it was still running, it seemed. Zoe had given it a makeover.

At 9pm sharp Zit dinged. Did I want to accept an incoming video call from Z? This was new. She’d obviously added video calls to Zit now. Damn I hadn’t expected that, and my room was a mess. My room was worse than a mess: it was a pigsty. Worse, I was a mess. I was an scruffy unshaven mess. Oh well, not much to do. I sat on my bed with my laptop on my knees, determined to sit still and not show her any glimpses of discarded dirty laundry or used dishes and glasses. Glad she couldn’t smell the stink.

There was some fuzzy static animation and matrix knock-off special effect and then padlocks sliding across the screen and then it cleared to show Zoe sitting at her desk. Behind her you could see a normal student room just like any other. A tidy bed, a large pin-board covered in tidy organised notes and a cheesy poster of Ed Sheeran. The Ed Sheeran poster surprised me- I didn’t know she listened to any music made after we were born. If it had been a The Who or Abba poster I wouldn’t have been surprised at all. It just goes to show how you can think you know someone but, after two years of chatting online across rooms at school, you realise how little you know when you see the window into their mind that is their bedroom.

Except, was it really Zoe? How could this be Zoe? Her hair was longer, shoulder-length now and off her face, tucked back behind her ears. And her hair was ... bright pink! And she was wearing a low pink tank top with string straps, showing her pale delicate perfect shoulders, half-hiding her brilliant white bra straps, showing her chest and the hint of cleavage. She was smiling nervously.

“What do you think?” she asked, bobbing her hair with her hands. Then she laughed “cat got your tongue? you like?”. Even the way she talked seemed different- more slang and trendy than her text conversations. And she was smiling. She was looking sexy. She was looking drop dead gorgeous. There wasn’t a hint of frump.

“Eh, yeah, wow! You look great! Really great, and, eh, different...” I stammered. My brain wasn’t moving fast enough to take it all in. She was wearing vivid pink lipstick too. I was captivated by the shallow corrugations on her neck. She had so much neck, such a slender long. I had never seen her show so much of skin. My heart was in danger of stopping.

“Going to a manga convention?” I asked incredulously; she didn’t like manga, but the look really put me in mind of those naughty furry porn you find online. If she’d had cat ears and a bushy tail it could have been very, how show we say, naughty?

“Hah, me at a manga convention? Yeah right”. It was weird to speak to Zoe, to have a normal conversation. We’d spent two years typing text messages when sitting opposite each other; we’d hardly ever spoken out loud before. And never a video call; in fact, never any kind of contact outside school hours before either.

I tried to steer away from manga, wanting to steer well clear of mentioning anything about furry porn. So somehow we got chatting about other conventions and discussing what we’d dress as for a Discworld convention. I suggested she dress up as Angua, the foxy werewolf. Oh dear, subconciously was I able to get her new sexy look out of my mind? Luckily her eyes twinkled. I was baiting her. We were edging towards one of her favourite topics, namely how ridiculous the girls armour is in fantasy books films and games. Zoe had always joked about starting a petition against Game of Thrones called ‘Jerkins not merkins’.

She was interested to put me on the spot and find out what I’d go as. This wasn’t fair on two counts- firstly, usually she did most of the talking in our conversations, and, secondly, its far easier to be witty when you have time to think about it before typing a reply. Luckily inspiration struct and I told her I’d need her help because I was going in a two-person costume like a pantomime horse, except as The Luggage. I don’t know where it came from but the thought of being behind her in a confined box, just our legs sticking out the bottom, was intoxicating. The new sexy Zoe was having that kind of effect on me, making all my thoughts circle back to her body.

There was a pause in the conversation and she stretched back, one hand tugging on the other to extend her body, and I saw a tantalizing flash of midriff at the bottom of the screen which caught my eye and made me miss her breasts.

Zoe then launched into a long monologue on her course and the first assignments and it was really Zoe, the same old Zoe, again. She asked me about my course and we fell back into our old routine of chatting about everything and saying nothing, and I almost forgot her hair was pink.

And then it happened: she got up to get something to show me. I forget what it was she was going to show me. All I remember is that when she got up I saw the rest of her body for the first time ever. Her tank top barely covered her tiny little breasts. It was more an over-bra than a top. I saw her chest in profile as she got up and turned. There was a hint of nipples fighting the fabric and winning. Her flat little tummy was a bit visible in the small gap between the bottom of her top and the top of her bottoms. She was just wearing soft white hello-kitty knickers and nothing else! There was a hello-kitty logo right on the front of her skimpy white cotton knickers. They were tight and yet baggy at the same time. It drew my attention like a moth to a lamp. There might even have been the hint of a camel toe. I might have exaggerated on that point as I recollected again and again later.

Her hips were small and her legs so skinny and toned and pale that they looked long. She was everything I had ever dreamed she might be, only better and more petite. That was what had always been under those boring clothes all this time and now I had glimpsed it and I couldn’t un-see it.

She sat back down, waving whatever she’d fetched at the camera quickly and started chatting again. I wasn’t listening. She paused, confused, frowning. Then a broad dawning smile spread across that tiny little pink lipstick pucker mouth and she berated me “my face is up here!”. To add emphasis she brought her hands up and overtly rearranged her top, pressing her breasts together slightly, making a slight shadowy hint of valley between them. And as quickly as the playful display had started it was over and the monologue was back and I tried to pay attention.

It was getting late, really late. We’d been talking for hours but we hadn’t said anything important.

There was a pause when some meaningless thread of discussion evaporated and she looked a bit pensive. She didn’t stretch; instead, she bowed her shoulders forward, inwards, hunched. “Are you making any friends?” she asked meekly.

That was a big change of subject. We hadn’t talked about our social lives at all. So I told her all about my flat and all the people in it. It was my turn to talk until there was nothing left to describe. Finally, done, I asked back “You? You making friends too?”.

She looked sad. This was proof of just how crap my own social skills were. Who was I to imagine she had some slight diagnosis? Where was I on the social spectrum myself? I hadn’t really thought through about why she might call me before. I hadn’t thought of the old Zoe as having social needs. It was obvious now: Zoe was lonely. It was written all over her face.

She told me it wasn’t as easy as she’d imagined it was going to be, that she was only being invited out with her new uni flat mates as an afterthought, that she really didn’t enjoy the bustle and crowdedness of the Student Union bar, and that she was quiet and invisible and it was all too overwhelming.

I had to stifle a laugh and ask how anyone with pink hair could possibly be invisible!? She giggled and cheered up a bit and explained that it was just a rinse and she’d wash it out before bed. Anyway, it was time for bed. We both had lectures in the morning and she had to go wash her hair. She ended by thanking me for the chat and saying it made her feel better, and that she really missed me.

Wait a sec, Zoe missed me!? There was a pause, neither of us wanting to hang up. And just at the moment we were inevitably about to part Zoe’s face suddenly lit up, as though it was a fresh idea: “Say, you wouldn’t like to come visit would you?”. Crikey. How about that? I agreed in a flash and she looked truly deeply happy for the first time that evening.

That night I had trouble sleeping. It wasn’t that I lay awake worrying that I couldn’t sleep, but rather it was morning before I noticed that I hadn’t slept, instead lustfully reliving Zoe’s sexy casual cartoonish appearance. Her petite build. That, for the first time ever, I’d seen her skin, her body, her real shape. Was her neck sensitive to kisses and, more importantly, did she have a birthmark on the inside of her thigh right up close to her groin or was I just imagining it? My fantasy became an engrossing day-dream being behind her like a pantomime horse in a tight little box, my hands exploring and caressing every inch of her, every crevice. My thoughts were all sexual and not really reflecting on the changed Zoe, the hint of social Zoe, that I had seen for the first time ever last night. It was morning and my day was wrecked.

When I got up I saw Zit was full of a long ream of text messages that Zoe had sent all through the night. I obviously wasn’t the only one not sleeping, although Zoe’s time had been more productive: she’d sent me a long list of urls to National Express bus timetables and suggested dates and times. It seems Zoe was all set on me arriving next Friday evening and stay until Sunday. I rushed off to lectures, dazed and tired.

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