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  Table of Contents

  Synopsis

  By the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  About the Author

  Soliloquy Titles From Bold Strokes Books

  Synopsis

  Is it possible to fall in love with someone you’ve never met? Imogen Summers thinks so because it’s happened to her.

  Immy is a normal eighteen-year-old, with a normal life, a normal family, and a normal boyfriend. But when she finds herself falling for a girl on an Internet message board, a girl she knows only as the mysterious Fickle, her so-called normal life is suddenly turned on its head.

  As her relationship with Fickle develops into more than just friendship, Immy finds another message board friend, the sweet and lovely Freddie, the perfect person to confide in. But can Freddie stay out of it when she starts to fall for Immy herself? Things are about to get complicated...

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  http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com

  eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

  Please respect the rights of the author and do not file share.

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  © 2012 By KE Payne. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-628-1

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: January 2012

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editors: Lynda Sandoval and Stacia Seaman

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])

  By the Author

  365 Days

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  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to everyone at Bold Strokes Books for their continued help and support, especially Lynda Sandoval for her kind words, encouragement, and constant invaluable advice.

  I’m also grateful to Chris for enlightening me on what “bat-shit crazy” means (who knew?!) and to my “CC friends” for their constant interest and enthusiasm in what I do.

  Thanks to my family for always supporting me, and last but not least, to BJ for always having the knack of saying just the right things to me at the right time. Thank you.

  To anyone who’s ever been misled…

  Chapter One

  I don’t know what it was that made me log onto the website that first time. Boredom? No, not boredom. An unknown curiosity, maybe? A curiosity, yes, but unknown? C’mon, who was I kidding? I mean, why else would I have gone out of my way to search for a website about a popular TV programme that absolutely fascinated me and where the two central characters just happened to be gay?

  I’d been hooked by this show, a drama kinda unimaginatively called Lovers and Sinners, and I mean proper hooked. From the moment I’d seen the trailer for it, squeezed innocuously in between a wildlife documentary and the news, I’d known I had to watch it. Something about it, about the two female lead characters—Jess and Ali—was mesmerising. They were both gorgeous, and, I dunno, the fact they played a gay couple in it just seemed to pique my interest even more. It added an extra verve to it, and as much as I kept denying it to myself, I eventually had to admit that I had a walloping great big crush on the pair of them, and from what I’d read on the Internet and in the press, half of the country did too. It was that popular a programme, the type that everyone talked about the night after it aired, the type that everyone discussed who they fancied on it and what they thought should happen to their particular favourite characters each week.

  So after I’d found myself at a loose end one evening before dinner and after I’d bored of Facebook and Twitter, I decided to Google Lovers and Sinners. The programme’s official website had a message board attached to it, this kinda open forum thing where fans of the show could talk about it and all the characters’ relationships with each other, plus a whole load of other things, like advice pages, general chat pages, stuff like that. It was brilliant! Intrigued, I’d read some of the messages on the general forum and thought the fans writing on it sounded a great bunch, so I registered my name and started posting.

  The other people on the message board appealed to me. From what I read on there, they all seemed to watch it for the same reason I did. Interestingly, although there were a few stray guys posting on there, the majority of the people posting on the message board seemed to be youngish women. I was hooked right away.

  I loved everything about the message board and felt right at home there from the first. The only thing I didn’t particularly like was the way the other women on there all talked with such authority about what Jess and Ali were going through. Reading their messages, it was clear probably over half of them were gay, and I didn’t particularly feel comfortable with some of the things they wrote, mainly because it made me feel really naïve and, well, a bit dumb.

  But that was my problem, not theirs, right?

  Aside from that, the message board felt like one big family, certainly to me, anyway. We were all joined in our love of the programme, our affection towards Jess and Ali, and our fascination of the story of their relationship being played out on our TV screens each week. I felt an affinity with the pair of them and really liked how their love story made me feel; I lived and breathed every argument they had, every breakup and every make-up. I felt their pain and loved their happiness, but I still told myself I had no specific interest in the lead women at all. All I was interested in was the story, the drama, and the unfolding sweet tale of love.

  I made some good friends on the message board too. On that first night alone I’d made friends with, amongst others, a “Twiggy”, a “Joey”, a “Lone Star”, and a “Betty Blue Rinse”. Now here I was, a week after registering as one “Barnaby Rudge”, slumped up in my room playing virtual karate and talking about football with one of the people on there, the first girl I’d chatted to on that first night, Twiggy, who was twenty-four and from Manchester.

  Twiggy had been the first person to answer me on the message board, about ten minutes after I’d introduced myself to everyone. We’d had a bizarre first conversation about our favourite breakfast cereals and had kind of struck up a friendship based not only on the fact we both loved Lovers and Sinners, but that we were also nuts about football.

  Our conversation, during a virtual karate match, went something like this:

  He’ll never get picked. Twanged his hamstring against City last week. Jab to your lower left side, Twiggy wrote.

  I replied straight away. Your move blocked, I wrote. But who else they
got??? Milton’s outta form, Bellamy couldn’t score in a brothel! Coming atcha…high roundhouse kickin’.

  Ouch! That hurt!

  S’meant to, stoopid! I grinned at the screen, imagining Twiggy rubbing her arm and mock grimacing.

  Nah, but it means the manager’ll have to play 3 up front instead. She was still banging on about the football.

  A voice hollering up the stairs made me jump and swing round in my chair, stopping me in mid-type. It was Mum.

  “Imogen! Tea!”

  I sighed, not really wanting to leave my conversation with Twiggy, but kinda not wanting to miss my tea either. You know how it is!

  GTG Twigs, ’rents calling me for tea.

  Be back laters?

  I looked at the yellow clock on my wall.

  Dunno. Got this 2,000 word assignment to get finished for college tomorrow.

  “IMOGEN! Last warning. If you’re not down in five your dinner’s going in the dog.”

  Mum again. Why did she have to shout at me like I was down the street or something?

  GTG.

  Wait! You on MSN? Twiggy asked me.

  MSN? I pulled a face at the screen.

  I had no idea what MSN was, but then I’d not heard of many things like that before I’d joined this message board. I was always shy. I was…what was it my mum called it? “A bit gauche.”

  I suppose I was a bit of a loner too, never making friends that easily, for whatever reason, and even though I’d had a few friends at school, a lot of us had kind of drifted apart after our final exams. A few of us went to college together, but as my friends eventually found other friends I suppose I got left behind. I had a couple of close friends at college, Beth and Emily, who I’d known since school, but I’m not really what you’d call gregarious, more happy in my own company, if not happy in my own skin—but I’ll get to that later.

  Yeah, MSN, dope. I could feel Twiggy’s scorn coming through the screen. You never heard of MSN Messenger?

  Nuh-uh, I typed and shook my head at no one in particular.

  “Immy! Two minutes. We’ve already started.”

  “FFS!”

  I looked frantically round at the door then back to the computer screen, willing Twiggy to answer—and fast.

  ’K, I’ll add ya while you’re having tea, Twiggy wrote at last. I can find your e-mail details on your personal profile on the message board. Download MSN Messenger, then we can talk there, rather than on this shit-slow board. It’s much quicker. And private. We can talk footy without the bloody Liverpool fans giving us grief!!!

  I left my PC downloading MSN Messenger and slumped down the stairs to the dining room where my mum, dad, and fifteen-year-old sister Sophie were already halfway through a plate of what looked like baby food, but which I was to find out later was actually cottage pie.

  “You been on that computer again?” Dad said to me through a mouthful of mashed potato.

  “For college, yeah,” I lied.

  Dad nodded and looked at me, fork poised en route to his mouth.

  “Make sure it is for college and nothing else, understood?” he said, waving the fork at me, making a small gloop of potato fall onto the table.

  “She’s eighteen, for God’s sake,” Sophie muttered under her breath.

  Dad flashed her a look.

  “I’ve read about people on the Internet.” He forked up some more potato and slotted the fork into his mouth. “Undesirables and all that,” he mumbled, his mouth full of mash.

  I chose to ignore his comments and instead ate my tea in silence. By the time I’d taken myself upstairs to my PC again half an hour later, Twiggy had gone, but I saw that MSN had downloaded and that she’d sent me an invitation to become one of her “buddies”. I accepted. I wished she was online, though; I wanted to tell her about my dad jabbing his fork at me and telling me not to talk to any “undesirables”. I wondered if Twiggy considered herself to be an undesirable…

  There was just Joey online, but she seemed to be deep in conversation on the message board with someone called Totalitarian Rule about civil partnerships, which I didn’t feel able to contribute towards. I checked my e-mails a few times, deleting all the junk that offered me Viagra and an enormous dick and shit like that, then drifted back to the message board again just to see who was around. I was bored; I wanted to chat to someone, and something kept drawing me towards the message board. Anything was better than that two-thousand-word essay waiting for me to finish it.

  I posted a message.

  Hiya, I wrote. Anyone around?

  It was brief but asked all I needed it to ask.

  I flicked screens and started Googling some stuff about the rise of Nazism for the assignment that I’d been putting off for weeks. I checked the message board again. No reply yet.

  I went back to Google and made some notes, copying and pasting large chunks of text, hoping I could mould it into something resembling a half-decent, non-plagiaristic essay. After ten minutes I checked back again on the message board.

  Hiya.

  A reply! The message was from someone called Fickle, who I’d never spoken to before.

  I typed out my reply, hoping that “Fickle” hadn’t logged off.

  Hey! How’re you? I wrote, kinda wanting to write something else, but not knowing what.

  I pressed the Refresh button once or twice, but whoever Fickle was, they’d obviously gone.

  Until…

  I’m good, ta. You?

  And that was the start of our conversation.

  We chatted for the next three hours that evening, my assignment well and truly forgotten. I immediately liked Fickle; she seemed so expressive and confident and had a wicked sense of humour that made me laugh out loud. In that first conversation alone, I found out more about her than I ever had about Twiggy, even after a whole week of chatting.

  Twiggy was great, but she’d always managed to keep this barrier up when she was talking to me. Fickle was so different, so much more open and, I suppose, so much easier to talk to. I liked Fickle from the moment I first started talking to her, much more so than Twiggy. I couldn’t tell you why, though, it was like something clicked with us that first night, something that clicked and then stayed.

  We messaged each other again the next night too, our messages to each other slotting in between greetings and chats to other people on the message board. On the third night, rather than talking about Lovers and Sinners, Fickle told me some more stuff about herself. She’d already told me a few nights before that she was eighteen and lived up near Leeds with her mum. But on this night she told me that she was at college and she started telling me about the subjects she was doing—English, French, History, and Geography—and how much work she was being given now she was in her final year. I told her I was at sixth form college, doing English, History, Maths, and Economics. She liked that. She thought I was clever for taking Maths at A level, but I told her I thought she was cleverer, taking French.

  I never got all the accents and stuff, I joked to her.

  I never got past my two times table, Fickle replied. She added a LMAO and a winking-face sign. The winking sign made me feel a bit funny inside, I dunno why.

  You on MSN? Fickle suddenly asked me.

  Yeah, I am! I replied, trying to make it sound enthusiastic. After all, I was enthusiastic, I mean, how cool was that? So two nights ago I’d never even heard of MSN and now two people wanted to add me to it. God bless Twiggy, hey?

  I gave Fickle my e-mail address and waited for her to add me.

  Kewl, Fickle wrote back. Now we can have private conversations on MSN. I’d prefer that, wouldn’t you?

  I supposed I would prefer private conversations. Message boards are all okay but it’s always a bit public, the things you say on there, aren’t they? Everyone reading everyone else’s messages. I wanted to keep some things private and I suppose if I was honest, there was a small part of me that worried that someone I knew might find out that I was posting stuff on a predominantly g
ay website. Private messaging would be perfect.

  A message flashed up telling me that Fickle had added me to her MSN list. I accepted straight away.

  I waited for Fickle to make the first move, so to speak. I felt excited at the prospect of having a private chat with her, but just as I was getting ready to talk to her on there, reality arrived to bite me well and truly on the bum with a text from Matt.

  That would be the Matt who was my boyfriend, or was supposed to be.

  Matt. We’d met at college through another girl in my class, a girl called Lyndsay who’d gone out with him before me and who said he would be perfect for me. Part of me questioned, if he was so perfect, then why wasn’t she still going out with him? But never mind. Me and Matt had been dating for around six weeks, driving my two friends, Emily and Beth, insane with jealousy, but, I don’t know, nothing was really happening for me with him. Still, I went out with him, more out of habit I suppose, and I was due to meet him later.

  Still on for tonight? his text said.

  I stared at it, then back up at the screen. I saw that Fickle had messaged me and now here it was, flashing irritably away at me.

  Fickle: You there?

  Dilemma time.

  Fickle: You there? It’s getting kinda cold out here on my own.

  I grinned at the screen, imagining Fickle, whatever she looked like, wherever she might be, shivering like mad in front of her screen.

  I started typing.

  Barnaby Rudge: I’m here.

  Fickle: Where you been?

  I started typing again but saw Fickle’s message flashing up at me.

  Fickle: Aaaaand, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Barnaby Rudge?? WTF? What kind of name is that?!

  That made me laugh.