023. Seriously funny lol catz! Best ever!!

She liked the way he held her.

Of course, she couldn't feel it. Danny had been her best friend for almost two years, ever since they'd met on Youtube, in the commentary fields of “SeRiOuSlY FuNnY LOL CaTz!!!!! BeSt EvEr!!!!”.

“OMG! Wetting myzelph”, she wrote.

“Aaamaza-nuts, yah?”, he responded.

“IM?”, she queried.

Emoticon winking smiley, he hit back.

Since then they talked daily. At first she was convinced that he was an old pervert pretending to be a young boy like all the other old perverts she'd chatted with. And when he sent pictures of a boy her age, curly dark hair and curious eyes, she remained sceptical. But then they switched to video and there he was: a curly-haired fully clothed boy her age.

No close-up of an erect penis with grey pubic hair. No “tits?” or “hey slut” in the chat-field.

Danny liked Joss Whedon, especially Firefly, and knew all the songs of the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer by heart.

It was love. D'uh.

But two years passed and they'd never met in the flesh. A part of her liked it that way. He was her little secret. A man in a box that didn't hit on her friends or poke her in the soft part of her belly and say

“Whoooooooo likes chocolate?”

Human contact? Why rush it?

Still, when Danny lay on his back with his laptop on his belly and when the video of him shook as he laughed at her jokes she could almost feel what it would be like to lie on top of him. The heat of his body as it pressed up against hers. When he carried his computer around his small flat she was just a disembodied head for him to lug around but he still moved gently because she once told him she was really prone to seasickness. When they went to sleep she placed her computer just so that it seemed like he lay next to her.

And then the audio distorted, the picture froze, the spell broke and they were screens apart again.