[kiasusam]

Prologue:

The wind howled as it gushed into the knot of the tree, the tree that’d been in Carl’s backyard for 20 years. The longest branch rapped on the side of the house making Carl turn to see where the sound had come from. He consciously decided it was time he did something about that branch, before it caused some real damage.

Turning back to his computer, he typed in a message on his favourite bulletin board, a board where he’d made a lot of good friends, although most of them were living in the STATES. He’d found this site whilst doing a search for erotic literature, and discovered it had a discussion board to go with it.

Carl had always found it easy to make friends online, he was just that kind of guy, someone you could talk with and feel comfortable doing so. It wasn’t hard to understand therefore, how easy someone could call him a close friend even though they’d never met him. He had a few friends online that he felt close to, but no one he considered as special.

One day however, that all changed, because he was attracted by something someone wrote on his favourite bulletin board. He quickly sent off an email to this individual, praising her for what she’d written, but not really expecting a response. Therefore, he was surprised that within 5 minutes of sending it, he received a reply. The email in question was clearly from someone who was sweet and kind, mainly because of the nice things she said.

This all made him further intrigued as to who wrote it, and so he started to talk back to her in other emails. Pretty soon they were chatting on their favourite Instant messengers, with each learning something new about the other everyday. It wasn’t until they traded photos of one another, that Carl began to feel more than friendship towards this individual.

‌Her name was Andrea, which wasn’t unusual, but it was her face that struck Carl the most, for she had the sweetest smile and loveliest eyes he’d ever seen. He made the mistake one day of telling her how much she meant to him, and found her backing off, as if she wanted nothing to do with anything other than friendship. Therefore, he was quite content to leave it that way, although on occasion he did let slip how much he cared, and was immediately admonished for getting too close. He turned to poetry to win his fair maiden, but when that didn’t work he just admitted defeat to himself that he would never get back the feelings he had for this beautiful woman. It was during one of their many conversations that Carl admitted his defeat and won the respect of Andrea in more ways than he could ever have imagined.