Saturday's Storyteller: "There should be a word for that moment when you encounter someone you met online that you never thought you'd meet, in the flesh."

by Belinda Roddie

There should be a word for that moment when you encounter someone you met online that you never thought you'd meet, in the flesh.

Luckily for everyone alive, I've come up with that word: eDezvous. Or, if you're pedantic and don't like capital letters in the middle of your words, edezvous would work just as well. Simple enough word to create: Just slap that iconic lower case e in front of the word rendezvous after the ren has been sawed off like the end of a trailer inhabitant's shotgun, and you have a beautiful mutilation of the French language and an homage to the World Wide Web as it was in the 1990s.

An eDezvous is rather difficult to encounter because usually, who you know is far away enough not to wind up at the same café where you get your typical five ounce hot chocolate in an eight ounce mug so the extra whipped cream doesn't spill over the end. I have had friends as far as Florida and as close as two towns north of me. In fact, the only times I've had a eDezvous is when it's been purposeful and on my watch. My friend and I arrange the awkward meet-up, and usually after we've finished off an entire box of pizza and a bottle of black rum after watching the baseball game do we part ways with the caution finally sliding off us like a wet, overused glove. In these cases, I don't even call it an eDezvous; I call it an e-a-tete. Like tete-a-tete, only internet savvy.

Therefore, I suppose it's to be expected that one day, I would have an eDezvous with someone I never thought to have one with, nor wanted to. It was nine o'clock in the morning on a Monday, when the air was cold enough to warrant a heavy coat just warm enough to bake your hair so that some of the strands turned to burned gold after prolonged exposure. Because the café I normally went to was under renovation, and the manager had walked out during because he was a prick who thought he was "destined for greater things" (I called him Chuck, because I call everyone I don't like Chuck, even the girls), I found myself wandering over to a small breakfast diner that only took cash but allegedly had some absolutely delicious deep-fried waffles. Now, I had never had such a confection before, and the thought was appealing, despite my heart's desperate pleas for me to turn back now. Now. Before it's too late. So I loosened the scarf around my neck as I pushed my way into the cramped restaurant, finding a corner table with red cushioning that served comfortable enough in the lukewarm air of the room.

After a waiter took my order for a hot chocolate, which I didn't bother to customize because I could only do that with people I trusted, I let my eyes flicker across the counter where a select handful of scrappy men and women sat on creaking stools, drinking coffee so milky and white that it probably didn't have to worry about getting apprehended by the cops. No one here looked familiar, and that was fine by me. The café was nice because I knew nearly everyone who walked in there, employee or patron. They knew when to talk to me and when not to. Most of them knew what I did for a living - I worked from home, trying desperately to get my own crafts business off the ground without having to cling to sites like Etsy for vampiric sustenance. Only two of those people - an old high school friend of mine named Claire, and a former retail coworker of mine who went by Switch even though his birth name was Jonathan - had the privilege of sitting at the same table with me as I drank my cocoa and checked my phone for any emails from clients. The baristas working at the café were mostly female and very heterosexual, so even though they were cute, I couldn't exactly flirt with them without their thinking that I was just trying to be some really over-the-top, creepy kind of "gal pal."

The hot chocolate served to me was in a tall and narrow glass, with what appeared to be cinnamon powdering the modest mountain of whipped dairy, and I drank it greedily. I had to enjoy what was obviously a decent beverage, not knowing that my unexpected, and undesired, eDezvous was about to commence.

The gray-haired, matronly server - most likely the owner or co-owner of the joint - was jotting down my order for the plaque-inducing deep-fried waffle when a lanky man walked in, a beanie pulled over his shaggy brown-ish hair. He was so white that he was almost translucent, the blue veins in his neck and hands poking out like extra fingers desperately attempting to claw away from its membranous prison. As he walked toward my table, he stopped, and the watery blue eyes beneath his glasses widened. I stopped talking mid-sentence. The server took it as a cue to leave, even though I would have preferred her to stay in order to be my bodyguard.

"You let me know if you need anything else, okay, sweetie?" she asked, before walking away as not a single word slipped out of my mouth in response.

The man who I had locked eyes with could not have been in the wrong place at the wrong time - at least, when it came to seeing me. I didn't understand it. Never did I imagine that he would travel all the way out to the west coast. His name was Al Wayans, and he and I had been online friends for three years before I cut it off. It had been two years since I pulled the plug on any communication we had. Now he was forcing an eDezvous upon me that I had been dreading for a very, very long time.

"Parker," he mumbled. I didn't blink. My hot chocolate, half-drunk, was probably getting cold.

"You're supposed to be in New Jersey."

Al shrugged. His smile was daunting to me. It didn't look natural, like someone was prying his mouth apart with invisible fingers and dental instruments. "Couldn't stay there. I'm crashing with a friend about fifty miles away from here."

"Did you know...?"

"No," he cut me off, sharply, defensively. "Not at all. I wanted to call you, but you said - "

"I said to delete my phone number and never text me again, or I would call the authorities."

Al sighed. "Yes, I remember that."

He did not look well. Then again, he hadn't looked well in his online pictures, either. Al and I had met in an online science fiction club, which I had left due to nerds taking the Internet way too seriously. We had started talking in the chatrooms set up for the website, before we moved on to messaging and texting. Back then, his skin was just as pale, and his body just as emaciated - but I had been looking at him through a filter of sorts. Seeing him for real, so close to me, was horrifying. He literally looked like a ghost from my past. It alarmed me.

Without asking, Al grabbed a chair from a nearby vacant table, and he pulled it up to my spot. Instantly, my throat went dry. I fought hard to get moisture back into my mouth, remembering what both my sister and my wife had said to me the night I finally decided to end things: You are stronger than he is. Do not let him scare you.

"So why did you move out here?"

Al chuckled. "I told you, I couldn't stay there. You know why."

I did. I didn't want to elaborate. His past was reason for his behavior, but not an excuse.

"I had to get away from the old man somehow," my ex-friend continued, folding his gnarled hands against the plastic table and keeping them far too close to my side. "He was getting worse. Drinking more. Work was awful, too. I kept getting threatened with losing my job. I had enough money, so I packed my bags, and I - "

"Who do you know out here?"

"Friend of mine," he replied. "Remember the Baptist girl I told you about?"

I wrinkled my nose. "The one who said she loved you but couldn't be with you?"

"She has a spare room."

"Plenty of space to put your baggage, then."

It was clear that my words were hurting him. It was typical; Al did not lash out in a territorial way, or like a beast trying to intimidate you with its power. He more behaved like a wounded animal, protecting itself from lashes by becoming more violent and more crazed. When he was down in that mental pit of his, and you tossed him down a rope, he would react that you had thrown a snake at him. And afterward, down in the darkness he said, spiraling into a guilt complex that was too muddy to see clearly into.

I didn't say anything else as the server placed the deep-fried waffle in front of me. I didn't want to. I knew what the cycle was: I would tell him that he could no longer contact me. He would accuse me of hating him. I would threaten to report him, and he would back off with a typical statement of how fucked up he was. Only this time, it was far worse. He was close to me. He was within driving distance. I didn't have an appetite anymore. I waited for him to start the show.

"So do you still hate me?" There it was. The barb I hated so much. He had used it on me when I merely told him I couldn't talk to him because I was at my retail job at the time.

"I never hated you."

"Bullshit."

"If you're going to do this, you can sit in another part of the diner. I'd like to eat my breakfast in peace, thank you."

Al had said many things to me. He had poured his heart out, red like juice, into a plastic cup and begged me to drink it. Multiple times, he had threatened suicide. "I'm going to do it," he had told me over messages once, "and you can't stop me." Only he never did. When a casual conversation went dead, he would ask me why I wasn't talking to him. "Did I do something wrong?" he would ask. It all seemed so innocuously framed, so indicative of a fragile person clearly seeking affirmation and friendship. Only instead of companionship, it was co-dependence. He was a calf desperately trying to suckle my udder. A leech dying for my blood. A parasite screaming when I told it away from the source.

I knew he had problems. He was a young, broken, beaten down, betrayed, depressed, and hopeless man. But he was trying to drag me down with him.

"I never wanted to end this," said Al suddenly as I cut a piece of the waffle and held the battered mess up to my face.

"I know you didn't. I did."

His cheeks were tinged with red. "I was never abusive."

"Yes, you were."

"I never tried to hurt you. All the things I said..."

"Should I list them off?" I asked. "What was your favorite line? 'Fuck you, dyke cunt?'"

The red got darker, the only color really left in his face. "I didn't mean..."

"You said it multiple times, Al. I know you tried to apologize, remind me of how bi you are. Then you had the audacity to say you loved me, even though you knew I was engaged, wishing I were straight..."

"Parker."

"Dyke cunt, Al. That's what you called me. Over and over and over again."

I stuffed the piece of waffle in my mouth and tried to chew. When it felt like rubber against my teeth, I washed it down with cold, stale cocoa. Al did not say anything. His hands were tense, but I knew he wouldn't hit me. He wasn't that kind of abusive. He would sooner hit himself in the face than hit me there.

"Do you want me to leave?" he asked finally, just as the server walked back over to me, looking as if she knew what was up.

"I would like you to never talk to me ever again."

"Parker..."

"You need someone who can handle your demons," I talked over him, getting loud enough for the server to freeze up. "I can't do that. I'm not your handler. I have my own troubles."

I pushed the plate toward Al, letting the stagnant syrup drift across the sugary mound of fried dough.

"Here, have some breakfast."

I slapped a twenty down on the table, retied my scarf, and walked out of the diner, ending the unexpected, and undesired, eDezvous. An eDezvous I would not wish on anyone else.

This week's prompt was provided by Daniel Bulone.