The Alpha Dating Game: An Extremely Sensual BBW Shifter Romance (4 page)

“There!” she said with a flourish.

Jessica groaned and covered her face with her palms. “No!”

“Yes! That’s how you meet guys, Jess. That’s how you take your life in your own hands.”

“You’re taking my life in
your
hands!” Jessica uncovered her face and scrambled for the computer. “I want to retrieve it.”

“You can’t retrieve the message. Just chill, Jess. For once in your life, grab something by the horns, OK? This is a good thing. Go meet him, if he isn’t taken by someone else first. If you don’t like him, then bail.”

It wasn’t that easy, Jessica knew. But she couldn’t explain it to Lyla because her best friend was ultra-confident and she wouldn’t understand. Jessica was afraid to hope so much that all her hopes would be dashed, and it wouldn’t be easy to recover from something like that. Or what if Kyle met her and he was everything he said he was and more . . . and he didn’t like her?

She wouldn’t be able to live with that. It would mean that she was so much
lesser
than she already thought she was. She knew her thinking was irrational, and that she should not put so much stock into what a guy thought or did not think about her. But it was still there, like a shadow hovering over her shoulder that wouldn’t quite go away no matter which way she turned.

And then . . . all her innermost fears about not being accepted for who she was would come hurtling back, and this time, they will not go away for a long, long time until she
changed
herself.

Maybe that was the only way.

She pulled in a deep breath.

“OK, I’ll meet him if he wants to meet me,” she said.

She knew she would never be able to live it down if she didn’t.

“Attagirl!” Lyla screamed. “He’ll reply. You just wait!”

*

Even waiting was a chore.

In the good old days when her mother was dating, Jessica reckoned that the girls of that era would be waiting by the good old phone. But today, there were a whole lot of other ways for a guy to reject a girl. SMS, email, Instant Messenger. You didn’t have to be ‘waiting’ by the phone in the sense of the word. Your cellphone was omnipresent, ready to buzz with a negative reply anytime, anywhere to dash your hopes.

Jessica felt the buzz of her cellphone indicating that she had a Yahoo message during Professor Peabody’s lecture. Professor Peabody was one of the more interesting teachers there, and Jessica
almost
forgot to surreptitiously check her phone every five minutes.

But the vibrator function alerted her.

“Let’s talk about amoeba,” Professor Peabody was saying. The Powerpoint slide onscreen in front of the tiered lecture hall was that of a reddish, amorphous-looking amoeba.

Let’s talk about excitement, thought Jessica. She teased her phone out from her pants pocket and glanced at the display.
You’ve got mail
, said the gleeful message.

Oh, oh, oh!

She opened up the message.

“Ms. Dent. Perhaps you’d be so kind to enlighten us on the properties of amoeba instead of looking at your cellphone every few minutes. Expecting a call from your boyfriend?”

Everyone tittered.

Jessica blushed. “Um . . . ”

Professor Peabody was eyeing her like a hawk from the lectern. “Well?” she inquired.

“Uh . . . ” Jessica wasn’t sure if she was supposed to answer the amoeba question or if she was expecting a call from her hopefully soon to be existent boyfriend. “Amoeba is a – ”

Gawd! She was supposed to be studying amoeba last night but was so carried away by ‘Kyle’ that she couldn’t remember a word.

“We are waiting,” Professor Peabody said. “Your assignment was to study the properties of amoeba prior to this lecture so that we all may proceed smoothly today.”

“Amoeba is a s-single celled protozoa,” Jessica stammered. They were mostly single-celled organisms anyhow.

“Go on.”

Jessica stared at the slide of the amoeba moving slowly across the screen.

“I-it has a nucleus . . . and cytoplasm . . . ” They all did after all “ . . . and they move exceedingly slow.”

The class laughed.

“That much is obvious,” Professor Peabody said wryly.

A boy behind her shot his hand up.

“Yes, Mr. Baines.”

“Amoebae’s most obvious features include one or more nuclei and a contractile vacuole to maintain osmotic equilibrium within the cell. Amoebae are unicellular eukaryotic organisms which reproduce asexually through mitosis, and they move by using their pseupodia or false feet, which throws out their ectoplasm followed by their endoplasm moving inward. And so, yeah. They move exceedingly slow.”

The class laughed again.

Professor Peabody smiled. “Excellent, Mr. Baines. I see you have done your homework, unlike some of us here.”

Richard Baines leaned over and whispered to Jessica, “Hope your boyfriend doesn’t move too slowly.”

Jessica flushed.

After class, she rushed out of the lecture hall to check her email. It was Kyle!

The message said:

‘Great! So happy you will meet me. How about tomorrow night at Spago’s? See you there at 8 pm. I’ll book a table for two in my name.

Kyle Smith.’

Kyle Smith!

So that was his name!

Everything in the message deserved an exclamation mark!

Jessica was so happy that she felt like spinning round and round, except . . .

She stopped short. What would she wear? What if he didn’t like what he saw in the flesh? What if he had lied about the way he looked?

All her insecurities came rushing back again.

No, no, no! She didn’t like being this way, as if she’s an emotional yoyo! If anything, she deserved to go on this date with a gorgeous guy who hopefully was every bit as gorgeous as his stock photo suggested.

*

Lyla and Jessica settled on a loose-flowing chiffon black dress which made Jessica look slim. It had just a hint of cleavage (“You don’t want to come off as cheap,” Lyla said, “but you want to show off your best assets anyway”) and a flouncy skirt which covered Jessica’s thighs. To compensate for height, Jessica wore three-inch black heels.

All this cost her entire allowance for the month.

“But it’s worth it,” Lyla declared. “Besides, I can always lend you the money if you need to eat.”

They appraised her in the mirror.

“Oh,” Lyla moaned, “you look absolutely gorgeous.”

Jessica had to admit this was a good choice of dresses. Unlike the last tight disastrous black number, this allowed her flesh space to breathe – if flesh could actually breathe, of course.

“Wait,” Lyla said. She ran to her chest-of-drawers to retrieve a little necklace with a pendant. She lifted Jessica’s hair and put it around her neck. “There. This will point him to your cleavage.”

Jessica gasped. “That is not the intention!”

“Oh shush. If he really is as good as he looks, you’d want to keep him.”

“What if I don’t like him?”

“Be that as it may, which I sincerely doubt, we’ll resort to the old powder room text message rescue. If you don’t like him, you excuse yourself to the ladies’, and you text – ”

“SAVE ME,” Jessica completed. She knew the routine. It was one she had to employ for Lyla many times.

“Then you go back to your table and I’ll give you a call five minutes later. It’ll be an emergency. Your Great-Aunt Hortense has just been admitted to the hospital for appendicitis and you have to leave STAT.”

“Hortense? Who has a name like Hortense these days?”

“That’s why she’s a great-aunt. Nobody names kids like that anymore. I’d have appendicitis too if I had a name like that.” Lyla glanced at her watch. “Oh scoot! It’s thirty minutes to eight! We have to go. I’ll call you a cab!”

They both ran out of the dorm in a trail of chiffon and heels, with Lyla busy dialing a cab all the way downstairs. When it finally came, Lyla hugged Jessica.

“You look great. Remember that. You are great, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

“Thanks.” Jessica hugged her best friend back. Tears came into her eyes, but she quickly suppressed them because it wouldn’t do to have her mascara run all over her nicely made-up cheeks.

She got into the cab. Lyla slammed the door behind her. She stepped back and waved.

“Goodbye, good luck!”

As Jessica turned to tell the cab driver where to go, she wondered why there was a strange premonition lurking around her subconscious.

FATHER’S REQUEST

The Enclave was imposing, as always. Forbidding. It was actually a mansion squirreled away in a vastly wooded forest area which belonged to the clan. As Kyle drove up its driveway, he was reminded of a Gothic cathedral. The Enclave resembled exactly that with its towers and sharply pointed roofs.

Plenty of people lived in the Enclave, but the Alpha of the pack was Kyle’s father, Jericho. Neither was the family name Smith. Kyle never went by his real name in the dating websites and forums. And if you looked for his profile in Big Beautiful Dating, you would not have found it. His was a profile specially manufactured for Jessica.

Kyle parked his Mustang in an empty spot at the parking lot before the mansion. The parking lot was filled with cars – Jaguars and Mercs and BMWs and Ferraris. The people who lived in the Enclave were a moneyed lot. But only the actual immediate family merited a covered parking lot. Kyle didn’t live here and so he gave his spot up a long time ago.

Kyle loped up the stairs into the house. He had a set of his own keys, but the front double doors were never locked. They didn’t have to be, considering the people who lived here.

The main hall was large with a high, domed ceiling. Kyle had always thought it pretentious, but this house was built two centuries ago by his forebears. The hall was filled with marble busts of creatures – lions and tigers and bears. A robotic cleaner circulated the marble floor slowly, mopping the already pristine stone into something akin to a mirror.

Kyle strode to the study where he knew his father would be.

The older man was seated behind his desk, studying a graph on a large monitor. He was an image of Kyle, but older. At fifty-two, Jericho Atreides still had a full head of dark hair. His handsome face was only slightly lined, and his powerful six foot two frame was as lean and muscled as ever.

Jericho looked up as his son entered.

“I have another candidate,” Kyle announced.

“Good.”

“I haven’t met her yet.”

“Since you botched the last one up majorly, I think it’s best I take a look at her first.”

Kyle sighed. But he supposed his father had every right to inspect the goods. It was the first time Kyle had selected the offering and his father wanted to be absolutely sure he was doing the right thing. After the last disastrous selection . . .

He gave his father the web address, and after a few clicks, Jessica’s photo appeared.

“Very pretty,” Jericho commented.

“I know.”

“And you will ensure she is a virgin?”

“As best as I can.”

“Remember, you have only five days left.”

“I know.” He knew the future of his clan and even the very foundations of this town rested on what he would do.

“You know the rote.”

“Yes.”

His father did not seem embarrassed by what he was requesting Kyle to do, even though Kyle was. Privately, he wondered if he was ready for this most important of clan tasks. But his father had decided he had come of age, and it was up to him to prove that he had what it takes to be the future Alpha.

If only the task wasn’t so emotionally
nerve-wrecking
–

Kyle steeled himself. He glanced at his watch. “I have to be going, Dad. I’m supposed to be meeting her at eight.”

He still didn’t understand why his father insisted on him coming all the way here when he could have easily sent him Jessica’s profile on email. But he supposed this was the old man’s way of getting him to come home more often. Truth be told, Kyle rarely came home unless he really had to. He didn’t like the Enclave. It held too many memories – most of all, the ones of his now dead mother pining in her room, imprisoned there because she was stark, raving mad.

And in addition to the memories, there was what lurked under the glossy veneer of the Enclave . . . the secret buried deep, deep under.

“All right.” His father’s blue eyes held his. “Good luck, son. Don’t fail this.”

“I won’t.”

This was his chance.
He couldn’t blow it.

After only a moment’s hesitation, he left.

*