The Next Big Thing Read Free Page A

“whenever I felt ready.” Money wasn’t a concern for him; his journalism job was low-paying, but his family was loaded.
    “You’ll love it here,” he wrote. “We can stroll hand-in-hand along the bank of the Thames, visit Oxford Street, eat Indian food. London’s a multicultural city, which I absolutely adore. We have the biggest Indian population outside of Asia. I can’t wait for you to learn all about Britain.”
    It was a wonderful fantasy, but I had no idea how to make it a reality. The trouble was, no matter how much I was dying to meet Nick in person – and believe me, I was dying to – I couldn’t exactly do that. At least not for a very long time.
    Even though I trusted that what we had was real, I hadn’t exactly been perfectly honest with Nick.
    To put it bluntly, I first blew it when I told him I had a flat stomach. It was, without a doubt, the dumbest mistake I have ever made in a relationship.
    The thing is, Nick alluded to the fact that he wanted a woman who was “trim and fit.” Unfortunately, he didn’t this until we’d already been talking for four months. So it couldn’t have been that important to him, right? And he never suggested we exchange pics, a fact that even I found to be a little bit odd after a certain point. Wasn’t he at least a little bit curious as to how I looked?
    When I posed that question to him one night during one of our marathon phone sessions (and, admittedly, after I’d had just a bit too much wine) it was met with a long pause. Then, Nick finally said, “I’d love to see a picture of you, Kat.”
    My breath drew in.
    “But I don’t need to.”
    I exhaled.
    Huh? What was this? Had I found the one man on the planet who didn’t care about a woman’s appearance?
    “I already know exactly what you look like.”
    I was taken aback. “You…you do?” I stammered. How was that possible? I’d been so careful. I didn’t have a photo uploaded to my Linkedin, and I’d set my Facebook profile to a photo of my cat (which was probably a dead giveaway that I was a “fat girl,” but I didn’t have any better options). A Google image search of me turned up nothing, so I’d thought I was safe. (Of course, a Google image search of Nick had only turned up one picture – a grainy photo of him at an art gallery. It was something I found odd, but I never questioned the issue. After all, to do so would mean I’d have to admit I’d been Googling him in the first place. It would also bring the whole photo issue front and center, which I’d been trying to avoid.)
    Of course, in wine there’s truth, and in this case the wine had caused me to blurt out something about exchanging pictures, leading to Nick’s proclamation that he knew exactly what I looked like.
    I was horrified. “How?” I choked out.
    “It’s easy,” he said softly. “I’ve known since the first moment I heard your voice, Kat. I can p icture you perfectly in my head...blonde hair, green eyes, gorgeous body.”
    Well, he had two out of three right.
    Nick and I had promised, from the very beginning, that we would trust each other. And part of that trust meant we wouldn’t snoop for each other online. We never went into the specific details of this, but I took it to mean I wasn’t supposed to, say, Google him. Which I did immediately. I also ran the aforementioned Google image search, turning up very little, and greatly piquing my curiosity.
    How was it possible that in this day and age such a hot, high profile person could leave so little of an online trail?
    I knew why I wasn’t online. I’d taken great pains to keep it that way. I was the one always ducking out of the way of cameras, the one who kept her Facebook settings heavily guarded so that no one could tag me in anything or search for me by name. I didn’t have a twitter account or an Instagram, and rarely went out to social functions. Even if Nick had broken his promise and Googled me, he wouldn’t have found much of anything. In