Can You Keep A Secret

Chapter One

What is the difference between 'the love of your life' and 'your soulmate'?

One is a choice, one is not.

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The young man sat in front of a computer, gaze locked on his monitor. The bright screen showed the colorful homepage of a questionable dating site. It claimed to host millions of profiles of extremely attractive young men, women, etc. All of them looking for romance and financial sponsorship.

Nathan stared bleary-eyed at his computer after eight hours of a futile job search. He took a swig from his can of Heineken and wondered at what point in his life did it spiral down so bad that he sat here, jobless at twenty five years of age, looking for a sugar daddy.

Not to be conceited, but Nathan thought himself to be quite attractive. The girls at school used to fawn over him, the aunties selling food at street stalls always called him handsome, and some men even complimented him before. When he looked at the popular K-Pop idols, he thought his looks were not that far off from them. And especially as a gay man, he totally would date himself. He might not have the qualifications to get a 9-to-5 office job, but he definitely had the qualification to receive financial sponsorship by his looks alone.

Mindlessly, he scrolled through various photos of smiling young adults. None of these photos looked like bad, desperate people. It was refreshing to look at people's dating profiles after hours of staring at lines upon lines of job listings. Some of the profiles were written quite witty and made him laugh, which gave him an even better impression of the shady site. After hovering for a while, he clicked on the sign up button.

It was time for people to start paying him for being hot. A voice on the back of his mind told him that he had hit a new low, but Nathan ignored it.

As he munched down on a bag of seaweed flavored potato chips, he filled in his basic information. Some of the information was nothing but a bunch of lies — like his name, which he filled in as Stephan because there was no way he was going to feed this site his real government name — and some were truths — like the area he lived in. He only hesitated for a moment before uploading a selfie he had never posted anywhere else as his profile picture. By using a photo he had not posted in any of his social media accounts, people wouldn't be able to use reverse image search to find his real identity. It wasn't like any of the people he knew would visit this hell site right?

He snickered to himself as he completed the profile. A few minutes later, he stared in horror at the result of his work. He rubbed his eyes. He was definitely drunker than he thought he was. Not only did he voluntarily post himself on a sugar daddy site, but he also could not find a way to delete the cursed account.

He scrolled up. Scrolled down to the bottom of the page. Nothing. He clicked on every tab on the settings page. He squinted. Still nothing. Wouldn't this be a violation of the data protection acts? Wasn't this liable to lawsuits? He didn't read the terms and conditions of this site, nor did he have money to sue the site owner. He cursed capitalism.

'What now?' he asked himself.

If he was not drunk, he definitely would have panicked more. As it was, he stumbled and looked around the site for a good 20 minutes, before giving up as a headache started to form. His mind was numb. He blinked a few times, stared at his screen for a few more seconds, then grabbed his empty beer cans and started chucking them into a plastic bag.