CHAPTER 60: BAGAS’S INSECURITY

A pin-drop silence fell around them, and Sarah had her head bowed, holding back the tears from coming out of the corner of her eyes. Sheva himself clenched his fist unconsciously, especially after he saw the weak smile on his best friend’s face. No matter how confident and comfortable Bagas was with his own body, the boy was still conscious enough about how people looked at his fattiness. This was also the boy’s biggest doubt before he started dating Sarah, and by how the conversation went right now, it seemed that the doubt was still there, lingering inside Bagas’s heart.

"What is wrong with a boyfriend like you?" Sarah mumbled quietly, approaching Bagas slowly before giving the fat boy the biggest hug she could muster. "You are handsome, kind, funny, loyal, brave, and smart. Where else would I find someone as perfect as you?"

"I really appreciate the ego boost here." Bagas chuckled wanly at the praise from his girlfriend. "But you know what I mean, right? Hell, our friends even call us the beauty and the beast, so I don’t really want to know how your audience would react when they saw their favorite streamer’s boyfriend turns out to be a fat boy like me." He smiled self-deprecatingly.

This was enough to render both Sheva and Sarah speechless, not knowing how to answer. In the end, it was the girlfriend who lifted the mood by mumbling under his sleeves. "I don’t really care about it... I just want to show the world about our relationship..."

"But you know you should be, Honey." Bagas smiled sweetly. Too sweet, even. Sheva had to hold back the urge to vomit on the spot at the scene they made here. ’Is this what those Chinese novels are called by getting fed dog food?’ He muttered to himself. Of course, Bagas didn’t notice. He just continued his explanation, "You are still a rising streamer, and it is not easy to get that many followers. Once your audience knows that you date a fat boy like me, they would think the worst of you, like, sorry for my bluntness here, a whore, a slut who does everything for money, or something like that. After all, what kind of beautiful woman would date a fat boy like me? I mean, even our friends call us the beauty and the beast, right?" He smiled wanly.

Sheva winced unconsciously when he heard that, knowing that he was one of the ’friends’ who called both ’The Beauty and The Beast’. He had never thought about Bagas’s feelings, especially since the boy would always join in the laughter whenever anyone was laughing about his relationship. Now, he wasn’t so sure anymore whether Bagas enjoyed the nickname or not.

Sarah herself also had the same reaction. She buried her face deeper into Bagas’s shoulder, not being able to utter a single word to deny her boyfriend’s words. After all, what Bagas said was true here. Even though she loved the boy—no, the man—dearly, her audience wouldn’t think the same. Nasty rumors about her would fly around, holding back her career, and would probably also affect her mental health in the end. This wasn’t her wild imagination, since something like this had already happened in the same Indonesian YouTube community before.

*Author’s note: The last part is a fiction that I added myself, not based on something real.

"You know what? Gas, you are not that fat." Sheva suddenly broke the silence there. It seemed that he couldn’t bear the awkward atmosphere anymore. "I mean, of course, you are still having that big body of yours. However, I know you have been hitting the gym pretty frequently, and most of the fat on your stomach has been transformed into muscles already. You just need to leave your fat persona, you know? No nerd or weeb persona anymore, cause it brings down your value. I am sure that after cleaning up a little bit, your look will be quite decent."

Sarah’s eyes lit up instantly when she heard Sheva’s suggestion. "That is a brilliant idea, Sheva!" Then, she turned to Bagas, her eyes gleaming dangerously. "Honey, do you know what that means?"

"I... Don’t?" Bagas replied warily. Based on his experience, the boy knew it was never good for his girlfriend to get overly excited like this.

"Oh, that means we are in for a shopping date!" Sarah clapped her hands like an excited child. "Oh, this is going to be a good day! Thanks for the suggestion, Shev! You are right, Bagas needs to have a little bit of a makeover here!"

Sheva turned his face away immediately, knowing that Bagas’s glare was coming. Still, he wasn’t wrong, though. Bagas wasn’t that fat. He was just having a big body. Once he changed his persona from his usual greasy weeb, Sheva was sure that his appearance would be enough to impress everyone. However, he could still see the hesitation in his best friend’s eyes, and then, an idea suddenly clicked inside his brain.

"You know what? If you are that worried about the scandal after your relationship reveal, how about you announce it after you get your own reputation first?" This suggestion was good enough to attract the two couples’ attention. "I mean, Bagas also starts being active in the ’Black Rook’ channel, right? If he builds his own audience too, I am sure that two people in the same circle dating wouldn’t cause that much of a backlash, right?"

"Well... I guess..." Bagas was still skeptical about the idea. However, he knew that Sheva was right. There were a lot of examples about how streamers date each other, yet they have never made any scandal before. If anything, the audiences tended to love it, always shipping one to another and clipping their cute moment to upload them to TikTok or something like this.

The more he thought about this, the more the idea seemed to be decent inside his head. Added to the fact that Sarah was basically giving him her puppy-dog eyes, Bagas finally crumbled like wet paper, his shoulder slumping as the boy raised both hands in defeat.

"Fine, you both win. Let’s try Sheva’s suggestion first, and we will see how it would go later, okay?"