Page 2 of After-Hours Heir

Would they ever talk on the phone? Video call? She was so reluctant to disrupt this thing they had, and she ignored the little alarm bells that went off that they hadn’t.

This felt so fragile, whatever it was.

She’d found a cell phone on the street after the worst publishing event she could remember attending, and she’d been huffing out of the building, stressed and angry, when she saw a phone lying there on the wet sidewalk, all lit up.

The rain had kept the screen from locking.

She’d picked it up and had turned back toward the hotel to hand it in, and something had…stopped her.

It was a totally generic phone. The lock screen and wallpaper were default. She hadn’t snooped or anything, but she had pulled up the texts, and started a new one:

This is from the girl who found your phone, hope you get it back.

She’d sent it to herself from that phone, just to see.

The next day, she’d gotten a text.

Unknown Number: This is definitely the most interesting way I’ve gotten a woman’s number.

And so it had begun.

It was like sending words into a safe void. She told him nothing about herself, and yet she told him everything.

No identifiers, only deep philosophical discussions. And…virtual sex. Which was something no one would ever believe given Sylvie was a sad midtwenties virgin.

But on this text thread? She’d done lots of things. Scandalous things.

The “sex” was great. But so was everything else.

Kid: Sometimes I wonder if I hate my job. Do you ever wonder that?

There is no pause on his end.

Baby: No. I live it. Which isn’t the same as loving it, I suppose, but it is the thing that gives me purpose.

Kid: I get that. It gives me purpose, or I guess it’s like, I was born with it as my purpose and now I don’t know how to live without it but some days I want to burn it to the ground and start over. Reasonable?

Baby: Arson is always reasonable.

He said nothing for a moment.

Baby: If you hate it why do it?

Kid: I don’t know who I’d be without it.

Baby: You have never told me what you do, and yet I feel like I know you. Which means you don’t need your job to be who you are.

That made her feel so much warmer than it should.

“I wish you were here.” She said that into the silence of her apartment instead of texting it, and she was surprised to discover how quiet her apartment was. When they talked she heard his voice in her head. Or what she had decided it was. Smooth and pleasant. She imagined him in the same way. For some reason, with light brown hair and glasses, tall with a slim build. The kind of intellectual handsome like a character from an old nineties cartoon she’d watched where they searched for a lost underwater city.

Childhood crushes on cartoon characters died hard.

Instead of being maudlin, she finished her dinner and pushed her bowl to the side. Her heart fluttered and she pulled a blanket over her lap as she scrunched up and pulled her laptop close like she was a child who might get caught doing something bad.

Kid: If you were here I’d kiss you for that.

That was better than a sad, wistfulWish you were here.