Page 43 of IRL: In Real Life

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I told her he’d called.

That stopped her cold for exactly one second.

“He called called?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, that’s different.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean that’s really different.” She dropped into one of the stools at the island and stared at me like I had just admitted somebody built a shrine in my honor. “Men do not call anymore. They send reactions. They hover. They make you do all the work of turning a text thread into something with a pulse.”

“That’s what threw me.”

“What he say?”

I thought about it for a second, not because I didn’t remember, but because I remembered too clearly.

“That texting started feeling thin.”

Kendra sat back and blinked. “Oh. He’s good, Tal.”

“Exactly.”

She chewed slowly, looking at me in that way best friends do when they’re trying very hard not to smile too big at your vulnerability.

“And?”

“And we talked.”

“How?”

I laughed once under my breath. “Like people.”

“No, I know that. I mean how did it feel?”

That was the real question.

I set my fork down and looked at the counter for a second before answering. Kendra was like another sister, someone who understood the real me. She could sometimes see what I couldn’t see about myself, and most times that did nothing but get on my nerves.

But I knew she was safety.

I could leap.

“Easy,” I said. “Too easy, maybe. He sounded like himself, but more. Less... packaged.”

Kendra nodded once, slow.

I kept going because now that I’d started, it wanted saying.

“In the room, that mattered. But on the phone it mattered more. There was no audience. No low light helping. No chemistry to hide inside because we were standing too close in good clothes.” I looked up at her. “He was just a man in his own place, playing ‘Surrender’ by Kut Klose, asking me what I was drinking, laughing at me over grape Kool-Aid like he already knew me a little.”

Kendra went still for a second.

Then she said, “Oh, baby.”

“I know.”

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