Page 14 of When He Calls

Every day, closer to him. Every call, deeper inside his head.

Next time I won't stop at the door.

Chapter Five: Milo

Three nights, three calls, and a habit I'm forming that's become the architecture of my day.

Edit during the day. The vineyard novel is getting better, the protagonist developing a spine. The work is satisfying in the way good editing always is. Taking sentences apart, putting them back together in the right order. I eat lunch at the counter. Bean's walk at noon when the sun is highest. The decorations are at their weakest then. The skeleton's red LEDs barely visible in daylight. The ghost on Ellis's porch beam limp, unconvincing with the sun behind it. Back inside, door locked, handle, deadbolt, handle. Work through the afternoon. Dinner standing up, one hand on a sandwich, the other scrolling the manuscript. The productivity is a kind of anesthesia that numbs the hours between the morning walk and the evening one and then her many overnight trips, because apparently she turns into a little old lady with a bladder problem when the clock strikes midnight.

Can’t blame her though, we all have our “thing”.

Bean's evening walk at dusk, which is worse than noon but better than dark. The route changes every few days. The house on Clement added a fog machine. The fog spills across the sidewalk at ankle height. The first time it touched my shoes my legs locked. Bean had to pull me through it, twelve pounds of determination dragging a grown man past a machine that makes water vapor. We don't walk down Clement anymore.

Then the couch. The wait. The hour when the apartment gets heavy and the silence fills with October and the phone is already in my hand, the screen bright, his number sitting in my favorites between Noor and the Thai place.

He always answers. Not someone else. Him. Every night, the same greeting, the same voice. The apartment rearranges around it. Walls pull back. Ceiling lifts. Harbor Crisis Center, this is Brantley has become the sound of the day ending properly. Some people need a bath or a book or a glass of wine. I need a voice on a phone that belongs to a person whose face I've never seen.

How the shift schedule works, why it's always him, whether it's coincidence or assignment, all of it confuses the hell out of me, and yet I'm grateful he never seems to take a night off. The question exists but stays unasked. The answer might change something. Nothing needs to change.

October 19th. In bed, under the blanket, with my phone on the pillow. Bean curled at my feet, already asleep, her body a fixed point against my shins. The thinking-about-calling started at four. Not because the panic was bad. Because the calls are so good. The panic has become the pretext. The calls have become the point.

And somewhere in these three nights the wanting changed temperature.

It started as relief. His voice came through the line and my shoulders dropped and the walls went back where walls belong, and I filed it next to the breathing counts and the pills I don't take, a thing that helps and nothing more. But relief doesn't make me change my shirt for a phone call. Relief doesn't pool low in my stomach when his register drops on the back half of a sentence, that gear-shift out of the daytime voice into the slower one, the one I've started waiting for the way you wait for a held note to land.

This is a voice thing. A kink I apparently have and didn't know about, or didn't have until him. I've never once in twenty-seven years wanted a body in a room with me, because bodies come with faces and faces are the thing I spend every October reading for threat. But a voice in the dark is a different proposition. Attached to nothing, asking for nothing, taking up none of the space my nervous system stands guard over. A voice I can let all the way in because there's nothing to brace against. My body never learned that wanting could be safe. It's learning now, off a sound. Just a sound.

I'm turned on by a man I wouldn't recognize if he sat down across from me, and it's the not-recognizing that makes it possible. That should worry me more than it does.

I resist the urge until midnight because his shift doesn't start until late and I can't risk calling twice just to get him.

"Tell me about today."

The manuscript. The vineyard novel improving, the protagonist finding her backbone, the prose elevated because this is the fourth draft and it’s had time to breathe. Editing described the way it's never been described to anyone, in detail, with opinions, with the pleasure of taking a sentence that doesn't work and making it work. Real questions back, not polite ones. He asks what makes a sentence right versus almost-right, and eleven minutes disappear into trying-to-explain.

It ends with me laughing and apologizing, because who the fuck wants eleven minutes on comma splices at one in the morning?

"I'm better with other people's words than my own."

"You seem pretty good with your own."

"Talking to a crisis line at midnight. Not sure that qualifies."

"You're talking to me and I say you're doing just fine."

Every time he does this, draws the line between what my brain says and what he says, his version gets more real. The falling apart becomes reaching out. The crisis line becomes a conversation.

The version of me that exists in his voice is someone I want to be.

"How's the phobia?"

"Medium. The inflatable ghost two houses down was off this morning, so the walk was easier. New display on Clement though. Pumpkins with faces. Just pumpkins. Hands went cold anyway."

"Who won?"

"Bean and I got through it."

"Good."