Page 16 of When He Calls

The words sit. Nothing added. No but a therapist would be worth it. No have you tried Kaplan. No you should renew the prescription. Just that. At the very least, you have me. And the sentence hits in the same spot where everything else he says does, below the collarbone, right side, the place that's been filling since the first call.

We end the call and I stare at the ceiling. Bean at my feet, breathing slow and even. Noor doesn't understand from the inside. Maren is gone. The medication is behind a wall. Brantley is here, every night, picking up the phone.

I don't know whether I'm pathetic, falling for him, or just trauma bonding with a fucking phone line. Probably all three.

At this point he’s the most stable person I’ve got and I don’t want to let that go.

***

October 21st.

Noor's text comes in at 2 p.m., right on schedule.

Care package arrived yet?

Yesterday. Gummy worms are already gone.

Knew it. How are the calls going?

She knows about the crisis line now. I told her on the 19th, through a text so she wouldn’t grill me.

Good. Same guy every night. Brantley. He's really good.

Same guy every night?

He works the overnight shift.

Milo.

What?

You're calling the same person every night. You know his schedule. You never get attached to people…

He's a crisis line operator. It's his job.

And you're my best friend. So it's my job to say be careful.

It's not like that.

Okay. Love you. Eat something that isn't gummy worms.

Noor has been watching me fall for people since sophomore year. She watched me fall for James, who was kind and temporary. Six months of good and then he graduated and moved to Denver and the good went with him and I spent a week on my dorm room floor eating gummy worms out of the bag. She watched me fall for Devon, who was neither kind nor temporary. Devon stayed for eight months and left marks that weren't visible and Noor sat on my floor and ate pad see ew and didn't say I told you so. She packed a bag for me and drove me to her parents' house in Sacramento and her mom made butter chicken and nobody asked questions. I slept in Noor's childhood bed for four days while she slept on an air mattress on the floor and we watched cooking shows and didn't talk about it until I was ready.

She's earned the right to say be careful. She's earned it twice over. The fact that I'm not going to listen doesn't mean she's wrong.

Then I wait until I can call him.

Tonight's call goes two hours. Bean falls asleep on the couch beside me, her nose tucked under her tail, and I move to the floor so the sound of my voice doesn't wake her, sitting with my back against the couch and my knees up, the phone on speaker balanced on my thigh.

No follow-up on Noor. No mention of Kaplan or the medication or the prescription. The manuscript. The day. The walk. Whether we’d prefer chicken Alfredo or pesto chicken because clearly pesto is better and talking about taste in pasta is so mundane, it’s grounding. Whether Bean tried to eat anything new. He asks about the vineyard novel's protagonist and I tell him she's getting better and he asks what getting better means for a fictional woman in Tuscany and I explain about character arcs and narrative momentum and the difference between a character who changes and a character who just has things happen to her, and fifteen minutes pass on craft theory and neither of us mentions Halloween once.

The calls have stopped being about the phobia. The phobia got me through the door. He's what is on the other side.

I want to stay.

By the time we hang up, October is somewhere else. The apartment is quiet. The good kind of quiet, the kind that follows a conversation instead of the kind that precedes a panic. Bean is still asleep, her paws tucked under her chin. The clock reads 3:43.

My phone is warm from two hours of draining my battery. The screen shows the call duration: 2:07:33. Two hours and seven minutes. The longest call since the first one. The calls keep getting longer because neither of us wants to hang up and neither of us says that.