Page 22 of When He Calls

Tonight I ask him something I've never asked.

"What do you do? When you're not here."

The pause. Two seconds. Three.

"I read," he says. "A lot of nonfiction. Behavioral science. How people work."

"That fits."

"Why?"

"Because you listen like someone who studied it. Not like a textbook. Like someone who reads it because they actually want to understand how people are built."

The pause again. Longer this time. Four seconds. Five. I count them. I count everything now.

"I cook," he says. "Badly. My neighbor keeps bringing me food because she's seen the smoke detector go off through the window."

I laugh.

"What's the worst thing you've made?"

"Risotto that I had to throw away with the pan."

"You can't ruin a pan making risotto. Even I can't, and I've set off my smoke alarm making toast."

"You can if you forget it for forty minutes because you got distracted reading about attachment theory."

The laugh again. I press my hand over my mouth to keep from waking Bean, who's asleep on the couch above me, her paw dangling over the edge near my shoulder. My eyes are wet. Not from sadness. From the laughter. From the fact that a crisis line operator burned risotto reading about attachment theory and told me about it like it was normal, like we were friends, like this was a conversation between two people who knew each other.

"I wish I could see you."

Oh, fuck. The words leave before I've approved them. Before the filter that lives between my brain and my mouth has time to activate. They're out. In the air. On the line. His line. The crisis line where the calls are probably recorded and the boundaries exist for a reason and the reason is exactly what I just said.

Silence.

Not the comfortable kind. The kind where someone is deciding.

"Milo." My name. Just my name. The way he says it when he's about to redirect, to gently steer the conversation back toward the professional rails, to remind me without reminding me that this is a service and he is a provider and the intimacy is constructed, therapeutic, a tool designed to make me feel safe enough to keep calling.

But he doesn't redirect. He says my name and then he doesn't say anything else. The silence holds. Three seconds. Five. Seven.

"I think about that too." His voice is lower. Quieter. The professional register has dropped into something underneath it, something that sounds the way this shirt feels, soft and worn and not for anyone else. "More than I should."

My hand grips the phone. The speaker is on, but my hand is on the phone anyway, holding it against my thigh, feeling the warmth of the screen through my sweatpants. My throat is tight. My pulse is in my ears.

"Is that okay?" I ask. "That I said that. Sorry. You can tell me to shut up."

"Yeah." A breath. "It's okay."

"Is it, though? There have to be rules about this."

"There are."

"And?"

"And I'm not thinking about them right now."

The sentence lands in my chest and stays. I close my eyes. Bean's paw twitches above my shoulder. The candle in the kitchen has burned down to the last inch. The apartment is quiet, the kind of quiet that holds. His breathing is in my ear. Mine is in his. The distance between us is a phone line, an address he doesn't have, a face I've never seen.