Page 32 of When He Calls

"What do you think happened?"

"I don't know. My body feels like something happened to it, but I have no idea what that would have even been. I don’t think sleeping in one position would do that, right."

"Maybe." His voice is soothing. "Trazodone causes deep muscle relaxation. If you were in one position for a long time with your muscles completely slack, the lactic acid builds up differently. You can wake up feeling like you ran a marathon."

The explanation is clean. Physiological. It accounts for the hips, the back, the thighs. It accounts for every piece of the soreness except the part I haven't said yet, the part that I'm holding behind my teeth.

"There was a dream," I say. "Maybe. Something that felt physical. Weight on me. Pressure. The kind of pressure that has a shape."

"What kind of shape?"

"A body." The word leaves my mouth and the silence that follows it is the longest silence we've had. Five seconds. Six. Seven. "I know that doesn't make sense. I know the trazodone hit me. I was out. Nobody was in my apartment except Bean. I know that. But my body woke up feeling like somebody was here."

"Dreams on trazodone can be extremely vivid." His voice hasn't changed pitch. Hasn't wavered. The calmness is a wall I can lean against. "Especially if it’s been a while. The sleep architecture changes and the suppressed dream activity gets compressed into the deeper cycles. People report very physical dreams. Pressure, weight, sensation. It feels real because the neurological experience is real. The dream isn't happening outside your body. It's happening inside it."

My hand has loosened on the phone. The explanation is perfect. It fits the gap between what my body is telling me and what I know to be true, which is that I was alone in my apartment, behind a deadbolt and a handle lock. Bean on the bed.

Nobody touched me.

"Was it a good dream?" he asks.

The question drops through my chest.

"I don't know." The answer is honest. "It wasn't bad. The pressure wasn't... it wasn't fear. I wasn’t afraid. It was something else? I don’t know how to explain it.”

"Try?"

"Closeness." The word arrives from somewhere I didn't expect. Exact. "My body filed it as someone being close. Being inside the space I usually keep empty."

The silence on his end changes. It’s heavier. The breathing underneath it has shifted from steady to intrigued. I recognize it because it's the same breathing from last night before things crossed the line.

"When you say inside the space," he says. Slowly. "Do you mean your apartment? Or do you mean your body?"

My hips ache. The soreness in my inner thighs flares in response to the question like his voice has a direct line to whatever nerve is carrying the signal.

"Both," I say.

Flashes through me as I wait for the panic that never arrives. The dark apartment. The candle burning low. Bean asleep above me. My body remembering something my brain refuses to retrieve.

"The trazodone," he says. "It can do that. All of that. The soreness, the dream, the feeling of proximity. Your body was in its deepest resting state and the dream content mapped onto the physical relaxation. What you're feeling is the residue. The body doesn't distinguish between a dream and a memory. Both can be remembered as experience."

"So my body thinks something happened."

"Your body had an experience during sleep. It was generated internally, by the trazodone and the REM compression, but the experience was real to your nervous system. The soreness is the body processing the experience after the fact."

My head tips back against the couch. Bean's paw shifts against my shoulder. Everything is accounted for, then. The soreness is the drug. The dream is the drug. The feeling of a body against mine in the dark, the pressure, the weight, the sense of being held open by something I couldn't see, all of it is the drug working on a nervous system that hasn't been touched by another person in fourteen months.

"Thank you," I say.

"For what?"

"For not making it weird."

A breath of laughter. The sound does something to my chest. "Nothing about you is weird, Milo. Your body had a big night. Phone call. Orgasm. Trazodone. That's a lot of neurochemistry in a two-hour window. Your system was processing all of it while you slept."

The orgasm. His voice saying come for me. The memory layers over the dream. His voice told me to come. I came. His voice told me to sleep. I slept. Something happened in the dark between the sleeping and the waking, something my body kept and my brain lost.

"Same pill tonight?" My voice sounds steadier than it feels.