Page 33 of When He Calls

"If you want. You need the sleep. Your body will adjust to the trazodone after a few nights, and the dreams will taper off. The first dose is always the most intense."

"Okay."

"And Milo?"

"Yeah?"

"The man at the coffee shop. With the brown eyes. Did you go back today?"

The pivot is so smooth I almost miss it. The redirect from the dream, from the soreness, from the thing my body is carrying, into something lighter. Something I can talk about without my hips aching.

"I walked past. On the evening walk. He wasn't there... why?"

"Just curious. Maybe tomorrow."

"Maybe."

"Same time tomorrow?"

"I'm not going anywhere."

The call ends. 1:14 a.m. Shorter than last night. My hand is on my phone, not in my sweats. Tonight was not that kind of call. Tonight was the kind where his voice walked me through something I couldn't walk through alone, the dream, the soreness, the gap between what my body knows and what my brain allows.

I stand. The ache in my hips is fainter now. The thighs have settled. The lower back is loose from the floor position, the stretch of sitting with my legs out.

Bathroom. Medicine cabinet. The trazodone. I shake one out. Fifty milligrams. Small, white, round. The same glass of water from last night, refilled.

Bean is already on the bed. Already in position. Her body against my shins, the weight of her familiar and constant and exactly where it should be.

The pill goes down. The ceiling starts its slow blur. His voice is in my head, not the low register, not the command. The other one. The explaining one. The one that told me my body was doing what bodies do and the dream was a dream, the soreness was chemistry. Everything that happened in the dark was generated by a pill, a nervous system, fourteen months of not being touched.

Everything accounted for.

The trazodone pulls me under and the last thing I feel is Bean's nose against my ankle and the ache in my hips settling into something that isn't pain, isn't pleasure, isn't anything I have a word for yet.

Chapter Twelve: Brantley

He told me about the soreness.

Sitting in my car in the parking lot of the crisis center, twelve minutes before shift, the recording playing through my earbuds. His voice saying my hips, my back, my thighs, the insides. The pause before thighs where his mouth held the word for a full second before letting it go.

He said closeness.

My fingers are on the steering wheel. The engine is off. The parking lot is half empty, the early shift already inside, Mark visible through the second-floor window with his headset on. Barbara's office light is on. The building looks the same as it did yesterday. Everything looks the same as it did yesterday. The only thing that's changed is that I've been inside him and the knowledge of it sits in my sternum, heavy, permanent, a fact my body absorbed the same way his absorbed me.

I press play again. The section where he describes the dream.

He doesn't know. He doesn't know and it’s what I keep coming back to, the thing I've been circling since I drove home, showered, stood under the water for eleven minutes. He woke up sore. He felt what I’d done to him. His body kept the record of what happened, the ache in his hips where my hands gripped, the tenderness in his thighs where my knees spread them apart, the deep-tissue evidence of being entered and fucked while the trazodone held him under. His body kept all of it. His brain kept none.

I gave him the trazodone explanation. REM compression. Lactic acid. Sleep architecture. The words came out clean because I practiced them. In the car, on the drive to his street, in the time between his call ending and my hand on his doorknob. The explanation was always part of the plan. The trazodone would cause soreness. He'd notice. He'd want a reason. The reason had to be physiological, specific, delivered in the voice he trusts. The voice that says you have me. The voice that said come for me ninety minutes before I came inside him.

He believed it. Of course he believed it. The man who trusts his deadbolt trusts the voice on the phone. Barriers that feel solid because nobody's tested them from the other side.

I tested both in the same night. With the thought of my cock buried in his ass, I lay down to nap for a couple hours before I pull another split-shift.

When I wake, I’m groggy and I don’t want to drag my ass to work, but that’s what I do anyway. Twelve hours and then tomorrow I can sleep all day if I need. The calls come through the headset in the usual order. A woman having panic attacks in her car. A college student who hasn't left his dorm room in three days. A man whose wife is dying and who calls every Tuesday to talk about it, not because the talking helps but because the silence in the house is worse than any conversation with a stranger. I handle them. The right words, the right pacing, the pauses timed to land. Barbara stops by my desk at 2:00 to tell me my evaluation scores are the highest on the floor for the second quarter running.

"Whatever you're doing," she says, "keep doing it."