“I Like.”
Low enough to live in the room instead of taking it over.
I poured a drink I didn’t need and took it toward the windows, city glittering back at me in broken lines. Somewhere out there, Talia was in her own place doing whatever a woman like her did on a Tuesday night after agreeing to let a man take her to dinner.
That thought sat in me longer than it should have.
A woman like her.
What did that even mean?
It meant I could picture her too easily.
Bare feet on hardwood. Gold hoops off. Hair still laid close. Maybe standing at a kitchen counter reheating something because grown people got tired and still had to eat. Maybe with music on. Maybe not. Maybe quiet because she actually liked quiet and didn’t need the television lying to her in the background.
That was the trouble now. The details had started arriving. Not fantasy exactly. Something more dangerous than that.
Possibility.
I drank, looked out at the city, and tried not to reach for the phone.
Triedbeing the important part, because the truth was, texting had started feeling thin. I got how necessary it was to keep an open channel of communication, and having a full-blown phone conversation wouldn’t always work.
But maybe I was getting older in a way I could admit without making a joke out of it. Maybe I missed when people had to do a little more than react and type. When you had to pick up the phone and hear a real voice. Hear the little pauses. The breathing. The laugh before the response. The way a person carried silence when nobody was helping them with emojis and timing.
A woman like Talia did not make me want more texts. She made me want to hear her voice.
That realization rode with me another minute, then I picked up the phone, looked at her name, smiled without asking myself permission, and called.
It rang twice before she answered.
“Hello?”
Her voice came through lower than it had been in the room, softer too, close enough to do something to me before the conversation even got going.
“Hey.”
There was a beat, and then I heard her smile.
“You’re calling?”
“You sound surprised.”
“I am.” She laughed lightly. “Men don’t really call anymore. They lurk.”
“Lurk?”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“I think I do.”
The truth was, now that I’d seen her up close and heard her up close, I could understand a man embarrassing himself over her and watching her every move, if he didn’t have no motion. She was just that fine.
I turned the volume down a notch on the speaker and leaned one shoulder against the window.
“You busy?”
“Not especially.” I heard something faint on her end. A cabinet, maybe. Then the soft clink of glass. “You?”
