First-Time Caller

Chapter 19

T his is good.

This is the reminder I needed.

I needed it broken down in black and white. Lucie is here to find a date. Someone who is capable of giving her all the things she deserves. She is not here for piggybacks down the street in the middle of the night, or slow dances in bars, or questionable Skee-Ball lessons from emotionally unavailable men. I told myself I’d never let myself get hurt by love, and I meant it. I’m doing just fine without it.

But Lucie needs to find a date.

So I’m going to find her one.

“Give me your phone,” I say to Lucie as soon as we cut for the first commercial break. I’m not in a particularly good mood tonight and I’m blaming the string of uninspiring candidates. I’m supposed to be picking her next date, but everyone who has called in has either been a bumbling idiot or a self-serving asshole. I don’t know how I’m going to pick someone short of throwing a dart at the wall and hoping for the best. None of these people are good enough.

She blinks at me, her chin resting on her knees and her arms wrapped around them. “What was that?”

“I need your phone,” I say again.

“I heard you, but what’s that tone about?”

“I don’t have a tone,” I grumble.

“I have a twelve-year-old. I know when someone is using a tone.” She curls her legs under her. She’s wearing jeans tonight. Loose ones with a hole at the top of her thigh. A threadbare T-shirt that I want to slip my hands under.

I woke up this morning still tangled up in my dreams, and all I can remember is groping hands, gasping breaths, and the freckles along Lucie’s shoulder. Her laugh curling around me like smoke and her mouth against mine.

I spent a significant amount of time in my shower.

“Aiden,” she snaps. “What do you need my phone for?”

I clear my throat and try to do something with my face that doesn’t say, I dream about you naked now. “Does it matter?”

“Sort of, yeah.”

I grunt and her lips pull into a smirk. She lifts her chin. “Ask me nicely and I’ll give it to you.”

My brain hears something completely different. Or maybe just the last four words of that sentence on repeat. Our new no-flirting rule is harder than I thought. I twist my head to the side, crack my neck, and try again. “Can I please see your phone?”

She hands me her personal phone. I stare at it blankly. The wallpaper is a picture of her and Maya sharing a giant blob of pink cotton candy at an Orioles game. She has a hat on backward and she’s laughing so hard her eyes are squeezed shut. Cotton candy on her nose.

“Not this one.” I set it to the side. I tap the screen again as soon as it goes blank so I can see that picture again. “The Heartstrings phone.”

Her eyes narrow. “Why?”

“I want to see the texts,” I explain, exasperated and trying not to show it. “Maybe there’s someone in there who will be a good fit.”

“Oh.” Her face tightens. “No.”

“No?”

She tucks her hair neatly behind her ears. It’s down tonight. No braid in sight.

“No, there’s no one that interests me in the text messages. I’ve stopped looking at them.”

“Have you?”

She nods. “I don’t even turn that phone on anymore.”

That’s a lie. I’ve heard the phone buzzing periodically throughout tonight’s broadcast. I study her face. The careful way she’s holding herself. How her eyes keep darting slightly to my left. I don’t think there’s a person in Baltimore who sucks at lying more than Lucie.

“What are you hiding?”

“Me? I’m not hiding anything.” Her fingers inch toward her ear like she wants to rub her thumb against the tiny wrench earring pierced through her cartilage, but she catches herself and snaps her hand back to her lap. “I’m just saying. The text messages don’t have any good candidates. It’s a waste of your time.”

Now I want to see the phone even more. “Lucie.”

“Yes, Aiden?”

“Give me the phone, please.”

“No.”

“Yes.” I swear to god, this woman reduces me to the most stubborn version of myself. I grab the arm of her chair and spin her around until her knees knock into mine. “Hand it over.”

She crosses her arms over her chest and doesn’t move.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

She rolls her eyes. “Okay, John Wayne . What are you going to—”

I curl my arm around her waist and tip her forward until she’s off-balance, then lift her up and over my shoulder. My chair squeaks ominously beneath us and Lucie shrieks in my ear. I pluck the station-issued phone from her back pocket like an apple from a tree.

“Aiden,” she gasps. “What?”

I hold her wiggling body against mine and she drives her knee into my stomach. I grunt, readjust my grip, and swipe open her phone.

The first three messages make me roll my eyes.

“Is this guy for real? ‘Do you have a Band-Aid, I just scraped my knees falling for you.’” I delete it on principle. “Ridiculous.”

Lucie relaxes against me with a defeated sigh, her body draped over mine.

“Don’t think I didn’t notice you lied about your phone being off, by the way.”

She mumbles something under her breath.

The text messages are just as uninspiring as our callers. Cheap pickup lines. Weird requests. A few kind messages from listeners. It’s the messages farther down, though, that have me seeing red.

“What the fuck ?” I spit. Lucie makes a half-hearted attempt to detach herself from the front of me, but my arm reflexively clutches at her waist. She settles with her chin on top of my head and her arms curled loose around my shoulders.

“To what are you referring?” she asks calmly.

“You know exactly to what I’m referring.” I scroll some more and it gets worse. “What the hell is this, Lucie? Are people threatening you?”

“No, they’re just—”

“You need to shut your mouth,” I recite from the screen of her phone, my voice shaking, “before someone shuts it for you.”

“Okay. Maybe mildly threatening. But I don’t even really turn on that phone anymore. Really. Most of them are just—are just comments about how stupid I sound on the air.” She laughs, but it doesn’t sound right. It’s too high. Too forced. “I guess Elliott has a lot of friends.”

The door to the studio swings open and Maggie pokes her frowning face into the room. Lucie is still slung over my shoulder.

“This is an interesting way to spend a commercial break.”

Lucie pushes on my chest and I let her go, still scrolling through her phone. She has hundreds of messages in her inbox and half of them are unacceptable. More importantly, all of them are read. She’s been looking at this garbage.

“Aiden,” Maggie continues. “Do you plan on going back to work tonight?”

I ignore the low-ball attempt at sarcasm and thrust the phone in her face. “I thought you said you set up filters on this thing.”

Lucie huffs. “It’s not a big deal, Aiden.”

“It’s a huge fucking deal,” I snap back. She flinches and I blow out a breath. “Sorry, I’m—this shouldn’t be happening.”

Maggie plucks the phone out of my hand. “What are you talking about?”

“The text messages,” I explain. “Lucie is being harassed.”

I watch Maggie’s eyes move back and forth as she swipes through the phone. “Play a song or something,” she mutters after a minute. “You’ve got dead air right now.”

I grunt and blindly slam my hand against my control panel. Shania Twain’s tinny voice drifts up from my headphones.

“How long has this been going on?” Maggie asks Lucie.

Lucie rubs at her earlobe. “A couple of days,” she mumbles.

“Days?” My voice comes out in a shout and she winces again. I rub at my chest with the heel of my hand so hard I feel the bite of metal from the chain around my neck. “You’ve been getting messages like this for days ?”

Was it happening at the bar? When she was waiting at that restaurant? Was she sitting there alone, reading them? Lucie briefly meets my gaze, then averts her eyes to the package of Andes mints she brought with her tonight. She slides one free. “I think my comments about baseline effort from romantic partners were inflammatory to some.”

“Aiden has said far more inflammatory things,” Maggie says, her voice tight. She reads something else on the phone and her eyebrows dip down. “When he called someone an asshat live on the air, for example.”

“It was once,” I mumble, but she’s right. I’ve said plenty of stupid shit on the air, and no one has ever threatened to shut my mouth for me.

Maggie sighs and darkens the phone with a quiet click . “Okay, lesson learned. No more texting. I’m sorry you had to deal with that, Lucie.”

Lucie shrugs. “I don’t concern myself with the fragile egos of men.” She glances at me. “No offense.”

“None taken.” I’m still having trouble with the rage coursing through my system like a cheap shot of liquor. I’m light-headed with it. “Can we report them somewhere? Send them a glitter bomb or something?” Lucie’s lips twitch with a smile. Some of my anger eases. “People shouldn’t be sending that shit to you.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Maggie says.

“But I—”

“I said I’ll take care of it,” Maggie cuts me off, steel in her voice. “I will take great pleasure in taking care of it. Taking care of it will make my entire month, thank you very much.” She flicks me in the forehead. “Now, go back to your radio show, please. If you’re still angry later, I’ll let you take a baseball bat to the couch someone left in the back parking lot.”

“It’s still there?”

“Yes. The raccoons love it.”

She disappears through the door in a blur of silk and perfectly straight hair, heels clicking against the floor. A chocolate appears in front of my face.

“Candy?” Lucie asks.

I take it and pop it in my mouth. She holds out another.

I take that one too.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I ask once I’m three chocolates deep and the gnawing rage has been shoved into something manageable.

She shrugs. “Because it wasn’t a big deal.” I start to tell her that yes, actually, it’s a very big deal , but she slaps her hand across my mouth. Both of my eyebrows shoot up.

“It wasn’t a big deal to me ,” she says. “This isn’t the first time in my life I’ve received unsolicited comments from men, Aiden. Do you really think, as a female mechanic, this is something I’m unfamiliar with?” She drops her hand. “A lot of men don’t like women working on their cars. But luckily, I don’t hold myself accountable to other people’s impressions of me. I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.” She pops a chocolate mint in her mouth and gives me a smile. I search her face carefully for any traces of hesitation, but there aren’t any. Just bright eyes and pink cheeks and a mouth that makes me borderline stupid. She reaches for her headphones. “We should probably stop playing Shania Twain.”

“Everyone loves Shania Twain.”

“Probably not the same song three times in a row, though,” she reasons.

“Debatable.”

I reluctantly drag us back to listener calls. They’re better than when we started, but not by much. Everyone either wants to tell Lucie why she’s wrong or offer their own sob story. I think we’re the most depressing show on the air tonight, and I wonder if— combined with the disaster of her first two dates—Lucie might pull the plug on this whole thing.

Just the thought of sitting in this booth alone again, listening to Charlene order six egg rolls because she still hasn’t figured out we’re not a Chinese restaurant, has me grabbing another chocolate mint. No more Lucie, no more mints. No more scribbled notes on the edge of her notepad, telling me FIX YOUR FACE . No more honey voice in my ear. No more daisies and motor oil.

No more half touches that I pretend are an accident.

Once Lucie decides she’s done with all this nonsense, I probably won’t see her again.

“Aiden seems to have forgotten where he is and what he’s doing, so I guess I’ll say it.” Lucie pokes me with a Heartstrings -issued pen and I realize I’ve been zoning out for seventy-five percent of this broadcast. “Welcome to Heartstrings . Thanks for calling in.”

She widens her eyes at me. I widen mine back. What.

Her head tilts to the side. Okay?

I nod. Yes, I’m fine. Except for the feelings I’m not supposed to be feeling and the dreams I’m not supposed to be dreaming and the excuses I’m not supposed to be making. I like Lucie. I like her so much it feels like there’s a band around my chest, constricting my breathing when she’s not around. I’m entertaining possibilities and that’s not—I need to not do that.

Lucie laughs and it yanks me out of my head. The guy on the phone just made some stupid-ass joke and she’s lit up like a firecracker.

“That’s the worst joke I’ve ever heard,” she says, but she’s smiling. She glances at me out of the corner of her eye and her smile falters. I’m always doing that. Making her smile disappear. I frown. “And that’s saying a lot, because I’m not sure Aiden even knows how to joke.”

“I make jokes,” I say. Not often, but it’s been known to happen. The guy on the phone—Owen, Oliver, something with an O — tells Lucie her laugh is beautiful and I watch her cheeks flush pink.

I’m acting like a sullen child. Hoarding my favorite toy in the corner of the classroom.

“Is there a reason you called in tonight, Otis?” I bark. Lucie gives me a questioning look. I pretend not to see it.

“Uh, Oliver, actually.” There’s an awkward pause and I make no rush to fill it. “And I don’t know. I was listening to you guys on my drive home from work and—I guess I felt like I should. I wanted to talk to Lucie.”

The lines around Lucie’s eyes deepen with her smile. “It was all the Shania Twain, wasn’t it?”

He laughs. “Yeah, you’re right. I heard ‘Man! I Feel Like a Woman!’ four times and thought, ‘God. I need to talk to the woman with that kind of confidence.’”

Lucie laughs again and I make my decision. She’s going on a date with this guy. This guy with the questionable jokes and the affinity for Shania Twain and the name that starts with an O that I’ve already forgotten again. He might be an idiot, but he makes her smile. And Lucie deserves someone who will make her smile. Not a grumpy asshole who makes that smile disappear.

I told her I’d find her a date.

This is her date.

“Oswald,” I ask, “what does your week look like?”

AIDEN VALENTINE: Knock, knock.

LUCIE STONE: What?

AIDEN VALENTINE: That’s not how you’re supposed to respond.

LUCIE STONE: Respond to what?

AIDEN VALENTINE: To “knock, knock.”

AIDEN VALENTINE: Knock, knock.

[pause]

LUCIE STONE: What? Why are you staring at me like that?

AIDEN VALENTINE: Knock. Knock. Lucie.

AIDEN VALENTINE: There is someone knocking at the door.

LUCIE STONE: What is happening?

AIDEN VALENTINE: I’m trying to tell a joke.

LUCIE STONE: Are you?

AIDEN VALENTINE: Yes!

LUCIE STONE: A knock-knock joke?

AIDEN VALENTINE: Obviously.

LUCIE STONE: I’m sorry! I wasn’t prepared. Try again.

AIDEN VALENTINE: No.

LUCIE STONE: C’mon. Don’t be shy. I was just surprised.

AIDEN VALENTINE: No.

LUCIE STONE: Is this because I said that you never—

AIDEN VALENTINE: No. Never mind. Forget about it.