Call Me Anytime (The Protectors #1)

Chapter 1 Hannah

Hannah

When I was a little girl, I used to dream of the future a lot. Of fancy houses and a handsome husband and jet-setting trips to the south of France. I pictured perfectly manicured nails and lawns, and I imagined big diamond necklaces resting heavily around my clavicle.

Instead, at twenty-five, I sit inside a warehouse on the outskirts of downtown Nashville, Tennessee, in a dingy office on the second floor, wafting cigarette smoke away from my face as discreetly as I possibly can while the woman interviewing me for a telemarketing job blows a continuous stream in my direction.

This, friends, is not what dreams are made of.

“I see it says on your résumé that you just left a job at Alliance?” Margo, my interviewer, asks.

“Yes. That’s correct.” I wiggle in my seat to sit a little taller, desperate to make the best of this situation. After fifteen interviews and no job offers in the last month, I don’t have much choice.

Margo Mavis’s makeup is thick—blue eye shadow, pink lips, pink blush—and her jet-black hair is almost as big as her currently pushed-up breasts, which I can only assume are fake.

They, like NASA, defy gravity. Everything else about her is aged—like she’s a character straight out of ’80s TV—and, since her office is windowless and there isn’t a fan or air purifier in sight, her views on the risks of indoor smoking seem just as old fashioned.

“And what’s Alliance, hon? A club?” She drops my single sheet of job history to the desk in front of her and takes another drag from her Virginia Slim.

“A club?” My eyebrows draw together. “No. It’s a medical-based technology company. I was doing data entry, but they’re relocating to Atlanta and aren’t offering any remote positions.”

Margo takes another drag, and a few ashes fall onto the neckline of her red sweater, which covers little more than her nipples—and comes nowhere near her neck.

She brushes them off with a nonchalant hand, but not before they burn a tiny hole in the fabric.

For continuity within the look she’s going for, the heavily coated foundation around her eyes cracks to reveal a few crow’s-feet as she squints down at my résumé for another quick read. “You have any experience on calls?”

“Um . . . I did some cold-calling with Alliance, but I’ve never been in direct sales before,” I admit, fudging the truth a little in the hopes that it makes me sound less like a fish out of water.

Nadine, my old boss at Alliance, did attempt to put me on the sales team at one point, but after a week of calls and no actual sales, back to data entry I had gone.

Being pushy with strangers isn’t one of my fortes.

Still, I’m desperate for a job, any job, and if that means doing a crash course on slick tricks via YouTube tutorial, then so be it. I wouldn’t be sitting here, secondhand smoking my way to bronchogenic carcinoma, if I weren’t willing to do anything necessary.

I’ve got a lot counting on me to bring in a steady stream of reasonable income—things I absolutely cannot sacrifice—and every day I’m not doing that, we go farther in the hole.

When Margo doesn’t say anything, I feel the urge to expand, the impulse to convince her to give me a chance nearly overpowering.

“I’m a dedicated employee, though. I give a hundred and ten percent to every assignment,” I add. “It might take me a day or two to get my feet under me, but I’m confident in my ability to adapt.”

Margo meets my eyes, searching my face for a long beat before nodding. “You’ve got a nice sound, I’ll give you that. A nice look, too, not that that matters too much around here.”

I glance down at my white blouse and black pencil skirt a little self-consciously and cross my legs at the ankle. I tried to “dress to impress,” but if Margo’s squeaky hot pants and tattered scrap of a sweater are anything to go by, I may have missed the mark.

“How’d you hear about the position, hon?” she asks.

“I saw the ad in the newspaper. The, um, Nashville Newsleader, I think it was.”

Margo nods. “Glad those things are working. Most of the time, I don’t know if anyone even reads that shit anymore.”

I shrug. My dad used to read the paper every morning and every night. I don’t take the eccentricity quite as far as he did, but I crack the pages every now and then.

“All right. Let’s get down to it.” Margo takes another puff of her cig and blows actual smoke circles into the air. “Go ahead and give me a taste of your phone voice.”

“My . . . phone voice?”

“Yeah, hon. Just act like you’re answering a call.” Her hot pants squeak again as she leans closer.

Nerves flit around inside my belly. Truth be told, I’d be hard-pressed to think of anything worse than a job in telemarketing. I’m an introvert. A classic case of “text instead of call” and a certified homebody. I don’t put myself out there—I never have.

But I need the job—the money—and that means my comfort zone is a thing of the past.

“Okay.” I swallow hard against the nausea and lick my lips to wet my dry mouth. I even pretend to put a phone to my ear, splaying my fingers in the hang-ten hand sign. “Hello, thank you for calling Call Me Anytime. My name is Hannah. How can I help you?”

Margo frowns and takes another drag from her ciggy.

“Was that bad?” I ask, my voice sounding as awkward as I now feel from Margo’s anticlimactic reaction. I loathe feeling like I’m letting people down, but really, that’s no surprise.

My people-pleasing gene is hardwired, a gift from my mom I can’t return.

When I was little, her whole world was making me and my dad happy and being the mother and wife we needed.

She attended every PTA meeting, sat through countless gymnastics classes despite my obvious lack of Olympic drive, and dedicated every Saturday to balancing the books for my dad’s home construction company.

“It’s a little stiff,” Margo comments, shoving back into her seat and crossing her arms over her ample boob balloons, two fingers and her cig extended to keep from burning herself. “Though I’m sure some of our callers will cream their pants over the sweet-and-innocent thing you’ve got going on.”

I’m sorry, but did she just say cream their pants?

“You got any hard limits?” she asks. “Anything you won’t do on a call?”

“Hard limits?” I tilt my head to the side, a puzzled wrinkle forming between my brows. “Like on sales attempts?”

Margo shakes her head, ticking off fingers. “Blow jobs, anal, foot play, piss parties, choking, or aggression?”

My eyes widen enough to encroach on my cheeks, and vomit threatens in the back of my throat. When I was rehearsing some practice questions and answers last night, this didn’t make the cut.

“Those are normally the big ones,” she continues as I choke on my own saliva. “But everyone is different. Different kicks for different chicks and all that. What won’t you do?”

A harsh buzzing explodes in my ears, and I blink what feels like one thousand times. I . . . I thought this was a job selling toner . . . or extended car warranties. Something. Anything other than blow jobs and anal and . . . my God . . . piss parties.

Is this . . . is this a phone sex line?

“Did you just say piss parties?”

“You’ll get a few curveballs in the beginning, but you’ll get used to it pretty quick,” Margo replies on a shrug. “A lot of these men call because they’re ashamed to admit their fetishes in person, you know?”

I look around the messy office and back at Margo, an ugly realization dawning well after the chickens have hatched. “What exactly does Call Me Anytime do?” I ask. “You never specified in your ad.”

“Phone sex, hon. We’re a twenty-four-hour hotline.”

Oh, freaking hell. I can’t take a phone sex job! I’m a virgin, for Pete’s sake.

“The more calls you take, the more money you make,” Margo rattles off while my brain feels a little too close to bursting inside my skull for any level of comfort, past or present.

This isn’t just outside the zone; this is a whole other freaking planet.

“Most of my girls make well over two thousand a week, but since you’re just starting out, I’d keep your expectations low and plan on fifteen hundred. ”

Hold up . . . did she just say fifteen hundred dollars? My throat is so tight I feel gagged, but the numbers sound too musical to my ears for me to run from the pressure. In this case, maybe just maybe, I could deal with being choked.

“Fifteen hundred dollars a week?” I ask, my voice as squeaky as her pants. “Before or after taxes?”

“After.”

Have mercy. That’s six thousand a month, which is almost double what I was making at Alliance. Hell, that would pay for bills and my mom’s caretaker, Lovie, and I could put food on the table. Maybe I’d even have an extra hundred or so to spare every other paycheck.

But . . . I can’t do this. Right? I can’t.

“You could start today, actually,” Margo updates me.

“It’s hard to keep reliable girls, and the men on our Ruby line are starting to get a little stir-crazy now that my girl on that line has no-showed for the past two days.

” She rolls her eyes. “I guess that’s what I get for letting some girls work from home. ”

I ignore the strangeness of a work-from-home phone sex job and fixate on the start date.

“I could start today?”

“Now,” she clarifies. “I can’t leave that line on hold much longer without chancing a boycott or something.

” Margo stands up and snuffs out her cigarette in the pink crystal ashtray at the corner of her desk.

It’s full of stubs and old soot and yet manages to be about the tidiest thing in the room.

“Come on. I’ll show you around. You can see where your desk would be and meet a couple of the other girls. Then we can go from there.”

Insane thoughts rush through me as I stand to follow her out of her office and down the dark hallway to a door that looks like it leads to an apartment. She taps a code into its keypad and pushes it open, waving me through and closing it with a click behind us.

The space is entirely different from what I imagined—likely because a sex hotline has never, ever been in my head before now—and largely wide open.

Eight cubicles line the walls, each decorated with its own theming and lighting, and women of all shapes and ethnicities sit inside, headsets in place as they chat with callers.

Margo jerks her chin at me to follow, so I do, walking first by the two nearest cubicles, lit with green and blue LED lights.

“These are our Emerald and Sapphire booths,” she explains, keeping her voice low as the woman with red hair and a pointy chin in the green booth moans into her mini microphone.

“They get a lot of callers who like the rough stuff.”

“The rough stuff?” I question, making Margo nod.

I swallow hard and try to keep a neutral face, but it’s a fight made in vain. The roughest things I know are hard water and scratchy sweater fabric.

“When I first started Call Me Anytime, I was a naive little pickle like you,” Margo continues with a pink-lipstick smile in my direction.

“I knew the business—I worked at the Crazy Horse as a stage girl for a decade or so—but I didn’t think about how many specialty areas there are and how much more you can capitalize if you facilitate the niche. ”

I almost laugh at how strategic she makes it all sound, but something about the overt sounds of sex at ten in the morning has robbed me of my humor.

“I used to have one line, and calls went to first available, but having separate lines for separate desires has worked ten times better and doubled our business. I make more, the girls make more. We’re all happy.”

I nod woodenly. Happy. Yeah.

Next, we pass the orange and purple booths, where the women’s voices are noticeably higher pitched and whinier. “Amber and Amethyst handle most of our role-players. Animals, characters, you name it. They do a lot of the kink.”

The next colors are yellow and pink, and the girls in these booths are calmer—almost subdued, actually. “Topaz and Opal deal with a lot of our alphas who want to dominate.”

I smile, but inside I am crying. What in the living hell have I gotten myself into?

Finally, at the end of the line, sit two more cubicles, one of which glows with bright white light and a sweet-looking young woman with a blunt blond bob and a big smile.

She waves at me, and I wave back, trying my best not to look scared to death.

“Your neighbor is Diamond. She deals with the rarest, most unusual callers in the whole place. And then,” she says, turning to the cubicle at my back that’s bathed in red light.

“This would be your desk. The Ruby line. It’s pretty straightforward, with some mild kink and predilections, but takes a lot of calls. ”

A lot of calls. According to Margo, a lot of calls means a lot of money.

“What do you think, hon? You’d really be helping me out of a bind if you start right now.

” Margo crosses her arms beneath her chest and leans a hip on Diamond’s cubicle wall.

“You can make your own hours, no problem. We’re here twenty-four seven.

But I do ask that you keep in mind the commission-like nature of your pay as well as establishing somewhat of a schedule so your callers know when to get you.

Trust me, it’s best for everyone. And if you’re not coming, you need to call me.

I can’t do any more of this no-show bullshit. ”

My mind is as bright white as Diamond’s sex cubicle as I consider taking the job.

I mean, it’s bonkers. But also, high pay and flexibility.

Two things, with my life the way it is, I find impossible to turn down.

Truth be told, if I turn this down, foreclosure, bankruptcy, and losing my mother’s caretaker are all in the cards.

You have to take it. No matter how ridiculous it is.

It’s not a diamond necklace, but it is a Ruby phone line. And I guess it’ll have to do for now.

“Sure. I can start today.” The words seem to come from a whole other dimension.

A whole other person. This isn’t just weird—this is a different set of time and space parameters, unexplored by man, alien, or skinwalker.

I don’t think there’s a single sci-fi movie out there that’s traveled the alternate universe I’m about to.

“Great, hon,” Margo says with a smile as she lights up another ciggy. “Let’s get you set up and acquainted with the equipment, and then you can take your first call.”

Me, the virgin, taking my very first professional sex call.

Oh, yeah. This ought to be good.