Page 81 of First-Time Caller
“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 thefuck?” 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 peoplethreateningyou?”
“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.”
