Page 92 of First-Time Caller
I do my best to be professional. We take calls from listeners, I don’t hang up on anyone, and I only find two excuses to touch her during the first half of the show. Then someone calls in to ask about her date, and every muscle in my body pulls tight at the reminder that last night, Lucie was out with another man.
“Oh,” Lucie says, a wide smile lighting up her face. Something inside me strains under the pressure. “I had a really nice time. Oliver is a great guy.”
The listener on the other end of our headphones gasps. “That sounds promising! Are you going to see him again?”
I knock over a pen cup. Lucie glances at me out of the corner of her eye while I collect wayward pens.
“No,” she says slowly, trying to tuck her smile away and doing a poor job of it. “No, we decided we weren’t right for one another. We’re gonna be friends, I think.”
The listener on the other end doesn’t share my relief. “Well, that sucks.”
“That’s how it is,” I butt in, rude as fuck. “Lucie decides.”
“I’m just saying,” the caller groans. “If you can’t find someone, where’s the hope for the rest of us?”
Lucie’s face pinches. “I don’t think I’m the measuring stick you should be using. My situation isn’t exactly ordinary. I think when the right thing comes along, I’ll know it.”
“So, you’re still looking for dates?”
Lucie looks at me from across the desk. “Very cautiously, yes. But I think on my own terms. No more crowdsourcing. ‘Lucie’s Road to Love’ is going private, I think. I’ll be making the decisions myself.”
“What does that mean?” the caller asks.
Lucie tips her head back and forth in thought. “I don’t think I’m going to look for dates on the air anymore. Sorry, Mr. Tire.”
“Mr. Tire can deal with it,” I murmur.
There are new rules to the game now. I won’t have to sit in this booth and watch Lucie entertain the attention of people who want to take her out, but I do have to live with the knowledge that it could happen at any moment. Lucie’s heart is open in a way that it wasn’t when Maya first called in to the radio show all those weeks ago. She’s just inches away from her happy ending. I know it.
The thought makes me borderline violent. I want to keep her in this booth with me for an undisclosed period of time. I’m possessive of her, apparently. Of her time and her laughter and her smiles that stretch so wide her eyes slip shut.
“I’ll only stick around for as long as Aiden wants me to. I don’t want to step on any toes.” She winces. “And I’m not sure how entertaining I am if you guys aren’t watching the car crash that is my love life.”
Fuck. If she only knew.
“Aiden wants you to,” I say, sounding like a whole idiot. But I don’t care, because her face lights up, a little wiggle in her chair. “No toes being stepped on. I’m sure the listeners appreciate your musical selection more than mine.”
“That’s true,” she says. “And just because the show isn’t setting up dates for me doesn’t mean I won’t be dating.” Her cheeks go pink and she looks down at the table. She grabs a discarded chocolate mint wrapper and starts to fold it into the world’s tiniest paper plane. “I just need to keep my eyes open, I guess. Like the other night.”
I rub at my bottom lip. A green dress drifts lazily across my mind. A jukebox that played only one song. Lucie on my back, her arms draped around my neck.
“The other night?” I ask.
She gives me one slow blink. A dare in the start of her smile. “You know the night I got stood up? When I was leaving the restaurant, I actually ran into someone on the street.”
“Yeah?” I ask, like I didn’t sprint over to Duck Duck Goose the second she texted me. Like I wasn’t sitting on my couch like an asshole, eating the chocolate mints I stole from her side of the desk and pretending not to look at my phone. “You didn’t mention it before.”
“Yeah,” she says, her smile bigger now. It climbs all the way to her eyes. “I think I wanted to keep it to myself for a little bit. We got a drink.”
“A drink with a stranger?” Our elbows bump together at the tiny desk. The room has shrunk in size. Too small for everything that’s tumbling out between us. That wall that was between us is crumbling brick by brick. I try to keep my voice neutral. “That seems suspicious.”
“It wasn’t. It was nice. We had a couple of drinks and I tried to show him how to throw a Skee-Ball, but he was categorically awful at it and I think—” She licks her lips and I am acutely aware of every place we’re touching. The rasp of her breath in my ear through my headphones. “I think that’s what I want.”
“Strange men on the street who are bad at Skee-Ball?”
She shakes her head. “I want to feel it first and think about it second. I want to be in the moment and not worry about what’s coming next. I don’t want to twist myself into circles over the idea of a partner.”
I exhale a short breath. “Then don’t.”
