Then there was the whole “we had never met in person” aspectofit.
Not like that had stopped me from pretty much falling in love with him or anything, so there was that. At some point, after a few months, I’d started going on dates with other guys to get my mind off him because I understood my feelings were pointless. He didn’t feel the same way. Plus,he’d told me to date. How much more obvious did I need our situationtobe?
And if none of that was reason enough to convince myself that going was a stupid idea, I knew what I would tell anyone who was going to meet a stranger they’d metonline.
I’d tell them they were out of their minds. And if I told any of my family members what I was thinking about doing, they would think the samething.
The thing was, for once in my life, my gut wasn’t telling me not to go do this crazy thing. It was telling me the exact opposite.Go, go, go. Despite being scared and worried about my safety. Hadn’t I just told him a couple of days ago that women traveled by themselves allthetime?
Then again, I couldn’t afford to buy a plane ticket. It would also be really irresponsible of me to charge something that expensive on my credit card when I didn’t exactly have a steady income coming in. I hadn’t been rich when I had two steady jobs; now, I was even further away from thatpoint.
Yet, even knowing all of this, I flexed my tingling fingers and typed in the phone number Aaron hadgivenme.
I ran up the stairs just as I hit the call icon, which in hindsight, wasn’t exactly the smartest decision I’d ever made because by the time my legs got me to the second floor, I was out of breath and still hadn’t made it to my room. My mom and Ben were at work, so they weren’t going to be looking at me like I was crazy for running up the stairs for the first time inmylife.
The phone kept on ringing as I dashed into my bedroom, and just as I thought a voice mail recording was going to pick up, I closedmydoor.
The familiar clicking sound of someone answering the call had me freezing as I turned the lock, and then I heard it. Myname. “Ruby?”
I was panting and trying not to pant at the same time, as the baritone voice on the phone seemed to steamroll my entire soul to the carpet floor. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting from Aaron, but I hadn’t been expecting the not-too-soft but just-deep-enough voice on the other end of the line. It was just in the middle. Friendly. Deep but not too deep. A little raspy.Perfect.
It was right then that itsankin.
He’d answered. I’d called Aaron and he’danswered.
I was on the phone withAaron.
“Rubes?” the male voice came over the phone again, still that beautiful pitch, a natural narrator, sounding… amused? What was he amused over? “You there? I hear youbreathing.”
I stopped breathing. Through my mouth at least. And I swallowed even though I was fairly certain it sounded more likeagulp.
Then the man on the line chuckled, easygoing and almost sweet. “What are you doing?” he asked like he’d asked me the same question a thousand times before. Like we hadn’t been pen pals for almost a year and instead had been friends for thelastten.
This was Aaron.Aaron.The only person other than my best friend who knew I’d stepped in human crap once. And just like that… “I ran up the stairs and I’m out of breath,” I told him, holding my phone away from my mouth at the end so he couldn’t hear mepanting.
His—Aaron’s— relaxed chuckle lengthened and somehow, someway, relaxed me. It reminded me of our IMs when we were messing with each other. Normal. Playful. Friendly.Like always. Like my friend.“Just from running up the stairs?” he asked, and for some reason I could picture him raising an eyebrow of a color I wasn’t sure of, like he was teasing me. Likenormal.
“It’s a lot of stairs.” I didn’t even realize I’d started smiling into the phone until I laughed. This was Aaron. No big deal.“I’m so out of shape.” And there it was. What in the world was coming out ofmouth? “That’s embarrassing, I’m sorry. You can probably run ten miles at a time. The only time I run is… never. I never run. I don’t want to lie to you. I’m rambling, I’m sorry. I get nervous and Iramble.”
“What are you nervous over? It’s me,” he drawled, steady and consistent, that slight Louisiana accent tinting his words just enough.It’s me, he’d told me a few times before, and each time, just like this one, shot an arrow straight into my heart that seemed to cripple every excuse I gave myself for why being more than a little in love with him was astupididea.
Because it was astupididea.
A reallystupididea.
And you would figure with my track record of stupid ideas, I would know when to get ridofthem.
But I hadn’t. Knowing me, I wouldn’t because I was an idiot like that. Weak. I was so weak. That term “wearing your heart on your sleeve” had been written with meinmind.
Oblivious to the fact he’d taken an imaginary baseball bat to my kneecaps with his tone and his words, he kept going in that smooth voice that I would listen to read the dictionary. “You sound…” He made a noise ofhesitation.
“Like an idiot?” came out of my mouth before I couldstopit.
Aaron laughed that time, clear and loud, sweeping my legs out from under me one more time, because it wasn’t like he could be awkward and graceless and unlikeable and laugh like a donkey. That would just be too easy. And fair. This was the guy who’d had two dozen crazy girlfriends for a reason. It all suddenly made sense. “No. Your voice is different than I thoughtit’dbe.”
Taking another deep breath to try and not sound like I was as out of shape cardio-wise as I was, I finally took a step away from my door, ignoring the clothes hanging off two chairs and the pile of dirty clothes that was way too close to the pile of clean clothes I’d pulled out of the dryer and dumped on the floor three days ago.This is Aaron, I reminded myself. I could do this. “What do you mean?” I asked him, sounding more like myself than I would’ve expected while on the verge of flipping theheckout.
It wasn’t my imagination he made another hesitatingnoise.
