Yes.
That was all he wrote.Yes. Three letters. No punctuation beyond what autocorrect had given him.
I stared at the screen. I waited.
The bubble appeared. He was typing.
The bubble disappeared.
The bubble appeared again.
It disappeared again.
I’d never in my life wanted so badly to be on the other end of a phone call. Whatever he was deciding not to send me was the thing I wanted to know.
The bubble appeared a third time.
Where are you right now?
I typed,In bed.
The bubble appeared.Sleepy?
No.
What are you wearing?
I exhaled out loud in the empty apartment. The question was less a question than an opening—he’d asked it in a tone of voice I could hear off the screen, even though we were on text, even though I’d never heard him say a sentence like that in my life. I knew what tone he’d asked it in. I knew it the way you know the weather is changing before you’ve looked at the sky.
I considered the answer.
I considered lying. I considered telling him I was in a robe. I considered being demure and saying pajamas, which would’ve been accurate and also useless.
I typed,A T-shirt. Sleep shorts.
I sent it.
The bubble appeared. It stayed for a long time.
His message finally came through.Come to the office.
I read it.
I read it again.
I sat on the edge of my bed in a T-shirt and sleep shorts at almost eleven o’clock at night, and I read the message a third time. I felt my body make a decision before my brain had finished processing the question.
I typed,Now?
Yes.
The office is closed.
I’m there.
I sat very still.
He was there. He’d left the reception ahead of me, or after me, and he hadn’t gone to his condo. He’d gone to the office. He’d gone to the building where I worked—the building where we both worked—and he was waiting for me there now.
