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"It makes me feel safe."

"What else?"

The breath he takes is the one I've been waiting nine nights to hear.

"It turns me on." The filter between his brain and his mouth finally gone. "Your voice turns me on, Brantley. Every night. I hang up the phone, I lie in bed, I'm hard. I don't do anything about it because doing something about it feels like crossing a line I can't uncross."

"Cross it."

His voice releases a shaky moan as rustling comes through the phone.

My hand is already at my belt.

I've done a version of this before. In a parked car on his street with his recorded voice in my ears and his lit window forty yards off, slow, jaw tight to stay quiet, imagining the exact thing that is no longer going to be imaginary. I've never done it live. I've never done it with his breath coming into my ear in real time and his voice unscripted and his hand, he's about to tell me, already moving.

"Are you sure?" he asks.

"I've been thinking about you," I tell him, and I get my belt open one-handed while I say it. "At work. At home. In my car." The truest sentence I've given him all night, and he hears confession where he should hear a map. "I think about your hands on the phone when we talk. I think about your body on the floor next to the couch, the way you described it. Bean above you. Your back against the cushion. I think about what you look like when you say the things you say to me."

The button. The zip. I pull myself out and the first drag of my palm is almost too much, the pressure finally finding somewhere to go, and I breathe through it without a sound, because the one thing of mine that never slips is my voice and I need it tonight more than I've ever needed it.

"What am I doing?" he asks. "In the version you think about."

"Touching yourself." My hand starts to move. "Your hand inside your waistband. Your head tipped back against the couch. Your eyes closed."

"I'm doing it," he says. "Right now."

The catch in his breath is real and it goes through me like a hand closing around the base of my spine. I hear the small broken sound he makes when his fingers find it, and my grip tightens in answer before I've told it to.

"Tell me," I say.

"I'm hard. I've been hard since you asked about the shop." His voice is coming apart in the exact way I've spent nine nights learning to hear. "My hand is on my cock and I'm thinking about your voice and I want to hear you. I want to hear you doing this too."

So I let him. I stroke once, slow, and I don't cover the sound of it. I let the fabric move. I let him hear the shift, the breath I pull in when my hand settles, the small wet give of my own grip. On his end his hips come off the floor, I hear it, the catch and the lift, the drag of carpet, the dog's collar.

"I'm here," I tell him. The rumble low, even, the one that has never once shaken. "I'm right here."

"Tell me what you're doing."

"Same thing you are. My hand on myself. Thinking about you on the floor with Bean asleep above you, your hand down your sweats, your mouth open." My hips push up into my own fist, and I keep my breathing deliberate, each inhale timed to his, the way I timed it in the car except now the loop is closed, now he's on the other end feeding it back to me. I could get caught at any moment, but the thrill is too much to stop. I need this, more then I need air. "I want to hear you come, Milo. I've wanted to hear it for days."

His breathing climbs. Mine climbs under it. The office is dark, my coworkers nowhere to be seen. The phones are quiet and there is nothing in the world but the sound of him in my ear and my hand on myself and the heat winding up from the base of me, tighter with every ragged breath he gives me. Panting now, both of us, the rhythm of it syncing the way our silences sync, the pauses lining up, the pressure building in the same place at the same speed.

"I'm close," he says. "Keep talking."

"Your voice is the best thing I hear all day. Every day." True. "I sit through hours of other people's worst nights and none of them sound like you. None of them make me forget the clock. I stop counting the minutes when you're on the line." My hand moves faster, my grip tight, the office chair creaking under me, my spine curling forward over the heat gathering low in my gut. "I stop counting everything."

I feel him reach the edge. I hear it, the hitch, the held breath, the whole body gathering.

"Come for me," I tell him. "Let me hear it."

He does. The sound breaks out of him, the groan that catches at the top, and it goes straight through me and takes me with it. My hand locks, my hips snap up off the chair, and I come into my fist with my teeth set against the only sound I won't let him have, the release tearing through me in waves while his pour into my ear and every distance between his body and mine collapse to nothing, to two men coming apart in the same second in the same dark.

The silence after is the best one I've ever sat inside. His breathing and mine, filling each other, no words, no distance. I keep the headset pressed to my ear and I don't move.

"Milo?"

"Yeah."