“He said you had a love/hate relationship with your therapist. I wasn’t going to call someone to your place you didn’t fully want there.”

“What else did you look at while you were here?” I ask. He’d seen it all except for my overly froufrou bedroom. I wait for him to remark about the girliness. It’s emasculating, Oliver told me once.

“Your bedroom is very pink,” he admits.

“Would that turn you off? Affect your performance negatively?” I tease.

He chuckles, though, apparently not offended or turned off by my question. “My manhood can withstand a little pink. I grunted a lot this morning.”

“That’s nice to know.” My cheeks are pink to match the decor, part in embarrassment over the other night and part delight. I burrow under the covers, where I can pretend that we’re talking in person. His next sentence surprises me.

“We need to reschedule our dinner.”

It’s a joke. It’s so clearly a joke so I respond in kind. “Yeah, tomorrow night.” I force a light laugh.

“I can do tomorrow.”

“It’s too bad you can’t come. Wait, what?” Did he just say tomorrow?

“How about tomorrow night?” he repeats.

“I, uh, I don’t know.” I can’t process his question right now because the thought of opening the door again, not knowing what is on the other side, is terrifying so I avoid it, but I can’t have him hang up on me. I change the topic hastily. “What’s your office like?”

He accepts my avoidance, just like he accepts every weird thing about me. “It’s very boring. White walls, gray carpet. It’s on the bottom of my townhouse, the garden level and the main level. I live in the top three with one of my sisters, Sabrina, who will be graduating from Columbia this year.”

“What’s your other sister’s name?” I want to know everything about him.

“Megan. She’s thirty-two. My parents had Megan and me a couple years apart. Sabrina was a late-in-life surprise for them. You?”

He’s thirty-four or thirty-five then. Nearly a decade older than me.

“Oliver’s like a brother to me. My parents died in a twenty-car pileup when I was five. The roads were icy and a truck on the interstate did a three-sixty, took a bunch of cars out, and caused a huge accident. They were coming home from a lecture at the university. My dad’s sister took me and raised Oliver and me together. He’s only two years older than me.”

“So you’re twenty-six?”

“You know how old Oliver is?” I guess he’s as good at math as I am.

“Since he won the Super Bowl, I think that everyone in the city not only knows how old he is, but how much he weighs, how tall he is, and what he bench-presses.”

“Good point. Are you a fan?” Maybe that’s it. Maybe he’s a huge Oliver Graham fan and he’s going to try to get to Oliver through me. He’d be disappointed to know that the most I can offer is a signed jersey, and I tell him so. “I don’t get free tickets to the game. Oliver’s given up on me attending so he gives them to other people. I could get you a signed jersey, though.”

I try hard to keep the disappointment out of my voice.

He’s quiet for a heartbeat, maybe two. “This may sound like I’m bragging, but I have a good friend who has a box at Cobras Stadium and I’ve got a freestanding invitation, and while I’m a fan, I think I’m a little old for a signed jersey. Besides, your cousin offered me one when we first met and I turned it down.”

“Oh.” There is a subtle rebuke in there, as if I should know better.

“Honey, are you trying to find something wrong with me?”

“No, I’m . . . oh Lord, this sounds pathetic and I know it’s going to sound worse when I say the words out loud, but I don’t understand why you’re even talking to me.”

“Tell me what flaws you’ve given me.” His voice warms me like a hot chocolate on a snowy day.

“No.” I’m not saying even one of them.

“I’m not going to be offended.” He’s having trouble hiding the amusement in his voice, I can tell.

“But I’ll be embarrassed. Or more embarrassed. If you could see me now, I’m rivaling a tomato in color.”

His voice drops at least a pitch. “I’d like to see how red you get. Do you blush all the way to your toes?”

If I wasn’t before, I am now. I’m hot, and not from shame, but from his suggestive tone and words.

“I, ah, I’m very red.” God, I suck at this phone-flirting thing but he . . . seems pretty adept at it. “Have you done this before? This, um, phone thing? You’re better at it than I am.”

He chuckles. “You’re doing just fine. But, yes, to answer your question, when I was deployed, I used Skype and emails to stay in contact with an old girlfriend.”

“How old?” I ask, instantaneously jealous over this nameless, faceless woman.

“In age or time since our separation? We broke up a few years into my deployment. I haven’t dated seriously since. How about you?”

“Not since Adam Masterson. He was a senior programmer for Saturnalia. I worked with him every day and after a couple of years, he seemed better than being celibate. We didn’t even date. We just kind of . . . fell into bed with each other. Neither of us were heartbroken when it ended.”

“My heart wasn’t broken either,” he says softly, as if to reassure me that he isn’t holding out for a rekindling of any lost love.

“Did you like it? The phone stuff? The Skyping?” I truly want to know. Can anyone be fulfilled by this? I suppose they must to some extent, or cam girls and 1-900 numbers wouldn’t exist. But with someone like Jake, I’d think he’d have a dozen better offers than sitting at home having a virtual relationship with a shut-in.

“It was better than nothing.”

I’m one step up from nothing at least, I reassure myself. Curious, I ask a question that has sat in the back of my mind since the first time we exchanged messages. “Why do you want to know what the girl is wearing?”

“It grounds you. Gives you a visual. Men are very visual.”

“But the person on the phone could be lying.”

His text message—which I’ve read repeatedly—comes back to me.

And if you’re fully clothed, please feel free to lie and say nothing.

“Doesn’t matter. If you tell me you have your hand down your panties and your shirt pulled up to show off your spectacular breasts, that’s what I’m seeing regardless of what you’re really doing or wearing.”

I lift the blanket and look at my breasts. They’ve flattened out a bit now that I’m on my back, but my nipples are hard. I wouldn’t categorize them as spectacular, but I haven’t had complaints. They’re just . . . breasts. Maybe if he was holding them they would feel spectacular. I tingle at the idea.

“I’m too honest. Like right now I’m wearing jogging pants and an old T-shirt.”

“And nothing else?”

“Well, underwear.”

“Hmmm.” His hum enters my ear from the cell phone and shoots straight between my legs. I squeeze my thighs together once as if to catch his touch and hold it there.

“You?”

“Jeans, T-shirt. Gray socks. Boots.”

I want to know more about this phone sex thing, yet what he’s wearing doesn’t interest me. I guess I want to know what he’s doing or rather what he would do with me.

“So you just say sexy things to each other and then hang up?”

“I had more involvement than that.”

“Like what? You had the phone-sex pillow? I saw that on the Internet once. You programmed it to shake or something when you wanted to alert your long-distance partner to some activity back home. I’m not entirely certain how a vibrating pillow does anything for anyone.”

“No.” He sounds a bit as if he’s strangling on a laugh he doesn’t want to release. He clears his throat and answers frankly, “I’d jack off.”

“Oh.”

The image of him sitting with his legs spread and his big hand around his big dick appears immediately. He’d handle himself with sure strokes and his chest would heave as he took big gulps of air. But his eyes would be pinned to mine as if we were magnetically pulled together.