Chapter 4: The Late Night Call
The buzz was an electric shock in the dark. Dasha jolted awake, her book slipping from her chest to thump on the floor. The screen of her phone glared on the nightstand: 1:07 AM. MATT BOMER.
Her heart did something complicated, a swift kick against her ribs followed by a clammy stillness. He never called this late. Texted, yes, at all hours, but a call was a violation of their unspoken code. It meant voice. It meant immediacy. It meant something was wrong.
She let it ring three times, the vibration skittering on the wood. On the fourth, she grabbed it.
“Hello?”
A beat of empty air, then the sound of traffic, hollow and distant. “Dash?” His voice was frayed at the edges, syllables blending into one another. “Shit. Did I wake you up?”
“It’s one in the morning, Matt. Of course you woke me up.” She sat up, pushing hair from her face. Her own voice was steady, a practiced calm. “Where are you?”
“Sidewalk. Somewhere. Just… needed air.” He exhaled, a long, wet sound. “I’m a little drunk. Sorry.”
“Are you safe?”
“Yeah. Yeah, my driver’s idling around the corner. I just… couldn’t be in the car. Or the room. The hotel room has… too many mirrors.” He gave a soft, humorless laugh. “That sounds insane.”
“It sounds like a Tuesday,” she said, and she heard him chuckle, a real one this time. She pulled her knees up to her chest. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Everything. I just finished this godawful charity dinner. Eight hundred people in sequins talking about ‘leverage’ and ‘impact.’ I smiled so much my face is numb.” He paused. “I had to do a speech. I think I quoted a shampoo ad by accident.”
Dasha smiled in the dark. “Which one?”
“The one with the fucking cascading hair. It just came out. I was looking at all those expectant faces and my mind went blank and I just thought… ‘for hair that shines with all its soul.’”
She laughed, a genuine burst of sound that seemed too loud for the sleeping world. “They probably loved it. Deeply poetic.”
“They applauded. That’s the worst part. They always applaud.” His tone shifted, the slurry warmth fading into something quieter. “Afterwards, this producer cornered me. Wants me for a biopic. About a war photographer. He kept saying, ‘We need your gravity, Matt. Your emotional opacity.’”
The phrase hung in the digital space between them. Emotionally opaque. Elise’s words. Dasha’s breath caught.
“He said it like it was a compliment,” Matt continued, his voice dropping. “A feature. Not a bug. And I stood there nodding, thinking… fuck. Maybe she was right. Maybe that’s all I am. Just a… a pleasant surface.”
“You are not a pleasant surface,” Dasha said, too quickly, the words sharp. She moderated her tone. “You’re a person who was at a bad charity dinner quoting haircare products. That’s the opposite of opaque. That’s practically translucent.”
He was silent for so long she thought the call had dropped. Then, “What did you do tonight?”
The change of subject was a relief. She told him about the archives, about finally cracking the code on a box of misfiled contracts from 1997. She described the stray cat, a one-eared tabby she’d dubbed Sir Lancelot, who now waited on her fire escape for tuna. He told her about the horrific canapés, the surprising merit of the silent auction’s chocolate bundle, the weird acoustics of the ballroom that made everything sound like it was underwater.
They talked for an hour. The conversation meandered, effortless, a river finding its old course. The distance collapsed. He was just Matt, on a sidewalk somewhere, his words softening as the alcohol metabolized. She was just Dasha, in her cream-colored room, the floor lamp painting everything in gentle gold.
Her arm grew stiff from holding the phone. Her eyes adjusted to the gloom.
“I should let you sleep,” he said finally, his voice now just a warm, tired rumble. “Sorry again. For the… hour theft.”
“It’s fine. Get in your car. Go home.”
“Yeah.” A pause. The traffic sound had vanished. “Dasha?”
“Yeah?”
“I miss you.” The words came out in a rush, a single exhale. “Not just… I mean, I miss talking to you like this. In real time. Without the… the noise.”
The air left her lungs. She pressed the phone harder to her ear, as if she could crawl through it.
But the line was already dead. A soft click, then the oceanic silence of her bedroom.
She slowly lowered the phone. The screen went black, extinguishing the last source of light. She stared at the ceiling, where the shadows of tree branches from the streetlamp outside made slow, shifting patterns.
I miss you.
Not I missed you tonight. Not We should do this more often. I miss you.
Present tense. A current condition.
Her pulse was a frantic drummer in her throat, in her wrists. She replayed it. The slur was gone from that sentence. It had been clear, deliberate, a stone dropped into a still pond.
She wondered what he’d meant to say after “Not just—”
Not just what? Not just talking? Not just friends?
She could call back. The impulse was a live wire in her hand. She could say, You hung up too fast. She could say, I miss you, too.
She didn’t move.
The habit of composure was a cage, but it was also a fortress. She had built it brick by brick over months of coffee runs and careful smiles. One sentence, even a drunken, partial one spoken in the lonely dark, could not dismantle it. Would not.
She thought of him in his quiet car, being driven through the sleeping city. Was he regretting it? Was he already constructing a joke to explain it away tomorrow? God, I was wasted. Did I call you? I have no memory of that.
She knew the script. She could already write his part.
Dasha slid down under the covers, turning on her side. She watched Sir Lancelot’s silhouette slip past her window, a silent hunter on his nightly rounds. The echo of his voice—“I miss you”—replayed on a loop in her inner ear, a haunting little melody.
She closed her eyes. She breathed in, out. She practiced the smile, the light tone, the casual deflection she would need when he next texted. She built the wall a little higher, a little thicker, to contain the riotous, foolish hope that his words had ignited. It was just a crack in his opacity. It meant nothing.
It meant everything.
Tomorrow, she would be Dasha again. The friend. The archive. The steady, unsurprised harbor.
But tonight, in the private dark, she let herself imagine, for just a few more minutes, what it would be like to be the destination.