Chapter 2: The Unrepentant Reply
The phone buzzed once, then twice, and I rolled over with a groan, still tangled in the warmth of a dream I couldn't quite remember, my fingers searching for the device on the nightstand with half-closed eyes. When the screen lit up, Grant's name glowed back at me, a video attachment blinking beneath it, and I squinted at the timestamp because it was barely past seven and he never messaged this early unless something was wrong. My thumb moved before my brain could catch up, and the video filled the screen. Grant's face, pale and slack with something I'd never seen in him before, his breath ragged and close to the mic, and the low, whispered sound of my name falling from his lips like a confession he couldn't take back. I watched it once, my stomach clenching. Then again, because I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Then a third time, because some part of me couldn't look away.
I sat there in the pale morning light, the phone shaking in my hand, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. This was Grant. My Grant. The man who'd held my hair back at weddings and called me his guardian angel, the one who texted me good morning every single day without fail. And he'd been jerking off to my photos. Filming himself. Saying my name like it was a prayer.
I typed a reply. Deleted it. Typed again. The letters blurred in front of me, and I couldn't find the words, because what words were there for this? My thumb hovered over the call button, and something in my chest twisted with fear and curiosity and a dark, pulsing heat I didn't want to name.
I pressed call before I could talk myself out of it.
The line connected on the second ring, and Grant's voice came through raw and cracked, like he'd been holding his breath for hours. "Oliva," he said, and the sound of my name in that ruined voice sent a shiver down my spine. I pressed the phone tighter to my ear, staring at the video thumbnail still glowing on my screen, and forced my voice steady even though it wanted to shake apart. "Grant. What the hell was that?" There was a long silence on the other end, so drawn out I pulled the phone away from my ear to check the call hadn't dropped. Then his voice came back, low and wrecked, like he'd been gargling broken glass. "I don't know. I don't know what that was. I was drunk, and I was... I was looking at your photos, and I just... fuck, Oliva, I don't have an explanation that makes it better."
"Looking at my photos," I repeated, the words tasting strange on my tongue. The video thumbnail was still there, frozen on his flushed face, and my eyes kept drifting back to it. "That's what you call it? Grant, you were..." I couldn't finish the sentence. Couldn't say it out loud, because saying it made it real.
"I know," he said, and there was something almost desperate in his voice, something raw and honest that cut through the morning quiet. "I know what it looked like. I know what it was. And I'm so fucking sorry, Oliva. I'm so sorry I put you in this position."
The anger I wanted to feel wouldn't quite crystallize. I kept staring at that thumbnail, at the way his hand was wrapped around himself, at the way his mouth formed my name, and I felt a treacherous warmth curl through my belly that had no business being there. "I watched it three times," I admitted, my voice barely above a whisper. "I don't know why I kept watching."
I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at the video thumbnail one more time, the morning light catching the familiar slope of his jaw, the same jaw I'd seen laughing across a hundred diner tables. And then I pressed the phone back to my cheek and made my voice harden into something I barely recognized. "Grant, you're married. You're my best friend. "You're my best friend," I repeated, the words landing heavy in the quiet apartment. I heard him exhale, a shaken sound that rattled through the speaker, and for a moment I thought he was going to hang up, going to retreat behind the usual walls we'd both built over fifteen years. But he didn't. He just said my name again, softer, like it hurt him to say it. "I know. I know all of that. You think I don't know that? You think I haven't told myself that a thousand times while I was lying in bed next to my wife, trying to figure out how I got here?"
I pressed my back against the headboard and pulled my knees to my chest, the phone warm against my ear. The video thumbnail was still glowing, and I didn't look away from it. "Then why, Grant? Why send it to me? Why film it at all?" The question came out harder than I'd meant it to, and I heard him take a sharp breath on the other end, like I'd landed a blow. But I needed to understand. I needed him to give me something, some explanation that made sense of the way my body was trembling under the blanket. "Because I couldn't stop," he said finally, his voice cracking. "Because I've been pretending for so long that you were just my friend, and I couldn't keep lying to myself. I saw your face on that screen and something in me just broke open, and all I could think about was what it would feel like to have you actually see me for once."