“Yeah, obviously. That was undoubtedly weird.” He was still blunt like she remembered, but Reggie had liked that about him. “I mean us talking after all this time. Or rather, us being able to hear each other instead of you just watching me and typing.”
“It is weird,” Reggie admitted. “For a long time, you were just the faceless guy in my computer, solving puzzles or trying to make them, who sometimes gave me advice about website design and my annoying family.”
He hadn’t been entirely faceless. He’d had that mouth, with a really plump, bitable lower lip, and now that he was on the other end of her phone, she couldn’t help but try to fill in the rest of his face.
“And you were the cat anime avatar who asked interesting questions and gave me advice about things I’d like and my annoying family.”
“Did your brother ever pop the question to his girlfriend?” she asked.
“He did, and I’m an uncle now. Did your sister ever stop avoiding you?”
Ah, that bluntness wasn’t so cute when it touched on one of her sore spots. It hit her then how much she’d shared with him. When he’d been a stranger on the internet, she’d told him things she hadn’t told anyone apart from her therapist. “Yeah. She’s abroad right now, but we talk more these days.”
“Good. And that website you were working on?”
He’d been there for the birth of GirlsWithGlasses, too. “Um. It’s chugging along.”
“Cool.”
There was a long pause of the awkward variety and Reggie unlocked the brake on one of her wheels and rolled her chair forward and back in a semicircle. “Okay. So—”
“Why do you want my voice?” he asked, demonstrating that bluntness again.
“Because I’m a sassy sea witch and I’m gonna keep it in a nautilus necklace, then use it to steal your man from right under your nose,” she replied drily.
He laughed in response, and Reggie felt relief loosen her body as her own grin spread across her face. His laugh was goofy as fuck, a rapid-fire trill like an evil cartoon kitten or something. He wasn’t a smooth talker—not intentionally at least. He was a big ol’ nerd, like her, just one who preferred his cube Rubik’s, not Cosmic.
That was what she’d liked about his live stream, apart from his voice—that he was deeply and unashamedly interested in something. She didn’t enjoy puzzles much herself—they seemed like a waste of valuable time—but she’d liked listening to him figure them out. He hadn’t laughed much when he’d done the videos, though. His mouth, when it’d been visible, had usually been a line of concentration as he worked, and his shoulders had usually been stiff and tense. He’d smiled in response to her messages, but there had been a reserve to those smiles that she didn’t hear in his voice now.
None of that was important to her current objective, though.
“Honestly? All your videos got deleted when you shut down your Livestream account. I have no other way to access your voice apart from paying for it, unless you want to give it to me for free.”
He grunted. “The sea witch joke actually answered my question. This does not.”
Reggie pressed her feet into the footrests of her chair and shifted in her seat, the movement one of mental discomfort, not physical. He was right. She wasn’t being direct.
“I have insomnia and I need your voice to sleep,” she grumbled, seriously annoyed that he knew this about her. People already saw her as weak, when they weren’t busy looking through her, and she hated giving anyone evidence that they were right.
“You’re saying my voice makes you sleepy?” he asked, followed by a softer version of his evil kitten laughter. “That’s disheartening coming from my only viewer. Geez. I guess I know why you tuned in so faithfully every night, and it wasn’t to watch me solve puzzles.”
She chuckled despite her discomfort. His voice wasn’t making her sleepy right then—she was feeling other, unexpected side effects of an actual conversation with him. She was a grown-ass woman having tingles in her nethers because of a guy’s voice. Ridiculous.
“I did watch you solve puzzles.” She remembered that he had nice hands, with long, dexterous fingers and neatly trimmed nails. “Helped you sometimes, too, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“I haven’t,” he said, and there was something in his tone that made her whole body perk in attention. “Of course, I haven’t.”
Reggie was glad that she was wearing her gym clothes because she was starting to sweat. “Good. Look, your voice . . . .” She took a deep breath. “Your voice is like the human equivalent of a weighted blanket.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time, but she heard the clack of fingers on a keyboard before his voice came through the phone speaker. “I was Googling weighted blanket. I guess that’s a compliment. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” Reggie swallowed. “So. Will you make the recordings?”
“No.”
She stiffened against the blow of the unexpected disappointment. The conversation had gone well. He’d laughed at her jokes. He’d seemed friendly—maybe a little more than friendly. What was the issue?
She wasn’t a crier, but she felt an uncomfortable burning at her eyes, like when sweat dripped into them during a hard physical therapy session. “Why not?”
“Because I can’t control what you would do with those recordings and if I’m rambling for hours I might say something that I don’t want accidentally blasted across the internet,” he said. “But. I have a counteroffer.”
Reggie waited, annoyed when he didn’t just get to it. “And that is?”
“I can call you,” he said. “Or you can call me, at night before you go to sleep. I’ll be up working anyway because I have a project I’m figuring out for my secondary job. You already know I talk out loud while working through things. You can hang with me while I work, just like old times.”
Great, I can just secretly record him, she thought.
“And you can’t just secretly record me either,” he added.
She huffed. “I would never.”
“I’ll talk until you fall asleep.” Another pause. “It wouldn’t be much different from what we did years ago, just adapted to a business agreement that works for both of us.”
“Right.” She was annoyed and considered pushing him on the recording, but didn’t want him to end up saying no. “Doing this live is more work for you, though. There’s a time difference, and you said you were busy.”
Okay, so she pushed a little. It was what she did.
He made a humming noise, one of consideration. “It’s not more work. It’s more control, and I like being in control.”
Honestly. HONESTLY. A guy with his voice shouldn’t be allowed to just say shit like that out of the blue. It was entirely unfair.
“Fine. I understand that.”
“What’s your name? I don’t want to call you 26 Inch or Miss Rims because it’ll sound . . . like a different kind of phone call.”
Heat crept up Reggie’s neck.
“It’s a wheel diameter, not some hentai stuff, okay? And you can call me Reggie,” she said. That was safe. She went by Regina at GirlsWithGlasses and its various social media accounts, if not by the site’s name itself.