“Well, hopefully you won’t have to be up past your bedtime,” she said sleepily.
It was already 10:15 so Gus was a bit confused, but she’d said in her second email that lack of sleep really messed with her head, so maybe she was just babbling.
“I’m kidding. I usually work until around 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. Besides, I wouldn’t mind being kept up by you,” he said. His cheeks flushed as he realized his words might be taken for innuendo, and that maybe they were innuendo. Conversation was flowing easily between them, and he’d forgotten how good it felt. He kind of regretted that they were only talking so that she could go to sleep. “That is, talking to you is better than being kept up by work, which is the usual culprit for me.”
“Same. I feel like a kid who got told that if I kept pulling a face it would get stuck like that, and found out my parents were right,” she said on a sigh. “I’ve spent so many nights working late and now I’m being punished with sleep deprivation to teach me a lesson.”
“Well, I’m here to remedy that. Ready to, uh, have me bore you to sleep?”
She laughed, but it was an exhausted sound. “I think of it more as soothing me to sleep, but please do. This insomnia has really fu—messed me up.”
“Been there.” Gus’s words stopped flowing for a few seconds because his mind had gone off on a tangent of how intimate that word was. Soothing. Lots of other thoughts blossomed from that one, fractal images linked by that core idea that she wanted him to soothe her, and the fact that there were so many ways to do that. His voice, his mouth, his hands . . .
What? Where did that even come from?
“Gus?”
“Oh. Sorry, just queuing something up.” He ran his finger in a circle on his laptop’s trackpad so that his words were not a lie. He didn’t need to have thoughts like this about Reggie. He didn’t even know what she looked like; how could he be imagining what it would be like to touch her? “I have to watch this show to figure some things out for my project. I figured I could just kind of tell you what it’s about while I do. Is that okay?”
“Yes.” Something about the fatigued anticipation in that one word did something to him. For a moment, he felt put on the spot as he had when 26InchRims had first started lurking on his stream. There was a sudden pressure not to disappoint, to do this right or to fail. He considered hanging up, blocking this number and email address. Then he closed his eyes and focused. This wasn’t that serious, plus she seemed to . . . need him. That wasn’t something he’d felt in a long time. Being the one who could help.
“Here we go.” He pressed PLAY and settled back into his crappy office chair, which matched the other crappy furniture in his apartment. “Okay. So the first episode is starting. This is an anime, by the way, which I don’t usually watch.”
“Why not?” she asked in that same sleep-rough voice. “Anime is awesome.”
“Oh no. You had an anime avatar on Streamlive. Please don’t tell me you’re an—”
“A super cool and well-rounded lover of all things interesting?” she said sweetly. “Don’t worry, I’m not an otaku. I think lots of things are awesome. Comic books. Video games. Dictionaries.”
“Puzzles,” he added. “You forgot puzzles, the most awesome thing.”
She yawned pointedly. “I guess.”
Gus grinned. “Whatever. So the theme song ended. The drawing style is kind of . . . hmm, effervescent, I guess? The color palette is my favorite thing about the show. The colors are bright and rich overall, though we’re opening on a nighttime battle scene so the colors are muted by shadow. The heroine is protecting a group of children from a dragon with some kind of magic from her sword, but it looks like she’s trying to stay awake.”
“Dragon? Sword?” He heard the sudden rustling of sheets.
“Yeah. Now we cut to our heroine. She’s sitting behind a desk in a classroom staring into the distance, like she’s sleeping with her eyes open. Someone waves a hand in front of her face. Then the main guy comes in and looks at her, and there’s a flashback of them as children and she smashes him into a tree with a boat paddle, then it’s a montage of her smashing him into various walls with various objects as they get older, and then in the present day he says . . .”
“‘Got some drool on your face, Sleeping Booty’!” Reggie cut in, the fatigue in her voice replaced by pure excitement. “You’re watching Reject Squad Ultra!”
“Yes. And you’re supposed to be going to sleep?”
“Sorry. Just.” There was a muffled noise . . . was she screaming into her pillow? “This is my favorite show ever!”
“Favorite show?” Gus paused the video, the frame showing the hero just as he crashed through a classroom window, a smug expression on his face even as he hovered three stories above the ground surrounded by shards of glass.
“EVER. Hashtag PhilRoraWakeMyHeart.”
“Hashtag NotSureWhatThatMeans, but I believe you about being a fan.” She was likely one of the legion of superfans who would travel to Anime Con for the express purpose of trying out his escape room. She was one of the people who would be disappointed if he wasn’t able to understand the essence of this show and get the escape room right.
“Hey.” He planted his feet on the ground and twisted his office chair back and forth with his hips. “I want to renegotiate our contract.”
“Why? Am I talking too much? I know I can be kind of weird about this show, but I can shut up. Just please, don’t hang up.”
Her voice was sharp, almost angry, though her words were pleading. He had the feeling that she was a woman who was used to getting what she wanted—the fact that they were even on this phone call was a testament to that, he supposed.
“I won’t hang up,” he said quickly. He didn’t want to hang up, which was weird. “I just realized that I need something from you as much as you need my voice.”
“What’s that?” Now there was no anger or pleading, but suspicion.
“I have a project centered around this show, which is why I’m watching it. I’m trying to understand what people love about it, but I don’t get the appeal.”
“SACRILEGE!”
Gus held the phone away from his ear.
“My bad. I get a bit . . . defensive about things I care about,” she said.
“Understandable.” He pressed the phone to his ear again. “Well. New deal. You teach me why you almost blew out my eardrum over this show, and I’ll do some recordings for you. No charge.”
There was a long pause.
“Wait. You’re going to give me what I originally asked you for, for free, in return for me shouting my joy at you about my favorite show in the world?”
“I could do without the shouting, but yes?”
She burst out laughing then, a sound that wasn’t delicate at all but somehow softened her. Her laughter was a disembodied thing, though, because he had no idea what she looked like. He wanted to know, and not just with the slight curiosity from earlier, but with that sudden overwhelming impulse that preceded some of his best ideas—and even more of his worst.
“Let’s do a video chat,” he blurted out, as if that was the logical next step when it was actually just what he wanted to happen. “Tomorrow night. We can watch in real time. I’ll send you the link.”