She answered on video when I called her, and I couldn’t help but smile at the sight of her face. Her smile was subdued, but her greeting was warm.
“I have a favor to ask,” she said when thehelloswere out of the way. “I don’t care what we talk about, as long as it’s not the game, work, or co-workers. Yours or mine.”
“I need to know one thing first.” My question wasn’t pressing, but it had been sitting in the back of my mind. If I was going to ruin the moment, might as well do it up front.
She frowned. “Please don’t ask me about him again.”
Elliot. “Not unless you tell me it’s okay.” That felt like a dangerous promise, but an important one. “And I won’t, but this is work related. Did you ever figure out who logged into your accounts, or anything more about that?”
“It was me.” Her voice grew soft, and her words filled me with disbelief. “Not me who did it,” she added quickly. “But whoever logged in, was there as me. They tethered to my phone.” She sounded upset. “But it wasn’t me who did it, I swear to you. Even if it looked like me.”
I’d never doubted. “I know it wasn’t you. I’m going to make this right. Somehow.”
She nodded, and the low frames per second gave the motion a jittery, almost surreal appearance. Somehow that felt appropriate to the situation.
What now? “How’s the weather in Sacramento?” I asked.
“Are you serious right now?”
Now what? “Yes?”
“You want to talk about the weather.”
It was a safe topic. “Yes?”
“I have never, even in game, even when things were awkward or stilted, heard you bring up weather as a conversation topic before,” Fallyn said.
It wasn’t my favorite, but it was better than ending the call. “I don’t know where we stand—you and me. I want it to be somewhere and I don’t want to scare you off. I want this to be more, but I don’t know how to get you there.”
Wow, I didn’t mean to say all of that.How’s the weatherwasn’t as safe a question as I thought.
“I want more too. So what next?” Her reply was the sweetest thing I’d heard in days, without question.One of the best I’d heard in my life.
Asking about things like favorite colors and songs rarely led to deeper conversation, plus we’d covered all of that online before she got here. I didn’t know where to start. “Tell me something you’ve never told me before. It doesn’t have to be earth shattering, or some deep dark secret, or any type of secret at all. Maybe you didn’t want to give away too much about yourself when we talked, or maybe it’s something that just never came up.”
“Ooh. Tough one.” The way she scrunched up her face was adorable, and it didn’t take any imagination at all for me to picture her being directly across from me, rather than two states away. “Oh,okay. How about this?” Her face lit up. “When I was little, I used to watch beauty pageants. Don’t judge—I didn’tknow the wordobjectification,let alone how to use it in a sentence.”
I started to hold up my hands in surrender. Didn’t work too well when I was holding the phone. “I would never judge.”
“No. I suppose that’s not you. Anyway, I loved the dresses in the evening wear category. I would redesign them in my head. I wanted to make them one day. And Ilovedthe talent show. The way some of those women kicked and danced… When I grew up I was going to design dresses and model my own creations and do the splits on stage while using a yo-yo.”
That last bit didn’t sound possible, but what did I know about the splits? “That sounds amazing. Did the dream change or…?”What happened?
“Everyone convinced me I was too short to do things like model. Too short. Too clumsy. Too timid.”
Suddenly I wanted to smack every person who’d ever told her that. “I think you’re the perfect height,” I said.
“For you to squish me.” Her laugh was forced.
“For you to be you.” It wasn’t that I had a short girl fetish, but I was pretty sure I had a Fallyn fetish.
Her blush was as pretty over video as it was in person. “What about you?” she asked. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I collect dragons.”
Her smile grew. “Real ones, I assume.”
“That would be amazing.” Talk about childhood dreams coming to life. “But just these for now.” I turned the phone toward the wall in my home office that was covered with shelves, and each of those shelves was filled with little dragons, big dragons, cute, and serious dragons, and every kind in between.