A line with a connection

Ring. Ring. Ring. In my heart and in my head, I heard the ringing phone number. Half of me wanted the call to go unanswered. For the questions to go unanswered, too. 'What you don't know can't hurt you.' But everybody knows there's never been a statement less true. Thus, I stayed on the line, feeling Eden's eyes on me like a pot of boiling oil ready to tip over onto my head, and waited for someone to answer. People usually pick up by the fourth ring if they're going to pick up at all, I thought, entertaining the idea of abandoning the call.

Then, a sound. The click of an old rotary phone would've given me some warning, but instead I heard a voice. "Hello?" it said. 'It.' Except, I recognized it. It was hard to forget, regardless of the state of my head right now, the voice that spent hours whispering in your ear as she fucked you with her fingers. Oh, fuck. Yes, that was vivid. The memory of her hand in my hair while I was on my hands and knees. She told me everything I wanted to hear and slipped them in from behind. Fuck, yes, it was even better than a cock, wasn't it?

"Babe?" Eden's, not Rania's.

"I'm okay," I said.

"You're okay?" said Rania on the other line. "This is Izzy, right?"

"Yes!" I said, afraid she would think some stranger had found my phone and was going through my sensitive files. "Sorry, yes, this is Izzy! Isobel Watson. Is this Rania?"

"Isobel Watson," she said, savoring it. "This is Rania, yeah. Are you okay? You sound a little funny."

"I'm in a tunnel," I said, and didn't know if it was a joke or a lie.

She laughed. "Okay," she said. "What's up? I wasn't expecting to hear from you so soon."

But she was expecting to hear from me? She sounded so non-chalant. To outside observers, were the last twenty four hours a totally normal happenstance? Maybe it was what Luke seemed to think, and what I was increasingly open to thinking, that we'd all taken something at the club that reacted badly to something inside me. Chemistry is a tricky thing when you're doing it legally. I don't know how the street dealers don't kill people nine times out of ten. "Well, I wanted to reach out and make sure it was you. I forgot to put your name in my address book," I said, trying to sound normal. Eden gave me a thumbs up. Mission accomplished?

"Oh," she laughed. "Yep, it's me. In the flesh." There was an echo to her words in my ear. Nothing unusual for a phone call, but it still made me shiver. I was getting paranoid again. I shut my eyes. My memories of her were pleasant, to say the least, but they were still slim. She was basically a stranger. This was more conversation than I could remember with her since we met. How honest was I willing to be with this person?