My cell phone buzzed, and I absently reached over and grabbed it off the nightstand. My journal and pen fell, thudding on the carpet.
“Hello?” I crunched on ice from my glass of water.
“Jill?”
My body jumped at the sound of Boner’s voice, and my glass tipped, spilling cold water on my camisole top.
“Hi. How are you?” I sat up in bed and put the glass on my nightstand, wiping down the water from my cami.
“That’s what I wanted to ask you.”
“Me?” I banged on the remote to mute the volume. “I-I’m good.” I pulled on the wet cotton fabric, flapping it against my chest.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you all day.” His voice was soft but intent without a trace of awkwardness. Blunt sincerity.
I closed my eyes and let his words, the supple tone of his voice, sink in, and they did. They penetrated like a wave of sound through every layer of skin, muscle, and bone and settled in my thumping heart.
“Me either.” I folded my legs under me.
Moments lapsed in charged silence.
He blew out a breath. “Shit, did I wake you up? I just noticed the time.”
“No, no, you didn’t wake me up. I’m in bed, flipping channels on the television. What are you doing? Are you at the club?”
The thought of him taking the time to call me, only to go jump Mindy or some club skank once we got off the phone, made my stomach harden. I was his old lady, but come on.
“No, I’m home.”
My chest relaxed, as if a thousand needles that had threatened to jab me suddenly disappeared.
“I just finished working out,” he continued. “But I couldn’t concentrate. Had to talk to you.”
“Why couldn’t you concentrate?”
“I still feel you on me.”
My eyes sank shut, a breath shooting out of me.
“Jillee?”
“Yeah?” I managed.
“Did you like it? Feeling me on you?”
Heat flooded my chest. “Very much. Very, very much.”
“I didn’t expect it,” he said.
“What didn’t you expect?”
“Feeling connected to you.”
My chest tightened. Me, too.
“You reminded me that there’s still magic,” he whispered roughly. “That there are things of wonder still left to experience.”
The air knocked out of me at his confession.
“I’m guessing you liked feeling connected to me?”
A low chuckle erupted over the phone. “I liked it, Firefly. A lot. A hell of a lot.”
“What did you call me?”
“You’re like a firefly, Jill. You glow bright in my night.”
“You go chasing them regularly?”
“No. Not at all.” He took in a long breath. “Just once, when I was little. One summer, my mom and I stayed out in the mountains for a week. It was the first time I’d seen fireflies. I would stay up every night and watch them, dance around the field, trying to catch them. My mom got me this huge jar, and we managed to catch a lot of them. It was magic. The best magic ever.”
My heart hammered in my chest. There was plenty of magic between us. Fairy-tale firefly-in-the-night magic. Magic I had hoped for but hadn’t expected. Yet here it was, buzzing and glowing between us.
“But when we had to leave and go home, I had to let the fireflies go free,” he said. “I was really upset, but my mother told me it wasn’t right. They had to be free in the wild or maybe they would stop glowing. I wanted to keep them forever, hoard their magic for myself. But some things, really beautiful things, you can’t hold on to forever, can you?”
An ache twisted inside me at the resigned tone of his quiet voice.
“I wish you were here with me right now, holding me,” I whispered.
“Want to hold on to you, Firefly. Keep you just for me.”
I swallowed hard past the lump of yearning lodged in my throat. “I’m right here.” A compulsion to keep him on the phone and listen to his voice grabbed ahold of me. “Talk to me. Tell me anything.”
“What do you want to hear?” He let out a soft laugh. “About the rebuild I worked on today? What I had for dinner?”
I giggled. “Yes. Yes, all of it.”
He told me about the bike he was fixing for a new client, how the rust had made it so difficult, and how the parts had been taking forever to be shipped because it was a foreign “pretentious piece of shit.” How he had been teaching Sy how to use a knife. How he hated the beef burritos Dawes ate almost every day for lunch because they smelled so greasy.
I tugged on my wet camisole. “Hold on a sec,” I mumbled into the phone.
“Why?”
“I have to take off my top.”
“You have to, what?” his voice sprang over the line.
“I spilled water on it before, and it’s more wet than I thought. It’s bugging me so—”
“What are you gonna change into?”
“A red lace nightie with a high slit up the sides,” I replied.
He made a growly noise in the back of his throat. “What are you wearing, Jill?”
“Tsk. How could you tell I was fibbing?”
He chuckled. “Red lace sounded a bit extreme.”
“Extreme for me? Great.”
“Firefly, tell me what you’re wearing.”