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I can't stop thinking about him. Even as I make my way to my room.

His voice. The way it doesn't rush. The way he just feels safe.

His hands.

The thought arrives low. What they look like. The size of them. Whether the fingers are long or blunt. Whether they're rough. How they'd feel on skin, on the back of a neck, on the place between my shoulder blades where the tension lives. My cock stiffens against my thigh and my hand goes to it before the thought finishes forming. Palm pressing through the fabric. Not stroking, just holding.

The thought has a pulse. Throbbing, matching my heartbeat. His hands on my neck. His fingers in my hair. The voice, that deep, thoughtful voice, saying my name against my skin. Not through a phone. Close. Breath-distance. My hand slides under my pants and wraps around my cock and strokes once, slow, hips lifting off the mattress, breath catching on something that isn't fear for the first time in weeks. The ceiling blurs. Eyes close. His voice saying Milo. My hand moving. Heat spreading from my hips to my chest to the backs of my eyelids. The darkness is the good kind. The kind that holds instead of traps.

Thirty seconds. Forty. My hand moving, my breath going shallow, my body arching into the feeling, chasing it, needing it, and then the thought sharpens, his voice saying you have me, and my hand tightens and my hips press up and the heat peaks and holds and I'm right there, right at the edge.

What the fuck am I doing?

To a voice?!

Jesus Christ, Noor was right.

My hand pulls away. My eyes open. The ceiling is just a ceiling. Bean is snoring at the foot of the bed, her paws twitching in whatever dream dogs have, chasing something or being chased.

My breath comes back in stages. My body settles. The heat doesn't leave, just lowers, sinking back below the surface. My sheets have been warm for a while now. My hand is still tingling. The frustration of stopping is its own kind of ache, dull and low, mixed with something that isn't quite shame but lives next door to it.

I don't know what he looks like. The voice has no face. My brain filled in the gaps with something constructed from tone and pacing and the way he breathes when he's listening. Probably wrong in every detail. Doesn't matter. The voice is enough. Crisis line operators don't meet their callers. The boundary exists for exactly this reason. Exactly what my hand was doing thirty seconds ago.

Noor is so fucking right, it’s not even funny. She's always right about this part. James. Devon. Now a voice on a phone I've never seen. I walk toward people who understand me without checking the ground first.

Bean shifts at the foot of the bed, sighs, resettles. My hand goes to her. The fur, the ears. She needs food and walks and the spot behind her left ear scratched. The rest is beyond her interest.

In the morning the vineyard novel will be waiting. I'll edit and eat and lock the door and walk Bean through the obstacle course and come home and wait. Noor will text. I'll text back. The texts will be normal. The normal will be a lie, because the real part of my day doesn't start until midnight. Doesn't start until the phone is against my ear and his voice comes through. The apartment opens up. October stands down.

Ten days until Halloween. The vineyard novel is due November 3rd. The author is expecting tracked changes and a developmental memo and a summary of structural recommendations by the end of the month. All of that will happen. The editing. The memo. Bean walked and fed. The apartment locked. The prescriptions lapsed. None of it will matter as much as the sound of his voice at midnight saying my name.

Existing for my call.

Waiting for midnight.

Not waiting for anything else.

Chapter Six: Brantley

Today, his morning starts at 7:14.

I know this because I've been parked on Ridgeway since 6:50, coffee going cold in the cupholder, watching the second-floor window where the light comes on at 7:12 and the blinds go up two minutes later. The sequence hasn't varied beyond a couple of minutes either direction in six days. Light. Blinds.

He crosses the window in a white t-shirt, no pants, and my hands go still on the steering wheel. The t-shirt hits mid-thigh. His legs are pale, the muscle definition visible even from here, the kind of lean that comes from walking, not from training. He doesn't exercise. He walks the dog and the rest of his body stays still, folded into the couch or the desk chair or the bathroom floor, conserving energy for the next time October asks him to spend it.

He's at the window for four seconds. Maybe five. Long enough for my eyes to track the line of his jaw, the sleep-flattened hair, the hand that reaches up and adjusts something on the sill. Some kind of plant. He has plants on the windowsill that I can't identify from the car but that he touches every morning, probably with the same hand that grips the phone at midnight.

He bends down and picks up his dog. Holds her against his chest with one arm while the other hand works the blinds fully open, and for three seconds I can see them both in the frame, the man and the dog, the white t-shirt and the black-and-tan fur, the morning happening the way mornings happen when nobody is watching. Easy. Carefree.

Except I'm watching.

My coffee is basically iced at this point, but I need to focus on something other than the sudden burning desire to see his shirt ride up and reveal what I’ve been having wet dreams about for three days straight.

My shift doesn't start until midnight, and I have every intention of using my time before work to the best of my abilities. Which means being here.

I have his routes memorized. The morning walk goes left on Ridgeway, right on Birch, loops around the cul-de-sac on Waverly, and comes back up the alley behind the row of houses where nobody has put up decorations because the alley faces dumpsters, not sidewalks. The evening walk takes a wider loop, changing every few days, and I've mapped four variations based on which houses added new decorations and which ones turned their timers on early. He avoids the fog machine on Clement. He avoids the animatronic graveyard on Linden. He takes the scarecrow on Birch at a near-jog, Bean pulled tight against his shins, his shoulders high, his breathing visible from half a block away in the dusk.

Ellis's skeleton is the only one he can't avoid. The sensor catches every pass. He knows it's coming and it doesn't matter.