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“I just wanted to hear your voice.” Jaina says, then sighs out, the sound loud and crackling through the speaker. “I’m sorry. This is- I should just let you sleep.”
“I was already awake.” Vereesa says. It’s not a lie, she’s been up for hours, trying and failing to wrangle one of her assignments. Given how readily she picked up her phone looking for a distraction, it’s hardly surprising that she hasn’t made much progress on that front.
Jaina’s been a bit too quiet on her end, and she wonders, quietly, if she has already dropped the phone and walked away. Forgotten about her.
“Jaina?” she says softly, just to check.
“Yes?” She replies immediately, soothing away that concern.
“I really don’t mind. Talk to me.”
She falls silent once more, but Vereesa has a little more faith this time, holds the phone against her ear with a shoulder as she goes to set the kettle on to boil. She knows enough of herself by now to predict how little sleep she’ll get tonight, so she may as well accept it now.
“Do you ever just… Start thinking too much about things that don’t really matter, but you can’t quite get out of your head? Like, I don’t know, everything’s normal and then you see something or you drink too much and it just all hits at once and… I don’t know.”
Vereesa pauses at that, puts the cups she has in hand down on her bench and leans against it instead, holds her phone almost too tight in her hand. Jaina is barely making sense, to her at least, rambling and avoiding the subject even after she rang Vereesa so late, like it’s something urgent, something that can’t wait until she comes back, or at least can’t be said in a phone call at some reasonable hour.
“Jaina,” she says softly, trying to focus on the present, on properly constructed words and the woman talking to her from so long away, “have you been drinking too much?” It’s almost terrible that Vereesa hopes that’s all this is, that this isn’t another terrifying phone call from a woman in shock, that she’s not about to hear about another awful accident drowning the Proudmoores. Whatever did that family do, she wonders, to attract so much tragedy.
“Maybe.” Jaina says, her voice dropping too, like she doesn’t want to admit it. “Tandred insisted on going out, and he was paying so it all just… You know. I’m not that drunk. I just started thinking about how much I’ve been missing home, but now that I’m here I just started thinking about everything else I left behind. I don’t think I’m making sense. Sorry.”
There’s a tiny pause, an audible intake of breath. “I just miss you.”
Vereesa isn’t quite sure what to say, for those first few moments. It feels like it should mean something big, something earth shifting, but dwelling on those last handful of words begins to make her feel more confused than anything. Is she overthinking, overreaching? Is she reading subtle hints or just hoping for something that isn’t even there? She can’t quite tell. Maybe what she needs is something more certain than rambling words from a drunk woman, something honest and in person.
And that concept really shouldn’t feel as terrifying as it does.
“How’s Katherine?” Vereesa asks instead of pressing. That’s her immediate response to this type of terrible uncertainty, it seems, sinking back into cowardice like it will protect her. One day, she thinks, the dam will break on the two of them, and it is impossible to tell, yet, exactly what that flood of emotion will do.
“Mother’s well. I think. She’s been avoiding any difficult subjects, so it’s hard to tell but… I think she’s smiling more. She keeps asking me to invite friends over. Like it’s easy to ask someone to drive ten hours to visit a friend’s hometown. I don’t know. I have a sense that she feels bad about missing so much of my life, and she’s trying to make up for it any way she can. I just wish she’d leave me any room to breathe.”
“At least she’s trying.” Vereesa says, sucks in air through her teeth, bites down on what courage is left in her as if it will break away from her if she doesn’t. “I’d like to visit, at some point, by the way. You talk about Kul Tiras so much. I’d like to see it in person.”
“One day.” Jaina confirms. The warmth is back in her voice, at least, even if they are still dancing around the same subject as always. “You’d like it, I think. Maybe not the sailing, so much, I still remember how seasick you got last year.” She pauses then to laugh, and really, Vereesa should be more upset at the teasing, but it’s pleasant enough to hear her laugh again that she puts that thought aside.
“But no. The landscape’s still beautiful, even after all these years, and there’s all these hiking trails I know you’d like. So yes. One day.”
“One day.” Vereesa repeats, softly. There’s that brief hesitation, that almost accidental silence, a tiny pause designed just to have time to think dragging on until it feels monumental to break it.
“I really should let you go.” Jaina says, soft again. “But it was good talking to you.”
“It was.” She thinks there should be something else to say, something bigger, more important, something to bridge whatever it is that sits between them, but nothing rises to mind. She lets it go. “Goodnight, Jaina.”
“Goodnight.” And she’s gone, slipped away into the night. And yet the memory of her voice lingers, echoes in the back of her mind, but the ghost of it hardly compares.
Vereesa sighs, and puts her phone down. Wishes, quietly, almost a secret to her own mind, that Jaina will ring back. But she doesn’t, and Vereesa isn’t brave enough to call herself. A coward once more.
Vereesa goes back to making herself a cup of tea, curses herself when she turns around to find two cups already made.
She pours the spare down the sink, and pretends she isn’t made all the more lonely by the mistake.