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It’s unusually chilly for the dead of summer. The incessant heat and humidity from earlier in the week had finally dried off into a crisp, cloudy afternoon. Patrick feels the pavement cooling beneath his feet as he paces nervously on the sidewalk outside of Ray's.
“Hello?”
“Hi,” Patrick says softly. He tucks his left hand safely into the pocket of his jeans.
“Sorry for calling,” he continues after a minute. “I don’t know if this is… allowed?” He sounds shy and lets out a short, rehearsed laugh. It’s too weird and foreign and he hates how unfamiliar he sounds even to his own ears. He's been texting with David intermittently since he walked out of his motel room four days ago, but they’ve never actually spoken to each other until now.
“I, just, uh… I needed -- ” Patrick pauses and sucks in a cool breath of air. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”
From the other end of the line, David makes a small, indistinct noise, like he’s about to say something affirmative, and then suddenly Patrick is overcome with the inopportune urge to laugh. It’s all just so dramatic, he realizes, his confession just then over the phone, his pacing aimlessly back and forth on the sidewalk, the dark clouds overhead promising an early evening rain. He feels like he’s in a scene from a movie, one of those movies that David loves and makes him watch over and over. He couldn’t, for the life of him, remember the name of a single one of them right now, but he was sure there was definitely, probably, a rain scene in one of them.
He looks up at the sky, at the storm clouds in the distance, and waits.
“It’s fine,” David eventually responds.
Patrick coughs to let out some of the tension.
“How are you?” he asks David.
“I’m fine.”
Patrick shuts his eyes. He hates this. He dislodges his hand from his pocket and runs it anxiously across the back of his neck.
"You're at the motel?"
"Yeah."
"Have you been sleeping?"
"Yeah," he answers. "Five, six hours a night."
Patrick thinks that might be a lie, but he doesn’t question it.
“That’s good to hear,” he says instead.
“Mm.”
They pause for too long and he wonders if he should just hang up the phone right there.
“How’s the store?” David asks, sounding more like an imitation of himself than the David Patrick knows.
“It’s good. Yesterday was pretty busy. Sold a few of those tea towels that we just picked up.”
"Maybe it’ll be another bestseller."
“Here’s hoping,” he rubs the toe of his shoe against a crack in the sidewalk.
“Anyway," David says. "I actually can’t talk much right now. I have to get going."
"Hot date?" Patrick jokes poorly to dispel any disappointment that he might be feeling. He hears some rustling and movement on David’s end of the line.
"Yeah," he answers simply and Patrick's heart stops.
A solitary car drives down the road and slows at the intersection ahead.
Wait a second, Patrick pleads silently.
His face begins to warm quickly despite the chill in the air and then his heart rate picks up again, except it’s racing now, stuttering impatiently, and he’s never felt like this before. Dread begins to well up inside him, something hard, ugly, and more urgent than the anxiety that’s been thrumming like a baseline deep in his gut all week.
I'm learning, he wants to remind him.
His body is hot now but he shivers and pulls his elbows in tighter. He can still feel the warmth of David’s hands on his shoulders even after all their days apart. He’s filled with an immediate homesickness for the way David’s fingertips knead into his back, the rasp of his stubble against his cheek, the perfect little quirk in his smile. Then, just as suddenly, his stomach drops. He thinks about how he’s going to have to teach himself to forget all of that. To forget all of David’s quirks and all of his smiles. The task is so daunting that his chest begins to hurt. He takes three quick breaths, shoulders his phone, and scrubs his hands over his face.
Something like an apology or a plea, maybe a prayer, bubbles anxiously in his chest ready to break the silence in the air but David beats him to it.
"Yeah, um,” David clears his throat. “Stevie and I are going to a spa. She has a Groupon."
Oh. Oh.
Patrick nearly drops his phone. And then he’s laughing. Loudly. It's startling and it’s a byproduct of the panic that had risen in his throat and the sheer relief now coursing through his entire body, and he hasn’t been sleeping much so it sounds borderline hysterical, but then David starts laughing too, just a little bit, and it's enough. It’s a little closer to how things should be and Patrick thinks it's the best sound he’s heard all week.
“I almost had you, didn’t I?” David asks, reserved, still, but there's something else there now.
“Almost,” Patrick manages through a half-sob, louder than he intended.
“I’ll... text you when I get there?”
Patrick sighs and he realizes then that his eyes are closed. He smells rain. The street is silent except for a few birds flying home for the evening.
“That’d be nice,” he says.
“Okay. Bye, Patrick.”
“Bye, David,” his voice catches on something unspoken as he hangs up the phone.
I love you, he nearly says.