Page 5 of Below the Shadow of the City
CHAPTER 5
SUNDAY, EARLY SEPTEMBER
M y phone vibrates in my hand. The name on the caller ID is one I recognize, but this is a first. “Adam” and I have texted for the last week, almost constantly. But phone calls are new. And he’s the one initiating it. I try not to act too excited, this probably means nothing at all. It could be a butt dial for all I know. I’m staring at it too long, I have to act quickly.
I swipe the bar across the bottom of my screen. “Hello?”
I try to downplay any emotion, my heart is pounding. I can pretend this is only a spam call and not someone who occupies far too much of my brain space. Less than a second in and I’m already regretting this decision. My anxiety is on overdrive.
“Sigrid,” I can hear him smiling as he says my name. “What’s up?” He speaks as if this is a normal thing between us, like every Sunday afternoon he gives me a call to catch up.
I’m taken aback by his nonchalance, “You called me?” My confusion comes across as callousness.
“Sorry.” He pauses. “Should I not have?” He has a goofy, awkward, boyish way about him. It’s cute.
“Uh, no, no it’s cool.” I’m as uneasy as he is, if not more so. I put him on speaker and pace back and forth in the living room. “Just a little surprising, I guess?” Surprising is an understatement, he’s thrown me off my rhythm so much I think I’ll need to take a walk after this to process it.
“I can only deal with you existing as text on my phone for so long,” he laughs a bit. “It’s a quiet Sunday, I have nothing but time. But, if you don’t want to talk?—”
“I do,” I say before I can stop myself. My chest squeezes tight. What have I become?
“Good,” he replies. “Because I really do love getting to hear your voice, Sigrid.” His voice is the one that’s deliciously craveable. It’s like hot coffee, smooth, and dark. It wraps itself around my throat and fills me with warmth. I want to beg him to say my name over and over, honestly, I want to hear him moan it.
“I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do here.” I giggle nervously. What do we talk about? We text throughout the day, we’ve covered the basics with one another, but he’s still a stranger to me. I can’t bring up random thoughts that pop into my head, or trauma dump on the poor guy.
“Have you never talked on the phone before? Is it the Eighteenth Century?” He laughs at himself.
“I mean, I don’t know what to talk to you about,” I answer.
“What’s your favorite color?” He asks innocently. “We haven’t covered that basic yet.”
“My…favorite…color?” I repeat the question back to him, mostly because I’m not sure how to best answer it. If we’re going by wardrobe standards, it would be black. But he’s not asking about that. And now I’m completely overthinking something as simple as my favorite color because I’m convinced there’s a ‘wrong’ answer to this question.
“It says a lot about someone,” I can hear his smile through the words again, a genuine one.
“Orange,” I answer.
“Why? ”
“Because I like it?”
“No,” he clicks his tongue, “there’s more to it. I’m going to ask you again, what is it about orange that you adore so much?”
I inhale and sit with the question. I do have an answer, a pathetic, cheesy, emotional one. The small sensitive part of my heart is clawing itself free from my chest, ready to bare its entire self to this stranger on the phone. “Do you know the Manhattanhenge phenomena? How a few times a year the sunrise or sunset aligns perfectly with the Manhattan street grid?”
“Yes,” he says it quickly, anxiously waiting for me to continue.
“When I moved to New York I was eighteen and that first year was tough. I was living on next to nothing, I had horrible roommates, and I was really, really miserable. But on a whim, I was walking on 34th Street on a Manhattanhenge day after a particularly shitty shift at my waitressing job. I had no clue, but I looked up and the entire city was bathed in amber. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d seen, I swear, I cried. Because I loved the city so much and was convinced it was going to chew me up and spit me out. But seeing the way the orange glowed around the buildings reminded me that I was meant to be here, and I’d work my ass off to stay here. Ever since then it’s been my favorite.” My heart races as I finish the sentence, all that word vomit makes me feel like gagging.
“Well, shit, Sigrid,” he laughs on his end. “That’s a much deeper answer than I was even digging for.”
“I can’t say all that sappy shit and have you give me nothing,” I laugh.
“I was going to say blue because it makes me think of the lake my dad took me to when I was a kid, but you make a good argument to get someone to be an orange convert.” He says it earnestly. I think of the two of us, opposing colors on the wheel, maybe never meant to converge .
“Welcome to the cult, please sign over your life savings and soul,” I laugh off the rest of my emotions. My face is red from embarrassment. I’ve never told anyone about that experience in the nine years since.
We talk about work and school, life experiences, and learned lessons like two old friends. He’s incredibly vague about details, but he does IT remotely for a tech company. He majored in English, much to his dad’s disappointment, and was in a fraternity.
On the surface, he sounds like yet another one of those frat bro Brooklyn transplants, and under any other circumstance I would have passed judgment on him almost immediately. I grew up comfortable, but had next to nothing when I moved out, opting to pursue big city dreams instead of a college degree. Everything I had I worked hard to get, and a decade later I was finally a little comfortable myself. If I’d met him at a bar I would’ve written him off as someone I would never be able to relate to.
“Do you ever feel like you’re sitting on the sidelines and watching everyone else know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing?” He pulls the conversation into something sincere again. Like we got too close to shore and he needs to drag me back out into wilder and deeper waters.
“Absolutely, yes,” I reply enthusiastically. “It’s like I somehow missed the one day in school where they taught us how we’re supposed to be functioning adults.”
“Yes,” he laughs a bit, “most days I feel the exact same way. I forget that I’m the age my parents were when they had me, and they seemed to have their lives together. Sometimes I think we’re all just imposters, trying our best to figure shit out along the way.”
“So, you’re saying I’m an imposter?” I joke.
“Only a little bit, but you have the comfort of knowing that I am too.” His voice is warm and effervescent.
I dip a toe into even riskier waters. “Only one of us is hiding our identity from the other, so who’s the real imposter here?”
“Touché,” he chuckles.
There’s a beat of quiet on both ends. I have to bring up the inevitable. I’m craving having these kinds of conversations with him walking arm in arm on the street or curled up on my couch. “Will I ever actually get to meet you, or is this the best I’ll get?”
The silence extends, I can almost hear him thinking. I know my answer, it’s precisely how he’s going to reject the notion this time that is unknown. “I want to, Sigrid, I really do. I just have some…stuff I need to work through first.”
“So, let me guess, you’re married.” I laugh it off and pretend that him dodging the prospect of meeting me doesn’t send a small knife through my heart. Maybe it’s a sign that I shouldn’t let this drag on any longer.
“No, definitely not,” he catches himself at how quickly he wrote off the very idea of marriage, “I mean, I’d like to be, someday, but my twenties have been enough of a mess without a spouse involved.”
“Aren’t all of our twenties a bit of a mess?” The last decade has gone by in almost a blur. I feel simultaneously eighteen, twenty two, and twenty eight, age hasn’t caught up with me yet.
“Yeah, mine consisted of a lot of superficial soul searching by way of late nights at bars and not knowing what I wanted to do with my life.”
“Very typical early twenties, no? Hell, I’m still like that sometimes,” I nervously laugh, he hasn’t given me an exact age but if I had to guess he’s likely also hovering somewhere around late twenties, too.
“Me too, on occasion, but years ago it was much different,” his voice has grown softer and wistful, “I was angry and bitter and asking questions that the universe didn’t have answers to, so I’d drown in alcohol instead to dull the thoughts.”
I sit silently, it seems like he has more he wants to say, but he’s hesitant. He’s shockingly open about his feelings, sharing equally as much as he has pulled from me. It’s been a while since I’ve spoken to a guy who hasn’t flippantly brushed over their emotions. His vulnerability is heartwarming, as much as I hate to reduce it to something so simple.
“I harbored a lot of jealousy,” he continues, “and I practically threw tantrums about life not being fair. I had to step back and take a look at things from a higher viewpoint to realize I had it pretty damn good, even if I felt like I was shortchanged in some aspects.” I want to know this younger iteration of him, and all the other messy, cobbled together pieces of him that made him into who he is today. Each piece of information I get is another limb for the Frankenstein’s monster of a man I’m stitching together to occupy the “Adam” shaped hole in my head.
“And do you think you’re happy now?”
“I know I am,” another staticky crackle, “happier now that I’m getting to talk to you.”
“Gross,” I snap, then dissolve any tension with a light chuckle.
“Clearly you hate it,” I can practically hear his eye roll when he replies, “I’ve kept you trapped on the phone for an hour, you must be getting conversational Stockholm Syndrome or something.”
“That’s exactly right, I’m a prisoner to my phone.”
“How tragic for you.”
“Maybe a handsome prince will rescue me.”
“Doubtful, you’ll probably rot away in the castle dungeon until you’re a toothless skeleton.”
“A prince could very well fall for the toothless skeleton, stranger pairings have happened.”
He laughs dismissively. “They certainly have. ”
I’m aimlessly wandering through the apartment while we find our way back to talking about nothing. I rearrange knick knacks on the bookshelf and fluff pillows for no reason. When I meander back into my room, I lay my phone beside me and begin rifling through my nightstand. I extract a shameful number of candy bar wrappers and empty chip bags and ball them up, my phone lays beside me as useless relics emerge from within the drawers.
He’s still talking, smooth and low, our conversation is casual and easy, mindless, even. It’s like we’re living in the other’s subconscious. My fingers fumble through cast off charging cords and junk items, then I extract a hot pink cylindrical piece of silicone and hold it in my hands. It’s been a minute since it’s been put to use. I have no clue if it’s even charged or not. Curiously, I hit the power button.
The vibrator flicks on with a much louder buzz than I was expecting. Panicking, I stuff it under my leg to quiet it for a second. He stops speaking. A deep chuckle rumbles from the other end of the line.
“Am I interrupting something?” he laughs a bit more. Fuck.
“I was—I was just needing to do something with my hands.”
“Oh?” He sounds startled. I don’t think he actually thought I was holding my vibrator.
My breath quickens a bit. “No! Not in that way, oh my god, you probably think I’m a perv.”
“I mean,” he pauses, “I could give you something to do with your hands. If-if that’s where you want this conversation to go.” He stammers a bit, and laughs with a hint of apprehension. Surely he’s not proposing phone sex. And surely I’m not wanting it.
My cheeks grow incredibly hot. I’m blushing, hard, and he’s not even here. I don’t even know what he looks like and he’s making my body react like this. “Fuck, forget I said anything, this is so embarrassing. I swear I don’t think of you, I mean I don’t…ugh, I’m not the sort of person that does that kind of thing, you know?” I blurt out.
There’s some silence, I hear a crackle of static. “But do you want to be? Uh, with me?”
It’s a loaded question, but I’m literally sitting on my vibrator. And god damn, his voice.
Short of him being here so I can make him toss me onto the bed and completely wreck me, this is probably my best bet. There’s no harm in a little fantasy. We’ve talked for nearly two hours at this point. I’ve bared my soul to him, I’d bare everything, truthfully.
“Fuck it, yes. I really do.”