His Voice In My Night

Episode5

The response was quick. Quicker than Clara had expected.

"I freelance," (Reed_Art) wrote. "Art for the most part and a bit of back-end dev work here and there. Nothing glamorous."

It was the kind of answer she would have glossed over on a normal day. Vague enough to be true, specific enough to ward off questions. But today was anything but normal. Not after meeting Damien Reynolds in that glass cube of a conference room. Not after watching him look at her.

She stared at the message.

Her hands hovered over the keyboard, then dropped into her lap.

She did not wish to pose the next question. But she also could not not ask.

(You ever work with NovaReign?)

The typing bubble started. Stopped. Started again.

Then: "No. Never."

She sucked in her breath. It wasn't the words—it was the pause. He had hesitated.

That had never happened before.

The faith she'd put in their invisible thread suddenly diluted, stretched like old elastic. It didn't snap, but strained.

She typed: “You hesitated.”

He answered almost right away. "I didn't know how to react."

“Why?”

There was another pause. This time, longer.

"I don't usually talk about the job. I like what we have."

That made her hesitate.

She set the phone down and brought her fingers to her lips. That line—it had felt intimate. Possessive, even. But also… evasive. As though he'd closed a door she hadn't meant to open.

The silence stretched for over an hour.

Clara didn't reply with a message. She turned her phone off and went back to work, forcing herself to focus. There were revisions to the NovaReign design files—Damien had already made comments on two of the interface transitions. His comments were pointed, brief. He didn't explain. He expected she could keep up.

And she could.

But that wasn't the problem. The problem was the tone.

For the time being, she could not read them without his voice.

Late evening had turned the sky outside her window a profound purple. Streetlights made golden glows on damp concrete. The city did not sleep, but it did sometimes catch its breath. Clara sat on the fire escape to observe, sipping wine straight from the bottle. Her hair was still damp from a quick shower, curls fuzzed slightly from steam.

The air had that electrical taste it got right before a storm.

She checked her phone again. No messages.

Not from (Reed_Art). Not from Damien. Not from anyone.

The hunger under her skin wasn't for food. She wanted… something. Not s*x, exactly. Not touch. But proximity. Evidence she wasn't losing her mind, falling in love with a ghost made of pixels and voicemails.

She opened the app.

Typed: “Do you want to see me?”

The message was reckless. Exposed.

He didn't reply for twenty minutes.

Then the typing bubble appeared.

"Yes."

Just that. One word. Too much and not enough at the same time.

She stared at the screen, her chest tightening, her mouth suddenly dry.

Then another message arrived.

"But not yet."

Clara swallowed.

“Why not?”

"Because once I see you, I won't want to stop."

Her breath caught.

She could feel it—like a pressure behind her eyes, in her throat. Something unspoken swelled and would not recede.

She typed: “You already don't want to stop.”

"No," he wrote. "But right now I can still pretend it's safe."

She didn't answer. Not immediately.

Instead, she opened his old voice messages. She clicked on one at random—an older one, weeks old.

I sketched with charcoal," his voice whispered, low and gentle. "Until my hands started to tremble during a blackout once. I ruined the sketch. It bled into everything. My hands were stained. I didn't try again for three months.".

Clara closed her eyes. She remembered that message. How it had unsettled her then. How it had comforted her later. He was real. Whoever he was, he wasn't attempting to be perfect. He was damaged. Beautifully, secretly damaged.

Just like her.

She typed: “I imagine your hands when you speak of drawing.”

The reply took longer this time. "I imagine your mouth when you read my messages."

She felt a warmth spread across her collarbone, then her neck, then elsewhere.

She didn't look away from the screen.

She typed: “You imagine too much.”

"I try not to."

She longed to be able to ask him what he looked like again. Something in her stomach told her it wasn't time. Not yet. So instead, she let the moment stretch out like a bridge they hadn't crossed.

Then she typed: “Tomorrow I have another meeting with your favorite tech company.”

"Lucky you," he replied.

His mood changed. She could feel it in the text. He was shutting back down again.

She needed to break that.

Clara leaned against the window frame, one leg tucked under her. The wine bottle was on the sill next to her, half-empty. She ran a finger through the condensation.

Then she typed: “Want to hear my voice?”

There was no answer.

Not right away.

She almost pulled back. Almost erased the message. But just as she was about to touch the screen, a new message appeared.

"God, yes."

Her chest tightened.

She pressed the mic icon. Heart racing.

She didn't think. She just spoke.

"Hi."

The word was too quiet. Her own voice in her own ears sounded weird. A bit husky. Vulnerable. Intimate.

She pressed send.

No second chances. No do-overs.

Seconds passed. Then more.

Then there was a voice message.

She opened it.

"I'm going to listen to that ten times," he said. "Maybe more. You sound… exactly like I imagined. No. Better."

She smiled—silently. The kind of smile that no one else sees. The kind that hurts, just a little, because it feels too good to be safe.

The next morning, Clara woke up before her alarm. Her room was full of soft gray light. There was a message on her screen.

From (Reed_Art): "Do you ever wake up wanting to be somebody else?"

She typed: “No. I wake up wanting to be somebody I used to be.”

There was no reply.

She fell out of bed, pulled on the first hoodie she could find, and padded barefoot to the kitchen. Savannah was already there, in an oversized T-shirt with a feminist slogan and no pants, eating cereal.

"Who's got you all blushed and brooding this early?" Savannah said.

Clara poured herself coffee. "No one."

Savannah snorted. "You only lie when it matters."

Clara said nothing.

The day passed in work—emails, interface testing, another round of updates from Damien on the design file. They didn't communicate directly this time. Just digital notes, tidy and impersonal.

But something in the phrasing of one of them—

"Don't move the button yet. I want it to sit longer before the transition."

—shifted something in her chest.

She didn't know whether he'd done that on purpose. If he knew what he was saying without saying it.

Later that night, she received a short audio message.

From (Reed_Art).

No words. Just sound.

Rain. Soft. Steady. On a tin roof, maybe.

She pressed the phone to her chest and leaned back on the couch, listening.

And when she closed her eyes, it felt like he was breathing somewhere close by.