Office Hours

Chapter 4: On Air

The caller's voice was young, maybe even younger than the usual Midnight Frequency crowd, and something about the story made the hair on Temi's arms stand up before the girl was even halfway through it.

"There's this girl," the caller said, "and she's got this whole other life nobody knows about. Like, her real friends don't even know. And there's this guy, new guy, and he's got no idea who she really is, and she's terrified that if he finds out the real her, he's going to like that version more than the one she's been showing everyone else. And that scares her more than anything, honestly. Being loved for the real thing instead of the performance."

Temi kept her voice level, professional, the voice of the host and not the person the story was uncomfortably close to describing. "What do you think she's actually afraid of?"

"I think," the caller said, slower now, "she's afraid that if the real her turns out to be lovable, she'll have wasted years being someone smaller because it was safer."

Aro, behind the glass, had gone very still.

Temi finished the segment on autopilot, gave the caller something warm and useful about the difference between safety and smallness, and then sat in the sudden quiet after the call dropped, aware of her own pulse in a way she usually wasn't mid show.

"That felt personal," Aro said into her headset, low, just for her.

"It's a call. People project all kinds of things."

"Temi."

"I'm fine, Aro. Cue the next one."

He cued the next one. But she caught him watching her through the glass for the rest of the show, that same reading-a-sentence-with-a-missing-word look from weeks ago, closer now to actually guessing the word.

Afterward, at the diner, he didn't bring it up right away, which was somehow worse than if he had. He let her get most of her fries eaten first, let the easy quiet of their usual booth settle around them the way it always did, three years of practice making the silence comfortable instead of loaded.

Then he said, "Is there a guy."

Not a question, really. A door held open.

Temi considered lying. She was good at the sentences that lived in the gap. But this was Aro, and the gap had never worked on Aro, not really, not since the night two years ago when her father's second anniversary had hit her sideways and Aro had shown up at her door with soup and no questions and just sat with her until she was ready to talk.

"There's a guy," she admitted. "It's not what you think. He's a student. In my section."

Aro's face did something complicated, something he smoothed over fast enough that if she hadn't known him six years she might have missed it entirely. "Okay."

"Nothing's happened. Nothing's going to happen. I know exactly how bad an idea it would be."

"I know you know," Aro said. "I'm not worried about you doing something reckless. You've never once done something reckless in the entire time I've known you, which honestly might be part of the problem." He said it lightly, but there was an edge under it, something that had been there, she realized now, replaying years of comfortable diner booths and easy midnight drives home, for longer than tonight.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means," Aro said, turning his water glass slowly on the table, not quite meeting her eyes, "you've spent your whole life doing the correct next thing. Correct boyfriend. Correct career track. Even this show, the one place you get to actually be yourself, you keep a hundred percent hidden from every single person in your correct life. I've watched you build this whole careful structure for six years, Temi, and I've never once said anything, because it wasn't my place. But you sat in that both tonight and looked like that caller had reached straight down your throat and pulled something out, and I think maybe it's time somebody said something."

Temi's chest went tight. "Aro."

"I'm not trying to make this weird." He finally looked up, and his eyes were steady, unguarded in a way she'd rarely seen from him, six years of easy jokes and cued cables suddenly stripped back to something rawer underneath. "I've known for a long time that whatever this is between us, whatever we've been calling friendship because it was safer than the other word, isn't just friendship for me. I've never said it because you had Dele, and because I didn't want to be the reason you questioned something that made you happy. But you don't look happy right now, Temi. You look like someone standing at the edge of her own life wondering if she's allowed to jump."

The diner around them kept going, some other table's laughter, the clatter of the kitchen, entirely indifferent to the fact that Temi's whole carefully built structure had just cracked straight down the middle.

"I don't know what to say," she said, finally, honestly, more honestly than she'd managed with anyone in weeks.

"You don't have to say anything tonight." Aro reached over, squeezed her hand once, brief and warm and familiar in a completely different register than it had ever been before. "I just needed you to know the option existed. Whatever you decide, about the student, about Dele, about any of it, I need you to decide it because it's actually what you want. Not because it's the correct next thing."

He paid the bill before she could argue, walked her to her car in the cold with his jacket over his shoulders instead of hers, same as always, and said goodnight like nothing enormous had just happened between them.

Temi drove home with both hands tight on the wheel and her whole careful architecture of a life laid out in front of her in pieces, and no idea, none at all, how to put any of it back together in a shape that made sense.