☎ my muse drunk dials your muse
His hands shake. This is a bad decision, one that he flirts with on a near daily basis, but he has never had the courage to do it before now. Tonight, the alcohol gives it to him: call her, call her, call her. He stares at her name in his contact, still listed in his favorites after all these years, because he has never had the heart to remove her from the list.
Call her, the voice in the back of his head chants through the drunken stupor he’s found himself in. And, at last, he does.
You’ve reached Sofia, says her disembodied voice, in the quiet timbre he’s missed desperately. I’m unavailable at the moment. Leave a message and I’ll call you back.
Beep.
“Hi,” he breathes into the phone, folding his arms around his torso. There is no prelude, no announcing who it is. Even if she’s taken his number out of her phone, she’ll know who it is. She’s always had a knack for that sort of thing, to know a person’s voice from a single word.
"Hi,” he says again, louder and more firmly. “I shouldn’t be calling you. You told me not to. But I just -- I had to. Sometimes - I just miss your voice sometimes, and it’s stupid, to be calling you and leaving a voicemail just to hear you tell me that you’re not available.” He rubs at his eyes, bloodshot and drooping. “You’re always unavailable. Even when we were together, you were unavailable. But I miss that about you. I miss you.”
“I got a promotion. I’m going to South America for six months to study indig -- indig -- local plants. Head of the team, really. I leave tomorrow. You were the first person I wanted to call, and then I remembered that you told me not to call. So I didn’t tell anyone. I haven’t even told my family. Because I couldn’t tell you. Nothing seems real until I tell you.”
“And Allie’s having a baby. But you probably knew that. You’re probably the person she likes to tell first, too. You’re -- You’re probably going to be the godmother or something, because that’s what Allie will do, and she’ll probably think it’ll bring me back to the country and try to make me the godfather, but I couldn’t do that, because then she’d die and we’d have to raise that baby together and you’d be miserable, because you’d have to be with me every day, because I make you miserable.”
He is silent for a long time, listening to the rain outside his window, hearing it spatter heavily on the glass greenhouse across the yard. “You broke my heart,” he whispers at last, turning onto his side to stare at the picture of the two of them that he’s never removed from his bedside. “You broke my heart, Sof. And I can’t -- I don’t know how to piece it back together. Nothing works. And I just, I dunno, maybe I need you to tell me how to fix it. Because it’s your fault, but it’s also mine. I can’t get over you. I’ve tried. Nothing works.”
He swallows. “I shouldn’t have called.” His voice is miserable now, pathetic; even he can tell. “But I -- no one ever listens, you know? And even if you were unavailable, even if you were miserable with me, you always listened.” He hugs his pillow to his chest and closes his eyes. “I’m sorry I called. I miss you, though. And love you. Still love you.” There is another long pause. “Bye.”