#nightline

Line four blinks. He presses the button on the console. “This is Noah.”

His voice comes easily, lower than his natural speaking tone, smoother, warmer by design. It is a performance, but not a difficult one.

The man on the other end is in a hotel room in Chicago. Lonely, from the sound of him. Tired enough to want company, vain enough to want to feel like he is directing the shape of it.

Zayne lets him.

He gives him the expected pauses, the measured breathing, the careful responses that create the impression of attention without requiring any real presence behind it.

Twelve minutes later, the line clicks dead.

Zayne exhales and adjusts the foam pad on his headset. That makes five. Five voices already flattening into one another. Same wants. Same silences. Same attempts to make need sound particular. Confidential Connections sold itself on privacy more than anything else. Late-night conversation. No names required. Real voices, if you believed the ad copy. Men called for all kinds of reasons. Most of them pretended they were only calling for one.

There are rules here. A structure. You answer. You speak. Time passes. The line goes dead.

No one bleeds. No one looks at you for certainty you may not have. No one fails to improve anyway.

The thought arrives sharp and sterile. Fluorescent light. Stainless steel. A monitor losing rhythm by degrees small enough to look manageable until they aren’t.

Zayne closes his eyes. His fingers find the pen again and move it a fraction of an inch to the left. When he opens them, the apartment is still there. The green glow. The desk. The logbook. The weak reflection in the darkened window over his shoulder.

Structure returns.

He checks his watch.

2:14 a.m.

Skye hasn’t called.

Over the last three weeks, Skye has called consistently between 1:30 and 1:45 on Thursday nights. The calls usually run longer than the others. They wander. They do not move cleanly from greeting to transaction to exit.

Zayne has noticed. That does not mean he has been waiting.

The first time Skye called, it was a Tuesday, not a Thursday, back when Zayne still expected the shift to feel new.The man’s voice had been droll and even, almost lazy - polished but bored, like a late-night talk show host running on fumes. Skye did did not ramp up the way the others did, did not lurch from zero to obscene in under a minute.

“How’s your night over there?”

That had been it. The opening volley.

Zayne remembered because it was the only call that hour not wrapped in panting or static or the twitchy energy of someone trying hard to forget their own room. No slurred reassurance that the line was private. No awkward pause before testing the shape of what could be asked for here.

He could tell right away. Skye was not dialing in for release. His questions spooled out slow, unhurried, as if he wanted to see how long the line would hold.

“What do you do when you’re not here?”

“Do you get many regulars?”

He rests his forearm on the desk and looks at the blank green-dark screen between calls.

The apartment feels smaller at this hour. Desk tucked against the wall. Console beside the monitor. Logbook open. Water glass half-empty. The lamp in the corner switched off because the CRT gives off enough light on its own, and because too much light at this hour feels aggressive.

At 2:27, the console chimes. Line two blinks red.

His hand moves automatically. He means to answer on the second ring, as he always does, but his finger comes down a fraction late.

“This is Noah.”

There is almost no static on the line, just silence held a too long. It gives the strange impression of space on the other end. A room. A body in it. Someone leaning back rather than forward.

Then: “Hello, Noah.”

The voice is low, textured, and entirely unhurried. Something in Zayne’s chest tightens. Not enough to qualify as reaction. Enough to notice.

“You’re calling late tonight,” he says. The words leave him before he decides on them. Not part of the script.

“I was occupied,” Skye says. There is a trace of amusement there, more vibration than sound. “Kept you waiting?”

“I’m paid to be here until four.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

The silence stretches, as if the cable between them is a taut line neither will cut.

Zayne listens to the faint sound floor on Skye’s end - the hum and pop of an appliance, a distant voice from a television, maybe, or the slow shift of a chair. It makes it easier to imagine a room around the voice. Not a face, never a face, but the configuration of silence: where a lamp might be, what kind of mug dully hits the table, whether the kitchen is cold or just empty.

“Do you want me to say something sexy,” Skye teases, his voice low and smoky, “or are you just here to hear your own fantasies echoed back?”

The question hits sideways. Zayne is used to directing the narrative, painting fantasies for men eager to listen, men who want distance and deniability as much as they want anything else. This obvious refusal hangs in their space, waiting for him to rise to it.

He pushes back from the desk slightly.

“I don’t need to hear anything. You’re the one calling.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Zayne’s hand tightens around the edge of the desk. He had not realized he was doing that.

That is not how this works.

He does not know what this man looks like. He should not feel observed anyway. There is no face to match that voice, and still he feels exposed.

“Maybe I’m doing more than just listening,” Zayne fires back, straining to keep his tone calm, even. His voice betrays him, coming out softer, huskier than he intended.

“Are you?”The teasing edge drops out of Skye’s voice. What takes its place is quieter, heavier in a way that makes Zayne pay closer attention instead of less.

Zayne tries to shift the call back to safe ground.

“You want to tell me what you’re wearing, Skye?”

A brief laugh, all breath and no sound.

“I can. If you want to picture something, you should say so.”

Zayne pushes a hand through his hair. The headset pulls at his left ear, reminding him how long he has been sitting this way. He has done this for months - shifting flexibly between feigned interest and explicit direction, putting on texture as required.

“I’m picturing it,” Zayne says, and the lie comes easy. “Tell me anyway.”

He expects a laugh. Instead, there is a hush - a faint, almost intimate static, the suggestion of movement on the other end. The satisfaction of being obeyed, or the pleasure of being asked. Zayne cannot tell.

“Suit jacket,” Skye says, pitching it almost casual, but there is resonance under the words. “Nothing underneath. I was in a hurry.” A softer, nearly private exhale, as if acknowledging the artifice of the statement. “Slacks. No shoes.”

“That’s bold,” Zayne says, meaning the suit jacket, meaning the nothing underneath. He is not sure whether to prod at the image, to pick it apart and shape it, or to sit back and let his own mind do with it what it will. “Were you expecting someone, or do you just always look ridiculous?”

“Maybe,” Skye says. “Maybe just myself.” The smile is implied, not spoken. “Is that disappointing?”

He can hear something shift on Skye’s end - fabric, maybe, or the slow movement of someone leaning back further into a chair. Not restless. Comfortable. Like he has nowhere else to be and knows exactly what that does to the person still listening.

Zayne looks at the pen on the desk again, then past it, toward the dark window over his shoulder. His own reflection is too faint to hold shape. The pale wash of the monitor across one side of his face. “You always do this?” he asks.

“Do what?”

“Make it difficult to tell whether you’re joking.”

A soft sound comes through the line. Not quite a laugh.

“Only when I think someone’s paying attention.”

Zayne’s fingers tighten once against the edge of the desk, then loosen.

He should redirect the call. Pull it back into something simpler. The structure is still there if he wants it. He could return to the script in a sentence. Two, at most.

He doesn’t.

“What if I’m not?”

Skye is quiet for just long enough to make the answer feel chosen.

“Then you’re very good at pretending, Noah.”

The words land lower than they should. Zayne becomes aware, suddenly and unpleasantly, of the headset against his skin. The room around him. The fact that he is sitting alone in the dark, saying nothing.

“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” Skye says.

Zayne looks at the monitor.

“That would be most things.”

Skye hums softly.

“I only asked for one.”

Zayne’s thumb finds the lifted seam in the laminate at the edge of the desk and presses it flat. The monitor throws the same pale green over the logbook, the water glass, the coil of phone cord beside the console.

He could lie. Say something polished enough to sound personal without costing him anything.

Instead, after a beat, he says, “I count things.”

The line stays quiet in that waiting way Skye has.

“Time,” Zayne adds. “Patterns. How long people take to say what they actually want.”

A soft shift of fabric comes through the receiver. “And how long do I take?”

Zayne glances at the dark window over his desk, at the faint shape of himself in it.

“Longer than most,” he says. “You take your time deciding how you want to say things.”

Skye laughs, low and brief.

“That sounds better.”

Zayne straightens the pen without meaning to, lines it back up with the edge of the logbook. The apartment feels smaller all at once - the hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen, the headset against his skin, the stillness of everything around him.

“What else?” Skye asks, quieter now.

Zayne exhales through his nose.

“I make the same coffee every night,” he says. “I don’t like it, but I make it anyway.”

“You like things that stay where you put them.”

Zayne’s fingers still on the desk. He hates how accurate that lands.

There is something faint behind Skye’s voice now - music, maybe, or the blur of a room with people in it. “Downtown, there’s a place called Neon Saint. Do you know it?”

Not framed as an invitation. Not pushed toward him. Just placed carefully in the middle of the dark to see what shape it takes. Zayne processes the words in order: the club, downtown, a place that would not ask too many questions as long as the right kind of money changed hands.

He does not write any of it down. He lies.

“Sure,” he says.

“I’ll be there for a while on Sunday.”

The silence that follows is not empty. It presses faintly at the plastic of the headset, at the back of his jaw, at something lower and more physical he does not have language for quickly enough to dismiss.

He becomes aware of his own heart rate. That irritates him more than it should. He is alone in his apartment. The door is locked. The window is shut. Nothing has changed except a voice and a name dropped into the space between them.

“I’m working,” Zayne says.

“I know.”

“Before I go,” Skye says, quieter now, “what’s your real name?”

Zayne hesitates. The script gives him an answer immediately. He knows exactly what he is supposed to say. The line is as automatic as the greeting.

“Noah.”

“No.” Skye’s voice stays smooth, unpressing. “I mean the one your mother uses.”

The room goes very still around him. Zayne looks at the monitor, at the soft ugly green of it. His grip on the desk loosens, then tightens again.

“Maybe next time,” he says.

Not yes. Not no. Something in between.

A smile enters Skye’s voice again, slight enough to be heard only if someone is already listening for it.

“Goodnight, Noah.”The line clicks dead. Dial tone floods in, flat and vacant, too loud after the shape of Skye’s voice.

Zayne does not disconnect right away. He sits perfectly still at the desk, headset pressed to one ear, listening to the dead air.

The appartment feels different after certain calls. Not changed exactly. Just more visible. The glass on the desk. The loose thread at the cuff of his sleeve. The faint reflection of himself in the dark window, blurred by the screen glow. He reaches up at last and presses the button. Silence settles back into place.

He did not tell him his real name. He did not write down the club. He did not need to say anything at all about the life he had before this one.

And still, for one brief second after the line went dead, Zayne had the strange, unwanted impression that Skye already knew there had been another life before Noah.