Page 21 of Not That Impossible

I kind of couldn’t believe I even had it. The holy grail of phone numbers.

“Okay,” I said again, and wandered into the sitting room. I perched on the edge of the sofa, stared at the phone some more, then gingerly opened up a text conversation.

How would a very mature and sexually confident man who wanted to say, Oh, hi! So, you had your tongue in my mouth earlier and I was wondering if you’d like to give that another go some time,kick off a conversation?

Me

What’s up?

No, not that.

Ummm…

Good evening.

That was stupid. It sounded like I was welcoming him to a restaurant.

Bro!

Hell, no.

Right. This wasn’t getting me anywhere.

Before I could second-guess myself, I went old-school and pressed the call button.

It rang and rang, long enough for my mouth to dry out completely while my hands started to sweat, before Liam answered.

“Nash,” he said.

I dropped the phone.

Grunting, I bent over and swiped it up from the floor, blushing like a fool even though there was no-one there to see me. I jammed it against my ear. “Hi!” I said, way too loud.

“Hello."

“This is Jasper.”

There was a brief pause. “Jasper?”

“Um. Connolly. Jasper Connolly?”

“I know who you are, Jasper.” He sounded amused. Warm, almost.

It was throwing me off.

“Great!” I said. “Good. Okay, so Adam gave me your number.” Whoops. I didn’t mean to start by dropping Adam in it. Never mind. Liam would probably blame him anyway. “Don’t worry,” I scrambled to add. “I didn’t tell him why I wanted it. I mean, he thinks he knows and he’s not wrong, but he doesn’t knowallof it.” He didn’t know that Liam had wanted me back.

“Why did you want it?” Liam said.

“Well…is this a good time to talk? Sorry, I should have asked that first. Are you at work? I don’t know your shifts. Are you alone?”

There was another pause. This one was longer. I squirmed uncomfortably on the sofa. Eventually, he said, “Do I need to be alone?”

“What?”

“Is this the kind of conversation I’m going to want privacy for?”

It was unfair what a lovely voice Liam had, honestly. It was always deep and a little gruff, but usually it was sharp, too. Impatient. Right now, it was deep and had a mellow tone to it that I wasn’t used to.

---