a photo of her. He didn’t know about her website, and had never seemed to care about comics or pop culture during his live streams. He’d been a puzzle nerd through and through, though maybe they tried to gatekeep women out of their circles, too.
“No. Just . . . I’d thought you were. Before. But I never knew because—not that it matters—just.” He sighed. “Sorry. This is why I stick to talking about puzzles. I’ll try not to do something like that again.”
“Thanks,” she said. He didn’t seem to be a jerk, which fit with what she remembered of him.
“This whole thing is kind of weird, right?” he asked after a long pause in which she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“My email?” She fiddled with her phone case, which was a rubbery plastic replica of Aurora’s Sword of Truth that she’d found on eBay and kept her phone safer than the expensive cases she’d tried in the past.
“Yeah, obviously. That was undoubtedly weird.” He was still blunt like she remembered, but Reggie had liked that about him. “I mean us talking after all this time. Or rather, us being able to hear each other instead of you just watching me and typing.”
“It is weird,” Reggie admitted. “For a long time, you were just the faceless guy in my computer, solving puzzles or trying to make them, who sometimes gave me advice about website design and my annoying family.”
He hadn’t been entirely faceless. He’d had that mouth, with a really plump, bitable lower lip, and now that he was on the other end of her phone, she couldn’t help but try to fill in the rest of his face.
“And you were the cat anime avatar who asked interesting questions and gave me advice about things I’d like and my annoying family.”
“Did your brother ever pop the question to his girlfriend?” she asked.
“He did, and I’m an uncle now. Did your sister ever stop avoiding you?”
Ah, that bluntness wasn’t so cute when it touched on one of her sore spots. It hit her then how much she’d shared with him. When he’d been a stranger on the internet, she’d told him things she hadn’t told anyone apart from her therapist. “Yeah. She’s abroad right now, but we talk more these days.”
“Good. And that website you were working on?”
He’d been there for the birth of GirlsWithGlasses, too. “Um. It’s chugging along.”
“Cool.”
There was a long pause of the awkward variety and Reggie unlocked the brake on one of her wheels and rolled her chair forward and back in a semicircle. “Okay. So—”
“Why do you want my voice?” he asked, demonstrating that bluntness again.
“Because I’m a sassy sea witch and I’m gonna keep it in a nautilus necklace, then use it to steal your man from right under your nose,” she replied drily.
He laughed in response, and Reggie felt relief loosen her body as her own grin spread across her face. His laugh was goofy as fuck, a rapid-fire trill like an evil cartoon kitten or something. He wasn’t a smooth talker—not intentionally at least. He was a big ol’ nerd, like her, just one who preferred his cube Rubik’s, not Cosmic.
That was what she’d liked about his live stream, apart from his voice—that he was deeply and unashamedly interested in something. She didn’t enjoy puzzles much herself—they seemed like a waste of valuable time—but she’d liked listening to him figure them out. He hadn’t laughed much when he’d done the videos, though. His mouth, when it’d been visible, had usually been a line of concentration as he worked, and his shoulders had usually been stiff and tense. He’d smiled in response to her messages, but there had been a reserve to those smiles that she didn’t hear in his voice now.
None of that was important to her current objective, though.
“Honestly? All your videos got deleted when you shut down your Livestream account. I have no other way to access your voice apart from paying for it, unless you want to give it to me for free.”
He grunted. “The sea witch joke actually answered my question. This does not.”
Reggie pressed her feet into the footrests of her chair and shifted in her seat, the movement one of mental discomfort, not physical. He was right. She wasn’t being direct.
“I have insomnia and I need your voice to sleep,” she grumbled, seriously annoyed that he knew this about her. People already saw her as weak, when they weren’t busy looking through her, and she hated