Finally, my phone pings.
It’s a man named Brian.
I end the chat and start again.
Twenty-two minutes to wait this time.
“This can’t be happening,” I snarl.
I don’t know what my plan was, but it wasn’t this. I need to get her phone number or her surname, so I can find her or something. I need anything except for our growing connection to be severed.
It’s possible there was no connection, at least on her end, but at least I would’ve known for sure. This is so much worse.
Then, with eleven minutes to wait, a thought occurs to me.
Did she end the chat?
Rusty gets tired of my pacing and pads over to his toy cupboard. He’s a clever dog, pawing at the handle until the cupboard swings open. Ducking his head inside, he pulls out his favorite beaten-up teddy bear.
I figure I owe him since I’m affecting him with my stress.
Carrying my phone and the toy onto my large rooftop garden, I toss it to the other end, waiting as he brings it back.
We play fetch as the minutes tick down, then another photo appears.
It’s not Rachel.
It’s not her for the next four times, either.
My chest hurts, cramping tightly. My belly churns. This can’t happen, not right in the middle of our conversation.
Desperation grips me.
The next time a chat advisor appears – it’s been at least two hours – I type out a quick message.
I was talking with an advisor before. Rachel. Would I be able to speak with her again?
The reply comes far too quickly.
I’m sorry, sir, but I’m unable to give out details about our employees. Is there anything I can help you with?
I almost follow up. But if this is company policy, there’s no way any of the advisors are going to risk their jobs.
Could I offer to pay one of them?
But surely they wouldn’t believe me, thinking I’m some crazy ex or a stalker.
That would make them even more suspicious.
I end the chat and walk to the edge of the garden, looking down over the city. Rusty comes and sits at my side, his head tilted, staring up at me curiously.
I stroke my hand on the top of his head, scratching his favorite spot.
“What the hell do I do, boy?”
Weirdly, my mind goes to my childhood, before I learned to toughen up my emotions before I learned to close myself off. The same feeling returns to me now.
It’s like all that fear and genuine emotion – feelings I learned to bury deep – have resurfaced.
It’s like, without even being together in person, Rachel has started to unlock parts of me.
But now she’s gone.
And I don’t know how to find her.
With a sigh, I turn and walk back inside. I amble back to the gym. It’s too late for the live stream now. We’ll have to do that tomorrow.
But it’s not too late to hammer the bag until my arms burn, to hammer it until it whines on the hinges and swings violently back and forth.
I keep hitting, trying to obliterate Rachel from my mind, trying to tell myself none of it meant anything.
There’s that possibility, too, even if I don’t want to face it.
She could’ve ended the chat.
CHAPTER FOUR
Rachel
I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling.
I’ve got the window and curtains open despite the noise of the city, the cars honking, and the screech of cats and two people yelling a few streets over.
I’m watching the streetlights, and the moonlight as it moves across the ceiling. It’s very early morning, but I haven’t been able to sleep.
He ended the chat.
I knew things were getting too intimate, too weird.
He was probably happy to humor me for a little while, sharing our ages, but then he decided he’d had enough, and the chat ended.
No, a voice whispers from a silly hopeful place. Chats have ended by mistake before. The tech guys are working on it, remember? There was an email about it.
That’s true. Our system is outdated and sloppy, and there have been complaints about chats randomly dropping out.
The problem is, that it’s impossible to tell whether somebody ended it manually or it dropped out because of a tech issue.
What’s more likely, really?
No chat has ever dropped out on me.
Okay, ever doesn’t mean much when I’ve been working at this company for two months. It hasn’t happened.
Then, when I’m finally speaking to somebody I like, the system chooses that moment to crash.
Worse, there wasn’t time to reload the application.
My shift was over, and the system closes you out once you are no longer on the work schedule.
There’s nothing for me to do but….
But what?
Hope that Ryland Ross boots up the help chat tomorrow, the next day, and the day after – all in hopes of finding a woman he doesn’t know and has no interest in?
Groaning, I roll over, burying my face in the pillow.