Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Carlos didn’t intend to call a sex line. It just sort of happened.

He had left that disgustingly loud faculty party early. He hated the damned things, he hated the cheap wine and the forced joviality, but this time he didn’t manage to talk his way out of it. He rarely managed to talk his way out of, or into, anything. Actually, it wasn’t very often that he managed to talk at all, since he preferred to hide either in his lab or in his flat most of the time. He was more useful there, and he knew he was very good at what he did, even if his field of research was so obscure that it took half an hour to explain what it was that he actually did. Well, half an hour if he was talking to someone with a Ph.D. in biochemistry – otherwise it would probably take years.

He was more drunk than he wanted to be, but not drunk enough to forget about the humiliation of failing at proper small talk yet again. Apparently people didn’t care about enzymes as much as he did. Instead, people talked about friends (but he never remembered who broke up with whom) and children (but he could never tell who was pregnant and who just deceptively pregnant-shaped) and politics (but he didn’t know who was running for president) and haircuts (but his own hair was so weird and uncontrollable that people just tended to stare at it). To avoid further missteps, he crammed half of an extraordinarily dry tuna sandwich into his mouth, just to hear a colleague’s pony-tailed girlfriend (he forgot her name) make a comment about how loud he was chewing. He spent the rest of the evening leaning against a wall, slowly sipping can after can of somewhat warm beer, and trying to turn invisible. He stayed until ten, because he didn’t want to be the first one to leave. That would have been like admitting defeat.

When he got back to his small apartment, he felt dizzy and exhausted and annoyed, not in the shape to get any work done, but far too wired to go to bed. He prepared himself for another sleepless night spent sitting cross-legged on the floor, solving Sudoku puzzles until his eyes hurt, just to keep from punching something. He felt in his jacket pocket for the pencil stub he always kept with him, and that was when he found the phone number.

He had discovered the advertisement weeks ago, thumbtacked to the wall of one of the cubicles in the men’s room near his lab in the biochem department’s basement: a printed page with the image of a stylised eye on it, and the slogan – WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE. Underneath the large words in purple, smaller print proclaimed: Call for the time of your life! Our lovely ladies and gorgeous gentlemen are here to satisfy your darkest, strangest desires! We are available all hours of the day, charging modest prices by the minute. The tear-off strips on the bottom of the page sported a local landline number, and Carlos took one, on a whim, and because this weird little ad was the first thing that made him smile in weeks. When he went back to the same cubicle the next day, the piece of paper was gone. He asked his colleagues (well, the people working on the same corridor as him) about the phone sex advertisement on the wall, but they all looked him uncomprehending and a little alarmed. One of them forced out a laugh, apparently thinking it was a very poor joke. So Carlos sidled away, and forgot about the entire thing until his fingers closed around that little scrap of paper.

It was perfect. He felt like shouting, like taking all his embarrassed frustration out on someone before he exploded, but he knew he would never in a thousand years dare to do that to a real person standing in front of him, to someone who could talk back. But there, on the other end of the phone there was some poor man or woman whose job combined the worst aspects of prostitution and telemarketing. And that person was paid not to hang up. He would call, let the whoever was on the other side debase themselves to the keep the call going, he would bask in their pathetic servility, maybe make a few outlandish requests to humiliate them further, then he would hang up. Like a prank call, minus the risk of pissing someone off. Great plan.

He sat down on the sofa that was also his bed, since the living room was also his bedroom and, if fact, the only room in his flat. He dialled the number eagerly, and pressed call. After three rings, someone picked up.

"Welcome… to Night Vale,’ said a voice, and Carlos had to admit that despite its grandiose cheesiness, it sounded quite pleasant. "Which one of our ladies or gentlemen do you require tonight? If you are a first-time caller or suffering from memory loss, allow me to remind you that from 10 pm to 6 am, the available personnel are Lyanne Hart, Steve Carlsberg…"

"You’ll do fine," blurted out Carlos. The voice had a strange lulling effect, and listening to it he felt too close to taking the entire thing seriously. He had to remind himself that he didn’t call this number for enjoyment, he called it to find someone more pathetic than him.

"Very well. My name is Cecil," continued the voice. "How may I address you, kind caller?"

"Carlos," said Carlos, cursing himself for not saying one of his colleagues' names instead.

"Carlos," repeated the voice named Cecil, and Carlos couldn’t help the shudder running down his spine. The way that man said his name, Carlos could imagine him turning it over in his mouth, tasting every separate sound on his tongue. It felt strangely obscene. But the man was a professional, of course he talked like that.

"What would you like to do to me, Carlos?" asked Cecil, and Carlos had to swallow a sneer. This was why he didn’t really miss sex. He liked men’s bodies, he liked women’s bodies, he liked orgasm, but when it came to sex, he couldn’t help but find it a boring, awkward, ridiculous ritual. I say the right things, you do the right things, we both pretend it was far better than it actually was because we feel a vague obligation to boost each other’s self esteem. Pathetic. On the rare occasions he actually ended up in bed with someone, he obediently went through the motions with quiet disappointment. But now there was no one here, and he could let loose.

"Nothing," snapped Carlos gleefully. "I don’t want to do anything to you. You’re not my type. Hey, couldn’t you, um, talk about me having sex with someone far hotter than you?"

"Very well," said the voice, taking this in stride. "Do you have someone specific in mind? Most callers prefer celebrities, with politicians coming in a close second."

"I don’t care," answered Carlos. "Just make him very muscular. And, um, blond hair."

"He is standing right in front of you," said Cecil, a little awkwardly. "He is looking at you, and he knows you want him. He is wearing a linen shirt, and he slowly starts unbuttoning it. Are you looking at him? He is reaching inside his shirt to tease a nipple, and…"

"Wait, wait, stop," interrupted Carlos. He wanted to get a reaction from Cecil, to hear humiliation, annoyance, anger, and his last request didn’t seem to do the trick. "Give me some context! Where are we? I can’t get into this without some background information."

There was silence on the other end of the phone line.

"Come on, tell me where we are," demanded Carlos. "Bedroom? Kitchen? Bathroom? In the middle of Times Square? What sort of phone sex worker are you? Come on!"

There was another long moment of silence. Carlos reckoned he managed to bully Cecil speechless, and prepared to put the phone down with an ill-defined sense of disappointment, when the man finally spoke.

"The full moon hanging over the desert wastes reminds you of the eye of some enormous primordial beast," he said. "It is the only source of light for miles and miles around, and the darkness around you is almost complete. You only see the pitch-black outlines of the dunes, and the pitch-black outline of your own hands. They told you the desert would be cold at night, cold enough to kill, and you wish, you desperately and fervently wish that were true. But you have been walking for days now, and despite the night-time you are surrounded by scorching, blistering heat. You are thirsty. Your skin feels hot and dry, as if it betrayed your living body to become a part of the dead desert instead. You dream of water, in glasses and pitchers and lakes and brooks, you remember its splashing sound and its clean, empty taste. But you won’t see water ever again, you realise, as you realise that you will die here, that you will stop and fall and wither until you are as dry as the sand. That is when you look up at the next dune, and you see him."

Carlos made a little noncommittal sound. He had no idea what to think. That was not what he expected from a phone sex worker, that was strange, that was downright bizarre, and it was his cue to laugh and mock and ridicule. He would do that, he would definitely do it, but for the moment he wanted to listen to Cecil’s story for just a little bit longer.

"You blink, and blink again," Cecil continued. "You rub your dry, tearless eyes, but the outline of the lone figure is still there. You scamper up the side of the dune, your feet sinking into the silty mixture of pebbles and sand up to the ankle, but you don’t care, you don’t care that the cloud of sand you kicked up gets into your nose, your mouth, your eyes, stinging and aching, because you have to reach him before he goes. And then you are there, standing before him, and he smiles at you lazily, like he is glad that you came. You see that his feet are bare, and so is his chest, and a pair of worn jeans are slung low on his hips. His hair is stuck into spiky clumps, and beads of sweat are running down his neck to gather in the little indentation above his collarbone, and you watch them trickle on, marking capricious parallel lines down his chest, down his abdomen, but before you could stop them, they disappear under the waistband of his jeans. As the moonlight hits him, he almost glistens – he looks cool and wet and you need to touch him. You want to, don’t you?"

Cecil fell silent, waiting for an answer, and Carlos was thinking about what to say. It would have to be something clever, something cutting, spiteful. It would have to be something that shut this whole thing down, that made it clear that he didn’t take it seriously and that he had absolutely no intention of stroking himself to orgasm while an absolute stranger was crooning absurdities into his ear.

"I…er," groaned Carlos finally.

"He knew you wouldn’t be able to help yourself," said Cecil, with a thread of warm amusement in his voice. "You lean in, and taste the skin of his neck, your tongue flat against the fluttering pulse. He tastes like saltwater and port towns, he tastes like seagulls sound, and you want to drown in him. You bend down to mouth at his collarbone, and follow the little droplets down, down until you are kneeling on the silt, nuzzling against the plane of his stomach, and as you rub your cheek against him, you can feel two strong hands fist into your hair, pulling hard."

Carlos had difficulty stifling a gasp. The rational part of his mind warned him that he was far past the point where he could pretend to be unaffected, but it was overruled by the part of him saying that yes, he could continue to pretend this did nothing for him as long as Cecil kept talking, and he would deal with the consequences sometime later.

"He forces your head up and drags you back to your feet and kisses you on the mouth. You kiss him back ferociously, like you are trying to drink him, because nothing else will satisfy the thirst and the burning. And as you are kissing he pulls you into him, until your hot, dry body is flush against his, and rocking against him you can feel he is hard in his jeans, rubbing up against you with every movement. He bears you down without breaking the kiss, you are lying flat on your back on the warm silt, with his weight pressing on top of you, and you can feel how hard he is for you, how good he will be for you. He yanks your hair so hard you see the stars of a constellation you never knew about, and he kicks your legs open to press in against you. You want him."

Carlos didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. He was not sure when he had started palming himself through his pants.

"You want him," repeated the voice insistently. "You want him like water."

"I want him," blurted out Carlos, quick and clumsy and undignified.

"You are lying there underneath him, naked and exposed, and he slides a hand between the two of you, to finally touch you. You arch into the hand wrapping around you, pushing up frantically, but he just smiles. His smile becomes wider and wider, until it reaches his ears, and his teeth are white and sharp and there are many of them, and his hand is tight around your cock as he throws his head back and laughs. His laughter creaks like a badly oiled metal hinge, and it sends an ice-cold shiver through your body. And then, still laughing, the apparition vanishes, its laughing head, the sinews of its neck, its strong arms, its taut stomach, its erection digging into your thigh, its hand still on your cock crumbling back into the sand and silt it always was."

Carlos couldn’t help a vague sound of confused disappointment. He could have asked what was happening and why, he could have made threats, but all he wanted was hear to Cecil’s voice, so he could imagine he could feel those ghostly hands on him again.

"You are alone in the desert," Cecil continued relentlessly. "You’ve always been. You should probably get up and try to walk. If you stay here, you can only hope the night vultures get you before your veins slowly dry out. But you are still naked, still lying on your back on the silt. You are still hard, aching for the hands, the mouth, the cock of someone who was nothing more than a mirage. Let’s get up and try to walk."

"I can’t," panted Carlos into the phone. "I can’t." He was so hard it hurt, and his bewildered anger towards that impossible, infuriating voice only made it worse.

"You rut into you own dry, sandy hand," continued Cecil, his voice still as calm and unaffected as it was in the beginning. "But your skin feels just as hot and rough as the desert, and you know that if you couldn’t cry, you can’t come either. There is nothing left in you, and you are on your back, begging for release with your fist around your cock, but nothing happens."

"Please," whimpered Carlos, with his eyes shut tight, his right hand down his boxers and his left clutching the phone in a deathgrip, far beyond caring what he sounded like. "Please let me. Please make me."

"Suddenly, you hear a roll of thunder," said Cecil. "Then a slight, uncertain wind awakens, bringing the smell of lightning and lemons, and you can feel the first large drops of rain on your skin. Every drop lands like a cool, wet kiss, and you can feel them caressing and tickling your chest, your thighs, your face. Some of them fall into your mouth, dissolve on your tongue. Everywhere they land, the sand is washed off and your skin comes alive, demanding more. And more comes, the rain falling down in earnest, until you are utterly drenched, slick with it, shaking with delight and want as you gasp for breath through the sheets of water criss-crossing the air."

"Yes," grunted Carlos, desperately close to the edge.

"Yes," echoed Cecil. "Yes, the rain has washed you clean, and yes, it still keeps falling, and your hand is wet and your cock is wet and your hand is on your cock, your back is on the sand, and your are staring up at the lights shining through the rainclouds. You can come now, Carlos."

Cecil said his name like a word of dark and incomprehensible magic, like a command, and Carlos was overwhelmed, lightning-struck, Carlos was coming hard. His vision went white and he slumped back onto the sofa, gasping and shaking through the aftershocks, while the voice named Cecil whispered calming nonsense into the phone he was still clutching to his ear.

Still trembling a little, he struggled out of his pants, and clumsily tried to wipe himself with his some tissues. He did not want to hang up just yet, but he had no idea how he could talk to Cecil now, after all this happened, and he could already feel his throat closing up, almost choking with embarrassment, when Cecil spoke again.

"You have walked into the desert, looking for gold and diamonds," he stated, in his nonchalant tone. "You will walk out of it, having found only water. The rain didn’t give you what you wanted, but did it give you what you need?"

"I don’t know if there is a difference," said Carlos, smiling at the absurdity of it all.

"We will see," he answered. "But for now – good night, Carlos. Good night."

The other man hung up the phone. Carlos knew he should have felt ashamed, terrified, disgusted, angry – any number of things related to the fact that he got slightly drunk, decided to prank call a sex line and somehow ended up jerking off furiously to an unearthly monologue by a weirdo with the sexiest voice on earth, until he came all over his only presentable pair of pants. He also knew he should probably muster up some sadness over the fact that despite nobody touching him, or even being in the same room as him, this was the best sex he could remember having.

But the smell of lightning and lemons still hovered around the room, and Carlos felt like his limbs were turned into rainwater and his thoughts washed away by flash floods, and no matter how hard he reached for the panic, it simply wasn’t there. So he pulled his chequered comforter over himself, turned towards the wall, and fell into a deep, peaceful sleep.

Chapter Text

The next day, Carlos did his best not to think about what had happened. He woke up, dug out some clean-seeming clothes from the bottom of his laundry pile and went back to the labs. He worked for fourteen hours straight, scribbling calculations on his whiteboard and reading through mind-numbingly repetitive documentation of his former experiments. He was afraid that if he stopped for a second, memories of last night would creep back in. When he could not even pretend to work anymore, he walked home, the music in his headphones blaring as loud as it could, and he wasn’t thinking about it, because as long as he didn’t think about it, it hadn’t happened.

He managed to keep memories of that strangely, terrifyingly glorious phone call at bay for two whole days. But in the middle of the third night, he woke with vague memories of a dream, a dream of desert heat and water-slick hands touching him, a smile with too many teeth and too much affection. He startled awake, desperately hard. Still half asleep, he couldn’t muster up the willpower not to reach for that feeling in the dream, not to wrap a hand around his cock, not to imagine a voice telling him he was allowed to do it, telling him he was doing so well, saying his name, over and over and over again. He didn’t have the willpower not to come into his own hand with a defeated little whine. He sat up, tried to take deep and even breaths, tried to calm down. The red numbers of his alarm clock reproachfully reminded him that it was 04:12 in the morning, and that even he should know that normal people were asleep at four in the morning. Maybe extremely cool people were still partying, or extremely industrious people were still working, but he was quite certain that none of them were pathetic enough to jerk off to the vague memory of some hallucinatory weirdness they heard on a sex line. In that moment, he solemnly promised himself that he would not call that number ever again.

***

It didn’t take an entire week for him to sit down at his desk and after forty minutes of agonising hesitation, finally call. His fingers were shaking as he dialled the number and he hated himself for it, almost as much as he hated that he was unable to come up with an effective rationalisation for why he was doing it. He could try to tell himself he was only calling to complain, or to ask the man if he invented the entire eldritch scenario on the spot, with desert demons and lecherous rain, or something equally reasonable. But that wouldn’t have been the truth. The truth was that despite working fourteen hours a day, sleeping little and keeping as busy as humanly possible, Cecil’s words and Cecil’s voice kept finding their way back into his thoughts. It was bad enough the very thought of that phone call led to a state of helpless, weak-kneed arousal. Far worse was the knowledge that this was the only thing that happened to him for months, maybe for years, that felt unquestionably real.

"Welcome to Night Vale," said Cecil as he picked up the phone. "Carlos again, isn’t it? It’s nice to have you back."

Carlos came to the belated realisation that in order to have a repeat of the last phone call, he would need to ask for it. He had trouble asking for a sandwich at the university cafeteria, how could he ask for eldritch and elaborate sexual fantasies over the phone?

"Hi Cecil," he ground out. "I. I am calling. Um. Because I."

"Your wrists are fastened securely to the top part of a metal frame that children’s swings hang from," said Cecil, without waiting for him to speak. "Your feet are immobilised by small plastic buckets filled with pebbles. You should not have come to the dog park."

Carlos barely had time for a relieved sigh before he was knocked off his feet by even more of that voice, even more of that story. Ten minutes later he was laying on his back on a bloodstone altar, as a non-virgin sacrifice in a complicated ritual officiated by mysterious hooded figures, hooded figures who were holding him down, one of them at each of his arms and legs, one holding his head steady, forcing him to stare up at the flickering, indecipherable lights slowly assembling into a form the outlines of a malicious deity. And one hooded figure whose leather-gloved hands were bringing him closer and closer to orgasm with ruthless, impersonal efficiency. That is where he really felt he was, not sitting at his own desk, trying to muffle the desperate, pathetic sounds he was making by biting down on his lower lip, jerking off to the rhythm of the voice in his ear, the voice that was now chanting in a coarse agglutinating language he couldn’t even identify, but as it built to a crescendo he nevertheless came, knowing that the inhuman god of the hooded figures would be sated for the next little while.

Cecil patiently waited for his breathing to calm down, talking nonchalantly about the domestic uses of bloodstones, and then he said goodbye. Good night, Carlos. Good night. There was a smile in his voice.

***

Carlos resolved not to call. He ended up calling again, then swearing that he won’t again, then breaking his promise again. He started crossing the days of the calls out in a diary: he meant to remind himself of his disgusting weak-mindedness, but it ended up looking like he was marking holidays, and in a way, he was. Every time he called Cecil he went to sleep content, and despite the guilt and self-recriminations, he woke up with a strange, Christmas-morningish feeling. On the days after he talked to Cecil, he felt inspired like he hasn’t been in a long time, like he could figure out anything he set his mind to, given enough time and test tubes. But the feeling passed, and on the next day, he sank back into the dull fog of hopeless indifference he had been living in for the past few years. Now that he remembered feeling otherwise, he could hardly bear it.

The longest he managed to hold out without calling was twelve days, and when he finally gave in, Cecil treated him to public sex in a public library with the maliciously muttering librarians lurking nearby. The orgasm left him shaking for an hour afterwards, and even worse, Cecil somehow knew how he felt about librarians – since his undergraduate days, he had trouble looking a librarian in the eye, he checked the return date each time he picked up a book, and he always worried that he accidentally creased the pages without noticing, or that someone else did and he would be blamed. Cecil didn’t even have to describe the librarians in detail, because to Carlos, they already were icy-eyed razor-fanged bloodthirsty monsters, and the exhilarating freedom of making a mess in a library coupled with the irrational fear of the things that might happen if he got caught – it made him come harder than he thought possible, but also, if only for a for a few minutes, it let him believe that he was the sort of person who would dare to stand up to librarians. He carried that feeling with him for days, like the tiny, flickering light of a match lit in his ribcage.

***

He decided he should stop trying not to call. After all, sooner or later Cecil would just run out of things to say, wouldn’t he? For all their hallucinogenic vividness, there was no way the man was making them up on the spot. He must have a finite repertoire, and all Carlos had to do was exhaust it. A few more calls, and Cecil would get repetitive, and then everything could go back to how it was before. There wasn’t anything especially appealing about his life as it was before, but his rational mind knew that he was better off without these bi-weekly phone sex sessions. He tried to be methodical about it: instead of running to the phone whenever he could no longer restrain himself, he called at regular intervals – every Tuesday and Friday at 11 pm. He settled into a routine as he waited for Cecil to get boring.

The problem was that Cecil never seemed to run out of ideas. One day, he spun an elaborate story in which Carlos had to climb an incredibly tall cactus to win the graces of the beautiful woman who lived on top of it, the woman herself as prickly and coarse as the cactus she called a home. Another day he had a quick session where he was lying spread-eagled on a bed entirely made of living tongues, squirming and moaning as they licked and rimmed him in unison. A week later, Carlos found himself in an old car lot, bent over a rusty Ford’s hood by a man in a tan jacket, whose face he couldn’t quite remember, but he knew there was something very wrong as the man didn’t put his suitcase down even when his other hand was stripping Carlos’s cock. Another time, he faced his own doppelganger who proceeded to spank him pink. The stories never stopped, and instead of eagerly waiting for the day when Cecil would be unable to come up with something new, Carlos started to hope it would never come.

After the second month, it stopped bothering him that he was falling apart in front of another person. It was the thing he hated most in real-life sex: that somebody else must see you sweating, panting, groaning, making the weird face you make when you come. How could people properly enjoy what they were doing when they looked and sounded so humiliatingly ridiculous doing it? But with Cecil, it was a little different. Cecil didn’t see him, of course, and Cecil always reacted to his heavy breathing, to the helpless noises he made with – well, with some sort of smug pride, which made sense, since they meant that he was doing his job well. Cecil never became the least bit involved in the stories he told – Carlos knew that the point of phone sex usually was that the person on the other end of the line was touching themselves, or at least loudly pretending that they were touching themselves. But Cecil always remained the calm, untouchable narrator, even though the scenes he relayed were barren in themselves, and only came alive through his voice, only became real when his smooth, gliding baritone filled them with meaning and texture. Carlos sometimes wondered what sort of person Cecil really was – what he looked like, what sort of things he thought about, what sort of clothes he wore, and why he started doing this for a living. It struck Carlos as strange that Cecil never said anything about himself. All Carlos knew was that Cecil seemed to like telling these weird stories – but he couldn’t be certain. After all, Cecil was a professional, paid to give the callers whatever they wanted, and just because he accommodated Carlos’s sudden craving for… whatever this was, didn’t mean Cecil actually liked it. If his real name even was Cecil.

***

One evening, after a long day of comparing tissue samples that appeared almost identical, wondering if the lab technicians messed up again, and avoiding his head of department, he looked forward to his call. He took off his jacket, he kicked off his shoes and he sat down on his bed before dialling. But instead of picking up after two or three rings, like he usually did, the phone rang eight times.

"Welcome to Night Vale!" said a high, chipper and obviously female voice. "This is Intern Dana, how may I help you?"

Carlos considered hanging up, but the need to talk to Cecil was stronger than his alarm at this new conversation partner.

"Hello – Dana," he said carefully. "I’m looking for Cecil."

"Oh, Cecil? I’m afraid he’s on the other line at the moment," explained the female voice apparently called Intern Dana. "But if you hold the line, I’m sure he’ll be with you as soon as he’s done."

"How long does that usually take?" asked Carlos, aiming for nonchalance and hitting unreasonable jealousy instead.

"Oh, it shouldn’t be longer than five minutes, not with that guy," answered Dana dismissively. "Wouldn’t you like to talk to someone else instead?"

"I- I am sure you are very nice, but..." stumbled Carlos.

"But I’m not your type," she answered with a little laugh. "Don’t worry, I could tell that from your voice. Still, five of us are available right now, and I don’t think you should rule us all out. Pamela can speak in dozens of accents: steamy French, authoritative German, posh British, mucky British, icy Russian – you name it, she speaks it. Leanne Hart is the second best voice-only submissive in the world, beaten only by a Japanese AI. Steve Carlsberg mostly does discipline and humiliation. He’s a total jerk, but some people get off on that. And then there’s me. I’m only the intern here so I get the stuff the others don’t want to do, and right now that means call dispatch, but I also get rape fantasies, incest, bestiality, underage-"

"You’re underage?" interrupted Carlos, aghast.

"No, but I’m pretty damn good at pretending."

"What about Cecil?" he asked, trying to steer the conversation away from the subject of underage bestiality.

"Oh, Cecil is good at everything," she said, and he could hear her voice light up with admiration. "He doesn’t really have a speciality, he always comes up with something new that somehow works for the callers. Not to mention his voice, that voice would probably work miracles if he was reading from an algebra textbook. He has as many regular callers as all the others put together. And since I’m the intern, I get to hang out with him in person!"

There was some clicking and shuffling in the background, Dana leaned away from the phone to talk to someone else, then she addressed Carlos.

"Excuse me, what was your name again?"

"Carlos. Is my name."

"Wow," she breathed. "You’re Carlos. Well, anyway, have fun, and thanks a lot for calling Night Vale."

Before he could ask how come she knew his name, there was a click, a beep, and the next thing he heard was that fantastic, familiar voice.

"Welcome to Night Vale, Carlos."

"I really hope I didn’t offend her by saying I would rather..." started Carlos.

"Oh no, the listener is always right, and when they aren’t, that is inherently our fault," answered Cecil. "Anyway, Intern Dana is very busy tonight. She has a pre-booked conference call with the McDanields gang, and it may very well last until morning."

"How come you even have internships? Do that many people want to get into… your profession?"

"Lots of people do, yes, a surprisingly large number of people. But there’s an enormous turnover rate. Most interns don’t last the week."

"Are they so bad you fire them on the spot?" asked Carlos, his curiosity piqued.

"Sometimes," said Cecil with a smile in his voice. ‘But usually they decide to leave. Well, more like run away with tears streaming from their eyes open wide in astonished horror, screaming and muttering the lyrics to nursery rhymes to blot the memory of disturbingly inhuman entanglements from their fresh young minds. Ours is not an easy job."

"Do you hate it that much?" asked Carlos, suddenly guilty.

"No, I have grown to like it quite a lot," said Cecil thoughtfully. "It’s not the profession I would have chosen, but I get to talk to people, give them some pleasure, and sometimes I even get to use my brain in the process. What could be better than that?"

"Did you start out as an intern too?"

"Yes, almost everybody does, but that was ages ago, I hardly remember it. I did an internship just like Intern Dana, although I have to admit I wasn’t quite so tenacious and, let’s just say, adaptable, as she is."

"Why do you put intern in front of her name?" asked Carlos. "Isn’t it a turn-off for callers to know that they are talking to someone who’s just learning the ropes?"

"You underestimate the number of people who have serious intern fetishes."

Carlos snorted in laughter, then fell into an embarrassed silence at his gracelessness.

"Did you know that there is a Faceless Old Woman who lives in you home?" asked Cecil after a few seconds. "You never see her, but she is always there. Watching you. Every time you see something in the corner of your eye, or something seems to move in the mirror, or you think something moved, but it’s just a trick of the light, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, because it’s not a trick of the light, it’s her. It’s always her. You can look around, you can get up and look for her, but when you turn your head, she won’t be there. Whatever you do, you’ll never see her face. How could you? She doesn’t have one."

Carlos curled up on his bed, listening with rapt attention.

"She doesn’t have eyes either. But she still sees you. How does that make you feel?"

"Uncomfortable," answered Carlos immediately, this wasn’t a question he had to think about. "I don’t like being looked at."

"But she likes looking at you," argued Cecil, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world. "And she will keep looking at you, she will still see you five minutes from now, but by then you are going to be hard, hard enough to be obvious, straining against your trousers. She will keep looking when you unbutton your fly and put your hand on your perfect cock. She will not blink. How could she? She has no eyes."

Carlos was already floating in that exhilaratingly strange mixture of arousal and terror, so he only hummed his agreement.

"You are going to have to touch yourself sooner or later, and she’s going to see, but you can choose how you do it," continued Cecil. "You can try to cover up, curl into a furtive little ball, making yourself quiet and small so she sees as little as possible, so you escape the humiliation of revealing that you are flesh. Or you can strip naked and lay yourself down on top of the covers, touching yourself slow. And firm. And good. She will see, yes, but it has been a long time, decades at the very least, since she has seen anything like you, anything as beautiful, as perfect as you. Maybe this is why she has been hiding in your home. Maybe this is why she keeps watching you."

Exactly five minutes later Carlos was slowly fucking up into his right hand, his head thrown back and his eyes closed to somehow tolerate the feeling of a stranger staring at his naked body. He felt exposed and vulnerable and terribly aware of his imperfection, but despite the tightness in his stomach, the thought of someone needing to watch him filled him with an excitement that while unpleasant, was also hopelessly arousing. The sharp attention of the unknowable, faceless woman, the inexorable waves of Cecil’s glorious, persuasive voice, and his own thumb swiping over the head of his cock struck a strange chord, and for a second, he thought it was Cecil with him in the room, Cecil watching him from the shadows with that calm intensity, Cecil seeing him touch himself, Cecil seeing him fall apart. He came, almost unable to separate his panicked shock from sheer ecstasy.

He was getting used to this, and it worried him less than it should have. The problem was, it didn’t feel like spiralling into an addiction. He didn’t lose control over his life, in fact, he worked more efficiently than he ever had since the first few months of grad school. He was interested in his research again, he had new ideas, he had ideas about testing and proving those ideas. He slept better than he had for a long time, and when he met his colleagues in the corridor, he was able to muster a genuine smile, even a few words of conversation. It didn’t feel like an addiction, this thing with Cecil, and while he was pretty sure there was a word for what it felt like, he was unable to find it.

Chapter Text

Two months and a dozen phone calls later, Carlos got an unexpected memo from his head of department. He wasn’t sure how he would walk into that office without throwing up his breakfast, but he thought of Cecil’s voice calling him perfect and beautiful, he stood up as tall as he could, and he did it with his head held high. After a ten minute conversation, he walked out of the room, hurried back to his own lab and then threw up anyway.

He would need to speak at a conference in two weeks, presenting his own findings, or he would lose his scholarship. And since he had never been able to teach classes, his only source of income was that meagre scholarship they paid him for his work on artificial enzymes. The university was absolutely in the right to demand this – after all, he had weaselled out of all conferences for years, he published nothing, and gave clumsily evasive answers every time people asked him what he was working on. He was a research scientist, but the point of research was that he needed to figure something out, and for the last few years, his projects yielded no tangible results. He wasn’t as bad at biochemistry as he was at public speaking, but the research he had been doing in the past two years wasn’t anywhere near publishable. They were mostly inconclusive comparisons between organic molecules that didn’t exist outside of his lab anyway. He heated solutions and observed whether or not the vapours formed a glowing cloud – how could he stand up in front of hundreds of people and talk to them about something he himself didn’t completely understand?

But he had to. So he wiped his mouth and he got to work. He read through all his notes and observations, which was hindered by the fact that most of them were written in his own nigh-incomprehensible shorthand. He tried to sort out his minor discoveries, and decide which ones were worthy of attention, and which ones just flukes. He worked constantly and inefficiently, paralysed by the thought of losing his job, but even more terrified of standing up in front of hundreds of people to say ‘I’m not sure what I did in the past two years.’ In the last three days, he did nothing but write. He didn’t leave his lab, he didn’t sleep apart from half-hour naps passed out over his desk, he lived on instant coffee and candy bars from the machine. He finished the last page midway through the last day and went home, but he didn’t dare stop working on it, he just kept re-reading and re-writing until the sentences fell apart into strings of incomprehensible syllables.

It was midnight, one in the morning, then two, and he was still trying to write. His eyes hurt and his hands were shaking, he stank of sweat and his sweat stank of caffeine. Common sense told him that if he wanted to look anywhere near presentable the next day – no, scratch that, if he wanted to be able to talk in complete sentences the next day – he would need to get some sleep. But sleep seemed like some unattainable, alien concept. Carlos did what he usually did when he couldn’t sleep: he walked round and round in his tiny room, he did some Sudoku, he lifted a book off the shelf and made an attempt at reading. He even made himself some hot chocolate, but the first sip made him gag, and in a moment of frustration he smashed the mug against a wall. Maybe the milk was off, after all he hardly kept track of his groceries, but maybe it was just him. His stomach had felt like a clenched fist for days now. It was almost three in the morning, his laptop sat on the kitchen counter taunting him with the finished but inadequate word document, there were porcelain shards and splashes of warm milk all over his room, and in a few hours, hundreds of people would see him stutter and mumble through a lecture that may not even make sense to anyone but himself. He really needed to talk to someone. He tried to think. He didn’t know any of his neighbours, the last time he talked to his parents was a brief Christmas phone call, and he would rather die than tell any of his colleagues about this. There was only one option left.

He would have to call Cecil. He didn’t feel like phone sex at all, the very idea made the knot in his stomach tighten, but Cecil’s voice, Cecil’s smooth, gentle voice seemed like the only thing that would make this terrible fear go away. He dialled the Night Vale number, held the phone to his ear, and waited. He heard the ringing on the other side. Once, twice, three times. What if Cecil wasn’t even in? Worse, what if someone else picked up again? He had nothing against Intern Dana, they chatted a few times while he was waiting for Cecil to come to the phone, but she wasn’t the one he needed to talk to. The others, Steven and Leanne, even less so.

"Welcome… to Night Vale," said Cecil’s wonderful, glorious, disembodied voice.

"Hello Cecil, this is Carlos," he answered eagerly, realising too late that he never started their conversations himself.

"Oh, hello Carlos,’ said Cecil. "I am so glad you called me again."

Carlos squirmed underneath the seemingly genuine warmth that emanated from Cecil’s voice. He couldn’t find it in himself to answer. Cecil would soon start talking, something weird and eldritch about floating cars and cursed pizza places, and he would just have to listen and nod and say mm-hmm sometimes. Of course, this time he didn’t feel like doing the sex part of it, at all, but he would suffer through it if it meant he got to listen to that voice for ten more minutes.

"You can’t sleep?" inquired Cecil instead.

"W-what?" startled Carlos. "Well, no, not really. But that doesn’t matter."

"Of course it matters. You have never called at such an ungodly hour, well, not since our first session, and also you have been completely ignoring me for the last ten days. If my lovely Carlos has something on his mind, I am sure he will tell me, and not keep it bottled up, will he?"

The ‘lovely’ took Carlos by surprise, and he was talking before he realised he was doing it.

"It’s nothing serious really I’m stupid to even worry about it it’s just that I have this conference tomorrow and I’m going to have to present a paper that’s unfinished and terrible and everybody will look at me like ‘who is this guy and why the hell are we still funding him’ and I’m going to have to walk off that stage knowing that the things I said made no goddamned sense and all I have to do is wait for the inevitable notice from the head of department that I am fired, and that was the best case scenario, I am being generous if I imagine that I can make it to the lectern and read these fifteen pages aloud without choking and having to be carried off on a freaking stretcher."

Carlos ran out of air and paused. In the silence he heard his blood drumming in his ears at the thought that he was getting an early start at tomorrow’s humiliation by making an idiot out of himself in front of the only person who had not judged him so far. The silence went on for several interminable seconds, and Carlos debated putting down the phone to avoid Cecil’s answer.

"You are a scientist?" breathed Cecil. "Wow." The wow was stretched out for multiple melodious syllables, and try as he might, Carlos couldn’t interpret the tone as anything other than deeply impressed.

"Yes," he answered. "I do biochemistry."

"That. Is so. Amazing. Do you have test tubes and beakers? I don’t know if people today still poke around with pipettes and fluids, or if it’s all on computers, you must think I am so ignorant."

"Not at all," protested Carlos, and he was surprised that he had to stifle laughter. ‘I do work with test tubes and Petri dishes, but I spend most of my time on the computer, writing spreadsheets about what happened to the Petri dishes. Well, I should be, I usually skip that part and take notes in my personal notebook, and on the whiteboards, and on my hand, and now I’m not sure in what happened to the Petri dishes and what I’m going to tell the people who paid for the Petri dishes."

"If you tell them you did important revolutionary science," said Cecil, in a conspiratorial tone, "then they will surely understand, and give you more than sufficient funding."

"No, they won’t because the problem is that…"

And Carlos started explaining. He knew that Cecil won’t get most of it, considering the man seemed to regard ‘science’ as a something closely related to magic, and apparently had less conception of molecular biology than the average middle-schooler. He tried to simplify it as much as he could. He dropped the jargon, used similes, and tried to single out the portions of his research that actually contained new information, instead of just the regurgitating the work of others. Cecil listened, and nodded, and sometimes he said mm-hmm. Whenever Carlos halted, embarrassed at how much he was talking, Cecil goaded him into going on. He even asked questions. Most of the questions were along the lines of ‘does it glow?’ and ‘what would happen if you mixed X with Y?’ but Carlos dutifully answered them anyway. (The answers were ‘yes, a little bit’ and ‘spectacularly fail to explode’.)

When he got to the end of his explanation, or at least as much of it as he could remember without his notes, an entire hour had passed, his ideas seemed to make far more sense than they did before, his sentences became longer and more coherent, and he felt surprisingly calm. Not calm-as-the-opposite-of-freaked-out, not numb, but calm like someone who has two years of experience with the topic he is talking about, and knows it better than any other living person.

"I think that’s pretty amazing," said Cecil, although it was clear from his tone that he didn’t still really understand much of it. "Just to think that you are a real scientist, and I’ve been talking to you for months now without even knowing!"

"It’s not that big a deal," murmured Carlos, suddenly more embarrassed than when Cecil was describing a zero-gravity bondage threesome scene in graphic detail.

"But of course it is!" protested Cecil. "What time is your lecture tomorrow?"

"It’s at ten, but I have to be in at nine, for the opening of the conference."

"Well then, you still have a few brief hours to get some sleep," said Cecil.

"But-" argued Carlos, then cut himself off. He just remembered that the man he spent the last hour lecturing to, was, in fact, a phone sex worker. Whom he normally called for phone sex. Seemingly Cecil recognised his current disinterest in sexual matters, and didn’t even try to initiate anything of the sort. He was glad of it, but at the same time, disconcerted at the thought that this half-stranger knew him so intimately.

"Thank you," he blurted out finally.

"You are welcome," answered Cecil, and his voice was no longer that of the interested listener: it shifted back into his customary melting baritone. "You have laboured long and hard to gain knowledge, and now you are the only one to possess it. If you keep it to yourself it will be worth more, but if you share it, it may become more than it was. Good night, Carlos. Good night." And he hung up.

Carlos struggled out of his clothes, set his alarm for seven o’clock and maximum volume, no snooze, and crawled into bed. The logical part of his mind told him he should feel like screaming, but the rest of him felt like he was floating, all drowsy and content.

Cecil’s apparent thirst for scientific knowledge may have been an elaborate act of make-believe; after all the man was paid by the minute. But it helped remind Carlos that he was a scientist. Of course he knew he was a scientist, he worked in a building designated for science in the company of other scientists every day, but that was exactly what allowed him to forget that to the rest of the population, scientists weren’t just boring, frustrated dead-end research scholars. They were mysterious people dashing to and fro in lab coats, juggling colourful explosive liquids in glass containers, tut-tutting at samples through microscopes, and saving the world from zombie plagues and megasharks and whatnot. When he was a little kid, he thought scientists were the coolest people in the world, just by virtue of being scientists, and it really didn’t do to forget that just because he became one. Carlos smiled, hugged his pillow and went to sleep.

Chapter Text

The next morning, Carlos could hardly believe his luck when he was walking back to his small lab. Not because anything extraordinary happened, or because the weather was pleasant (in fact, the weather was defined by an atrocious grainy mist), but because he still had his lab, and he still had his scholarship. He never expected his lecture to go as well as it did, and he hardly expected it to go anything other than terribly even after Cecil managed to talk him into an almost hypnotised calm. He made it to the lectern, he talked, he didn’t choke, he didn’t faint, he didn’t stutter much, and afterward people seemed interested – at least, they asked questions. He went home afterwards, and slept like a log – like a very happy log coming down from an adrenaline high. This morning, thinking about the scholarship he hopefully secured for another two years, Carlos turned the corner to the door of his sub-basement room at the end of a corridor, and started back in surprise.

Carlos never had visitors. He didn’t even have office hours. Nevertheless, now there were two people standing in front of his door. They both seemed to be in their mid-twenties, and quite ill-at-ease. The young man had pulled his hair back into a greasy pony-tail from his pasty-pale face, and his clothes all looked too old and ill-fitting to be second hand, appearing to be at least fifth-hand instead. The young woman was dressed like someone who follows fashion out of sheer stubbornness instead of enjoyment, and while her warm brown skin and generously applied makeup disguised the fact that she has seen no more sunlight than her companion, the redness of her eyes betrayed that she seemed to have forgotten sleep even existed as a possibility.

"Professor!" cried the young man. "We are so glad you are here! Apparently you have no set office hours, and no public phone-number or e-mail address, so we thought our best chance would be just showing up and…"

"Andrzej," cut in the young woman quietly. "Excuse my colleague," he added, turning to Carlos. "He tends to get excited."

"What about?" asked Carlos, intrigued at his strange visitors despite himself.

"About you!" blurted out the young man, then fell silent under the disapproving look of the young woman.

"I’m Dr Rita Dabhoiwhala, and my excitable friend here is Mr Andrzej Seriakowak, both of us are graduate students here at the university, studying Medicine and Computer Science respectively,"she explained. "We were at your lecture yesterday, and we immediately knew we needed to talk to you. I mean, the implications!"

"What implications?" asked Carlos, too confused to be genuinely unnerved.

"Isn’t it obvious?" cut in the unkempt young man apparently named Andrzej. "The hypothetical enzymes you mentioned, the ones you found it impossible to synthetize, have the exact structure we predicted in our shared research on the regeneration of cerebral tissue!"

"In short, if you kindly allowed us to work with you on this project," continued Rita with badly concealed excitement. "Then we might be able to use it to manufacture a substance that is capable of mitigating the effects of both congenital and traumatic brain damage. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?"

"Nice to meet you," Carlos grated out. Then, because he knew manners were important, he opened the door and invited them into his lab. The two young scientists looked around in wonder at the equipment he had described in his lecture – his homebuilt system of glass containment chambers for gaseous substances, his Petri dishes overflowing with various fuzzy things, his walls covered in whiteboards and his whiteboards covered in notes.

"Wow, these are in some sort of… weird Spanish," remarked Rita, examining the writing on the whiteboards. That sounded strange, but so far Carlos hadn’t found a name for his favourite method of recording his discoveries. He liked using his native Spanish in his work. There was nothing wrong with his English, and he was so habituated to the language that he thought and dreamed in it, but Spanish had that certain comforting safety about it, something that helped him focus. And sometimes when there was something he couldn’t adequately name in Spanish (or English, for that matter), he just drew a hieroglyph of his own invention, reminding him of molecule shapes or markers or spatter patterns. From an outsider’s perspective, his notes must have looked downright eldritch – he wondered what Cecil would say about them, and had to suppress a smile.

He didn’t even have three chairs in the room, so the they spent the next few hours sitting on the floor cross-legged, talking about advanced neurobiology and 3D computer modelling of subcellular processes and how Carlos’ work could make it all come together. They kept talking over lunch at the cafeteria, then the long, windy walk to the Medicine building on the other side of the campus where Rita had a seminar and Andrzej had a plan to steal cough syrup from the storage rooms.

Carlos walked home in a daze. The enthusiasm of these two was utterly contagious, and the project they were working on seemed brilliant and revolutionary, and what’s more, they seemed to want… no, to need Carlos to help them with it. He did something that meant something – wasn’t that what he had aimed for, when he decided to become a cool scientist in a lab coat?

The first thing he did, once he locked the door of his flat, was to dial the Night Vale number. Well, he didn’t exactly have to dial it. He didn’t even have to look it up in the list of contacts on his phone – the number had been on speed dial for a month. Carlos took a deep breath and smiled in anticipation. He could hardly wait to talk to Cecil – to hear his voice again, to get lost in the lavish, chill-inducing descriptions of otherworldly landscapes and creatures, to feel his body caressed by the cresting and crashing waves of that baritone. But before that, Carlos wanted to tell him about the presentation, about his apparent success, about these young people who wanted to hear what he wanted to say about synthetic enzymes, about the unexpected elation he was feeling. And most of all, he wanted to thank Cecil for helping him when he felt he was beyond help, for listening and caring and being there.

His finger hesitated on the call button, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that no matter how much he wanted to make the call, something was wrong. He kept calling Cecil because Cecil’s voice was hot, he had already made his peace with that. But now he also wanted to call Cecil because Cecil listened and cared and was there, and that, that was just unacceptable. Cecil wasn’t a friend (not that Carlos had any), Cecil wasn’t family (not that Carlos had much of one), and Cecil wasn’t some sort of … some sort of fucked up suicide hotline. Cecil was a sex worker, and Carlos paid to him for phone sex, that was all.

If Carlos wanted to reward himself with phone sex for a job well done, that was certainly somewhat pathetic, but not half as pathetic as calling the same guy over and over again, having developed some sort of bogus emotional connection. Oh god, what if Cecil realised how Carlos felt about their sessions, how important they were to him? If he hadn’t before, he must have discovered it during last night’s spectacular fiasco. Cecil must have been so bored. No, Cecil probably found it funny, the way Carlos hyperventilated and stuttered through paragraphs upon paragraphs of clunky technobabble. What if he laughed? What if he told everything to his friends at Night Vale, imitating Carlos’s nervous prattle by cranking his beautiful baritone up into a wheezy squeak? What if the others stood around him, and they all laughed at the pathetic asshole who calls a sex line because he is freaking out about a presentation?

Carlos wanted to turn invisible, or sink into the floorboards, both of which he knew to be impossible, and also utterly pointless since he was alone, standing frozen in the middle of his flat, phone still in hand. He carded a hand through his hair, absently noted through the mortification that it was still sticking up weirdly in the back and that he must have looked ridiculous the entire day. The very thought of Cecil laughing at him made him wish he didn’t exist. Well, he did wish that on a daily basis, but this made it suddenly and acutely worse. Carlos took a deep breath. There must be something he could do.

The inspiration hit him with all its mundane simplicity: he would just need to call a different sex line. He would get off, he could say he treated himself to something nice, and he would prove to himself that his humiliating panic-and-caffeine induced rant to Cecil was just a one-off thing. Maybe he was weird, maybe he was a pervert, maybe he was addicted to phone sex – but admitting that still felt easier than actually examining the thing with Cecil, whatever it was.

Carlos opened his laptop, looked up sex lines on Google, picked the first one that didn’t seem prohibitively expensive and didn’t try to goad him into interacting with overly young-looking cam girls. It was a tasteful, minimalist website, the black lettering on a pastel background suggested both corporate professionalism and a cheery, friendly attitude. The header announced its name, Desert B, followed by a succinct logo: ‘Service with a smile’. Carlos took a deep breath, swallowed his doubts, and dialled the number.

"Hello, I am Kevin, and this is Desert B," said a chipper voice on the other end of the phone. "How may I help you tonight?"

The voice was warm and pleasant and very friendly, in fact he sounded perfect apart from the fact that he wasn’t Cecil. But Carlos told himself he didn’t need Cecil, that he just needed to get off, that’s all, so he decided to stop beating around the bush.

"Phone sex," he answered, and his voice hardly shook. "Do it, or get someone on the phone who will."

"Oh, I’m so glad that you called, very glad indeed," answered the voice named Kevin. "I believe I am up to a task, although if you would prefer another one of our operatives, I won’t be offended at all, no sir, scout’s honor."

"You’ll do," said Carlos, desperate to get this thing over with already.

"Any special requests?"

‘Just… normal stuff. Do whatever you normally do.’

‘In that case,’ continued the voice, and Carlos could hear him switch to a deeper, huskier register, a tone seemingly calibrated to raise goosebumps. ‘I think you’d like to see me on my knees, wouldn’t you? You want me to suck your big fat cock, don’t you?’

‘Yeah.’ Said Carlos, because he supposed that was the correct answer.

‘That’s good, because I want to suck you. I want to taste you on my tongue so bad.’ Continued the voice, sultry and heated and perfect.

Carlos closed his eyes, and started touching himself like he always did while on the phone, slow and tentative at first, through the fabric. The harder he was, the more difficult he found it to keep his thoughts from straying in Cecil’s direction, towards the memory of all the stories he told or just his voice in all its naked baritone glory. Carlos screwed his eyes shut and concentrated on visualising the various mundane-but-appealing sex acts Kevin was describing in meticulous detail.

‘Harder, god, fuck me harder!’ gasped Kevin on the phone, and Carlos was at a total loss concerning what to do. The other man’s desperate gasps and moans seemed to bypass his brain and go straight to his cock, but his mind was going into overdrive trying to decide how to respond to them.

‘Yeah.’ He grunted, feeling that he was letting Kevin down.

‘Yeah, take it.’ He added a few seconds later, once the realization hit that he was worrying about displeasing someone who was only acting pleased for his, Carlos’s pleasure anyway.

‘Oh, oh, you’re gonna make me come!’ moaned Kevin, breathlessly and beautifully. Carlos did his best to suppress the part of his mind that was screaming that this entire thing was ridiculous, corny and somewhat disgusting, sped up his hand, and concentrated on coming as fast as he could. When orgasm slammed into him a few seconds later, it felt forced and unpleasant, as if the ecstasy of it was a flood closing over his head, giving him no time to claw his way to the surface. He took a few deep breaths, tried to get his bearings, and forced out a somewhat weak ‘thank you’.

‘You are welcome.’ Answered Kevin, and he didn’t sound the least bit out of breath anymore. ‘Remember: Desert B – service with a smile.’

‘Yeah, sure, I’ll remember.’ Said Carlos, suddenly wanting nothing more than to hang up the phone.

‘I am extremely glad to hear that.’ Answered Kevin. ‘Until next time, customer. Until next time.’

Carlos put the phone down, cast around for some tissues to clean himself up, and tried to convince himself that his experiment was a success. After all, he did call someone who wasn’t Cecil, and he did manage to come – the evidence was all over his thigh. In fact, he would be fine if he never called Cecil again – but that though felt so disorientating and terrible that he decided not to dwell on it. All that mattered was that he proved that he liked phone sex, meaning he wasn’t just some fucked-up weirdo who could only form an emotional connection with his phone sex provider. Everything was fine. But he didn’t feel fine at all, so he opened one of the scientific journals Rita had handed him, and read until sheer exhaustion forced his eyes closed in the dizzy insomniac quiet of four a.m.

Chapter Text

Carlos hoped his embarrassment over Cecil would fade the next day, but it didn’t. Instead, he woke up with a vague sense of unease – he knew had dreamed of something rather disturbing, but he wasn’t entirely sure what it had been. All he remembered was an image of a dimly lit room with entrails strewn everywhere, the thick, cloying smell of congealed blood, and an overwhelming worry if Cecil was all right. He tried to blame it on the dream and his unruly subconscious, but as he got ready for the day, the feeling that there was something wrong only got stronger. He brushed his teeth, the brushed his hair, he even shaved, and got ready for another day in the lab – he was planning to meet the doctoral students at 10 to discuss their work together. He walked fast, hoping the exercise and the autumn chill would help clear his head, but it failed to accomplish anything. He had no reason to feel the way he felt, so unmoored and unwell, so he did what he usually did nowadays to calm himself down – he tried to imagine Cecil’s voice telling him that he was all right, that he was safe. But when he tried to recall that voice, he heard Kevin’s husky tones instead, talking about big fat cocks and licking and sucking and cum, and Carlos felt his stomach clench in distress. He stopped for a second, leant his forehead against a lamppost, took a deep breath, counted to ten, and concentrated on not throwing up.

What if he had messed something up? Carlos knew it was stupid and childish, that it was magical thinking, but he couldn’t escape the thought that he did something unforgivable, and now he would never be able to find Cecil ever again. He would have to call. No matter how mortifying it was, he would have to call, just to stop this foolish, superstitious fear and reassure himself that Cecil was still there.

He quickened his steps until he was almost running, he waved his identity card at the receptionist, he tore down the corridor, he threw the door of his lab open, and still out of breath, still flushed from the cold, he pressed ‘call’.

‘Welcome to Night Vale’ came Cecil’s voice less than ten seconds later.

Carlos swallowed a ‘thank God’, and cast around for a somewhat more dignified response.

‘I… I wanted to call you.’ Said Carlos shakily.

‘You sound out of breath.’ Commented Cecil. ‘Of course you called me, something cold is chasing you.’

Carlos knew that if he acted along with Cecil’s newest invention, he could have the time of his life, but when he opened his mouth to grunt a ‘yeah’, something else came out.

‘I called somebody else.’

‘Oh.’ Breathed Cecil, and there was a hint of disappointment in his voice – but no, that must have been Carlos’s wistful thinking. ‘You have signed no contract, but if you are formally announcing that you are no longer using our services…’

‘I called somebody else and it wasn’t good.’ Clarified Carlos in an embarrassed rush.

‘I see.’ Said Cecil, and the smooth smugness of the inflection already sent pleasant shivers down Carlos’s spine. ‘And which one of our unfortunate rivals did you grace with your attentions?’

‘It was a company called, uh, Desert B.’

‘You what?’ shouted Cecil, his voice modulating into an unpleasant screech. ‘Tell me you didn’t call that festering hive of sweat-stained mediocrity.’

‘I did.’ Mumbled Carlos, caught between intrigued and shamed.

‘You could have called any other line, Carlos, any other line, and it would have been all right.’ Continued Cecil, shrill with outrage. ‘But you had to dial up that soulless piece of pop-up covered excrement, that mechanical dispenser of uniform groans, that mindless, dry narrator of DIY-manuals, that plague on the name of respectable sex phone workers, in short, the guys who are trying to put us out of business. Carlos, I cannot believe you. Get on your knees.’

‘Cecil, I’- protested Carlos.

‘I said get on your knees.’ – repeated Cecil, voice vibrating with restrained fury.

Unsure if he was doing the reasonable thing and painfully confused about the entire situation, Carlos gingerly lowered himself to his knees.

‘Put your ankles together. You can’t pull them apart.’ Added Cecil. ‘Put me on speakerphone, place the phone on the ground in front of you, then put your hands behind your back, and cross your wrists. You can’t move those either.’

‘But why – ‘

‘I said you can’t move them, and you can’t move them, because I am not letting you. I am holding down your ankles and I’m twisting back your arms, and I am covering up your eyes and I am stopping your mouth. Can you feel it?’

Carlos had to think about that for a second. His eyes were already closed, his lips were pressed close together so he had to breathe shallowly through his nose. He was pretty sure he could move if he wanted to, but he felt entirely disinclined to – in fact, he could imagine Cecil’s voice, Cecil’s power emanating from the phone, like smoky, half-visible tendrils – no, like tentacles. Tentacles that pinned him to the ground, that pulled his arms to the point of actual pain, that wrapped around his chest and crawled up his neck to crowd over his face, invasive and terrifying and glorious. He couldn’t speak, so he tried to give a ‘mm-hm’ – it ended up sounding more like an eager, muffled moan.

‘You are going to tell me exactly how it happened.’ Stated Cecil.

‘I only called – ‘ blurted out Carlos, but he was cut off by Cecil’s sharp ‘shush’. It was unbelievable, noted Carlos absently, that Cecil managed to make ‘shush’ sound like an urgent and precise order.

‘You will speak only when asked. Otherwise, you will keep your mouth shut.’

Carlos opened his mouth to answer, and then closed it again with an audible click.

‘Good.’ Remarked Cecil, and the smirk in his voice felt too good to be legal. ‘Now to business. Which one of their workers did you talk to?’

‘Kevin.’

‘You had to pick Kevin of all people.’ Answered Cecil with a wry laugh. ‘It seems like you have a type. And what was the first thing he said to you?’

‘He said’ – mumbled Carlos. ‘Hesaidhewantedtosuckmycock.’

‘I didn’t quite catch that.’ Said Cecil. ‘What did he say he want?’

‘To suck my cock.’ Repeated Carlos, audibly but still quietly.

‘Because?’

‘Because he wanted to taste me.’ Said Carlos weakly.

‘To taste you? Interesting.’ Carlos couldn’t help noticing that Cecil drawled each syllable in a sinfully attractive was. ‘And what did he do then?’

Carlos thought back to the phonecall, and the portion that followed the lurid description of fellatio.

‘I asked you a question.’ Said Cecil severely.

Carlos shook his head mutely. He couldn’t get the words out, no matter how he tried.

‘Am I still twisting your arms?’

‘Yes.’ Said Carlos truthfully, for he hadn’t moved his arms from their cramped, uncomfortable position behind his back.

‘I am glad you are aware of it.’ Continued Cecil. ‘Now unless you answer the question in three seconds, I am going to break them. Three, two…’

‘He started rimming me.’ Blurted out Carlos. He knew that Cecil couldn’t really have broken his arm, but the threat nevertheless felt terrifyingly real.

‘Did he now?’ said Cecil, his voice glistening with icy amusement. ‘And did he like it?’

‘He said he did.’

‘Details.’ Barked Cecil.

‘He said it made him hard. He said he loved eating me out. He said it made him want to fuck me. He said it made him want to cum inside my slutty ass.’ Babbled Carlos, face burning with embarrassment.

‘Then he play-acted fucking you, didn’t he?’

‘No.’ said Carlos. ‘I… I fucked him, actually.’

‘Oh. That’s surprising. Were you any good?’

‘I don’t know’. Murmured Carlos.

‘You must know, the guy you were fucking was right there on the other end of the phone! How did he react?’

Carlos was silent for the second, trying to catch his breath. His legs were starting to fall asleep as he was kneeling on the floor, his arms were starting to ache, protesting their contorted position, he felt almost nauseous with embarrassment, and his blush seemed to spread from his face to his entire body, because his skin felt flushed and hot everywhere. He was starting to get hard, and he couldn’t believe how that was even possible while in such depths of mortified misery. Maybe it was just a Pavlovian response to Cecil’s voice. But he needed to answer before it got even worse.

‘He moaned. He asked for more. He told me to do it harder, that he can take it.’

‘I worked with Kevin, and I know for a fact that that’s certainly not all he said.’

‘He said he loved my big fat cock tearing him in half and that he wanted to feel me shooting my cum inside him.’ Said Carlos mournfully, hoping that if he got it all out in one breath it would feel less terrible. It didn’t. ‘He told me he was going to come. And then he came, or at least he said he did.’

‘All right.’ Said Cecil contemplatively. ‘Question is, did you like it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Were you hard?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you touching yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you touching yourself now?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because my hands are behind my back.’ Carlos felt almost offended for a second, offended at the thought that Cecil made him put his hands behind his back and then dared to doubt his perfect obedience.

‘Good.’ Chuckled Cecil. ‘But you are hard, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’ In fact he was so hard it was beginning to be terribly uncomfortable.

‘I’ll release your right hand then.’

Carlos had to reassure himself that he was imagining the pressure of a shadowy tentacle uncurling from around his right wrist, letting blood flow into his hand again as he pumped his tingling fingers.

‘Open your fly and touch yourself.’

This was utterly unlike any of their other conversations, and Carlos found it unnerving, but he had no time to worry about it, he had to touch himself or die of sheer confused want. He was already reaching for his fly when he accidentally looked at his watch.

‘I can’t.’ he groaned, knowing that his disappointment sounded obvious. ‘My students are going to be here in… eight minutes, and I didn’t even lock the door!’

‘Touch yourself or I’ll make you.’ Said Cecil, and it didn’t even occur to Carlos that the threat was an empty one.

He clumsily undid his zipper and wrapped his hand around his cock. When Cecil gave no further instructions, he gave in to temptation and started jerking off, painfully aware of the sound of his ragged breathing in the silence of the room.

‘Enough.’ Said Cecil after about half a minute. ‘Your hands behind your back again.’

Carlos reluctantly obeyed, leaving his cock hard and aching to be touched.

‘Now I’ll have to ask you a few more questions.’ Continued Cecil. ‘Are you this desperate because we’re talking about Kevin?’

‘No!’ said Carlos, almost outraged.

‘Is it the things Kevin did to you?’

‘No, of course not, please let me-‘

‘What was it then?’

Carlos bit back the obvious answer, and mumbled a ‘dunno’.

‘If you cannot give me an answer, why do you retain the ability to speak?’ asked Cecil, and his voice sounded a lot like the old, weird-grim Cecil. ‘In fact, why do you even have the ability to breathe? I’ll revoke it right now. Keep your left hand behind your back, use your right to cover up your nose and mouth, and be absolutely certain that I will hear if you try to cheat.’

Carlos did as he was told.

‘Now, let’s talk a little about the things you did with Kevin.’ Continued Cecil in a quite conversational tone. ‘I think they were utterly unimaginative. The opinion of others, of course, may differ, after all, there could be people with a fetish for mediocre descriptions and porno dialogue. But I do not think you are one of them. You seem to appreciate the stories I spin for you, and those don’t usually involve an orderly and linear progression from base one to base five, and involve far more blood and brimstone than the average bedroom. I do not begrudge that you wanted to see something a bit more normal this time, after all, everyone has that one fantasy of something so very mundane, yet so very irresistibly filthy. But I wonder – would your normal, everyday scenario include being licked out by Kevin from Desert B? Or would it be more like – let’s see, like, you’re in the middle of your own lab where you have spent the last two years, seeing every single object from a new angle as you kneel on the floor with your fly open, slowly fisting your cock, wanting to make it last even though you know that the door could open any second, people could look in and see you, kneeling there, your eyes closed, your head thrown back in ecstasy? You don’t want them to see you, but the thought of being seen…’

By this time, Carlos had to bite his lip in order to force himself not to inhale. His heartbeat drummed in his ears, his lungs were burning, and the pressure building in and around him seemed like a separate being, a being of shadowy tendrils squeezing and strangling him. All he could think was ‘let me, let me, let me’, but he wasn’t sure if he was silently begging for permission to breathe or permission to touch himself.

‘Remove the hand.’ Ordered Cecil, and Carlos sucked in a large lungful of air. ‘Now tell me, what made you hard?’

‘You did.’ Answered Carlos, still dizzy with the influx of oxygen.

‘Well done.’ Said Cecil drily. ‘You can touch yourself as long as you answer my questions.’

Carlos’s hand flew to his cock, but he couldn’t for a second forget Cecil’s words about the imminent arrival of his students and his almost inevitable humiliation. He felt light-headed with panic.

‘If I made you hard, why didn’t you call me?’ asked Cecil sternly.

‘Because I was afraid.’ Said Carlos. He hadn’t openly admitted to being afraid of anything since he’s been a child, and one the other side of the shame it felt good.

‘Afraid of what?’

‘That you will laugh at me.’ He was telling Cecil everything, he was humiliating himself so thoroughly that there would be nothing left of him. His hand sped up.

‘Why would I laugh at you?’

‘Because I got off on the stuff you said.’ Said Carlos, his face burning red with debasement.

‘What stuff?’

‘The… the really weird stuff.’ Said Carlos breathlessly.

‘Why did you get off on that?’ asked Cecil, still in that cold, curious tone.

‘Because I’m a freak.’ Whined Carlos, scorching self-disgust filling his every cell. ‘Because I’m a creepy, disgusting weirdo with a fetish for horror stories, because I deserve to be shamed in front of everyone I know because they all should know how fucking pathetic-‘

‘Stop.’ Snapped Cecil. ‘Keep your right hand where it is, put your left over your mouth. You made me angry, you don’t get to breathe.’

Carlos clapped a hand over his mouth, mindless with lust and adrenaline, and gave a muffled little noise to indicate his obedience. His pulse was jumping so rapidly he was afraid his heart was going to stop, and his hands on his cock and over his face seemed pinned there by the almost-visible force of Cecil’s voice.

‘Now listen.’ Continued Cecil in a burning-cold voice – a voice like dry ice, thought Carlos weakly. ‘I am going explain something. The stories I tell are not the result of random chance or whimsical improvisation. They are all about things I find interesting, or lovely, or beautiful, threaded together to form the best narrative I can. Not all of my stories are of an equal quality, because they fit the customer, and they can’t all involve the elements I prefer, but my stories are all quality, and if my customers react to them, and by react, I mean pull and finger and jerk and rub themselves into a shuddering, sobbing orgasm, they are quality customers.’

Carlos was listening attentively as he felt the craving for air get stronger and stronger. He knew his arousal was making it worse, but he couldn’t help touching himself, his hand moving over his cock as if it was moved by Cecil’s shadowy presence.

‘But even then, they aren’t of an equal quality.’ Cecil stopped for a second to consider that. ‘For example, when you first called me, you didn’t even know what you wanted, so I used my preferred elements, and instead of saying – eh, I don’t know, let’s talk about threesomes instead – you appreciated it. When I talked about how interesting desert rain is, you listened with bated breath, interested too. When I told you about how lovely the strange constellations in the sky are, you gave me the loveliest little moans. And when I told you how beautiful libraries can be, you fell apart so beautifully, I could hardly believe it. So when you call yourself pathetic because you enjoy my stories in a quite carnal sense, you are calling my stories pathetic. But my stories are not in any way pathetic, and those who say so deserve to be punished. So keep your hand over your mouth, and let me tell you what you really are.’

Carlos couldn’t believe his ears. His eyes were squeezed shut, his head bent, and he saw colourful lights dancing behind his eyelids. By now it wasn’t only his lungs that were begging for air, he felt that persistent, panicked ache in every part of his body, and while the pain was bordering on unbearable, the urgent thirst for air sparked something that was perilously close to pleasure. He felt the half-existent appendages wrapping around his chest, his belly, trying to push the life out of him while others were rippling against every inch of his sensitised skin, either in mockery or a caress. He wasn’t scared of them because he wasn’t thinking clearly enough to wonder if he was hallucinating. However, he was terrified that he would pass out, that he would be seen, or that either of those things that happened before he came, and he was even more terrified of what Cecil was going to say next.

‘You are perfect.’ Said Cecil matter-of-factly. ‘You don’t believe me, but you are. You are perfect, beautiful Carlos. You think that taking yourself into your hand while listening to my voice makes you pathetic, but it doesn’t. It makes you perfect. You are afraid of what would happen if someone walked in on you, if they saw you in your shame. But there is no shame to see, not even when you are kneeling on the floor, shirt sticking to your chest with sweat and your hair falling all over the place and your hand on your cock, working yourself in absolute silence. If someone saw you like that, Carlos, they would fall in love instantly. Now breathe.’

Carlos gasped, and he felt air flood his lungs the very same moment the brightness of orgasm flooded his mind, and the two kinds of relief seemed to short-circuit his body for a few seconds. He fell forward, on all fours, panting for air and trembling through the aftershocks.

‘You have to concentrate.’ Came Cecil’s voice from his phone. ‘You have forty seconds until ten, I timed you.’

‘What?’ grunted Carlos, blissed out beyond all coherent thought. His limbs still felt weak and watery.

‘First, wipe yourself down and do up your fly.’ Advised Cecil. ‘Labs usually have paper towels, right? Now wipe the floor, too, and throw the towel in the bin, now throw a clean one on top. Turn on the air conditioning. Straighten your T-shirt. Tidy your hair. And time.’

Exactly when Cecil finished talking, there was a knock on the door. Carlos had wiped himself and the floor, hid the evidence, did up his fly, tried to fix his hair and clothing, and felt that it may not look entirely obvious what he had been doing. But he couldn’t let Cecil go without telling him something vital.

‘One second!’ he called towards the door.

‘You’re wrong, I never thought your stories were pathetic. I was just scared of them. But now I see they are-‘ he said into the phone, but then paused, looking for the right word. ‘They are innocent. And pure.’

‘Good night, Carlos’ replied Cecil, and he sounded strange. Amused? Or maybe touched? ‘Good night.’

Carlos threw the door open and greeted his students, and ten minutes later, when he was walking down the corridor holding a clipboard, with a dutiful medic and an enthusiastic computer scientist following him, he felt like a Serious Scientist. Even though he knew his hair still looked like a haystack and his shirt was still stuck to him, he couldn’t help feeling – perfect. And that afternoon, when he stood up at a meeting to ask his project to be funded, it hardly even occurred to him to be afraid.

Chapter Text

Carlos kept calling Cecil twice a week. They never mentioned Carlos’s call to Desert B, nor what Cecil said about pathetic and perfect, but it seemed like they never had to. They just went back to how they were, with one small improvement: Carlos was no longer afraid to take an active part in the proceedings, to add details to Cecil’s descriptions and turn situations around so they were more to his liking. And Cecil seemed to be fine with it – he never attempted to railroad Carlos back into the story, instead he just one-upped anything he suggested. This is how Carlos ended up being molested by a disembodied hand, kidnapped by mysterious helicopters, and making out lazily in slowly disengaging gravity. Not to mention the thing in the submarine.

When he called too early, he ended up chatting with Intern Dana, and he learned far more about the details of her internship than he thought he wanted to know. It was quite strange to hear such dispassionate diligence applied to something so crude, but she seemed content with her work, and almost as fond of Cecil as he was. In fact if Carlos was honest with himself, the main reason he kept talking to Dana instead of hanging up was the possibility that he might pick up some crumbs of information about Cecil. He didn’t learn much apart from the fact that Cecil was not a morning person, and that he considered jello a central part of a healthy diet, but it good to least hear his name spoken by someone else. And once Cecil was finished with his former client, or with whatever else he may have been doing, Intern Dana said goodbye and passed on the phone, and Carlos would re-immerse himself in the wonder that was Cecil, that was him and Cecil together.

And in-between these half-hours of bewildering bliss, his daylight life underwent far more radical changes. His grad students showed up almost every day, bringing him new answers and new questions and coffee. They weren’t sure they were anywhere near a solution, or that they were doing good work, but it was undeniable that they were doing lots of work. Carlos was surprised how much easier it was to set up an experiment if you could ask somebody else to watch it. How much friendlier his colleagues treated him, now the text of his lecture was successfully published. How much more fun it was to eat a sandwich in the cafeteria if you were having loud and spirited arguments about subjects only two other people could understand. He told Cecil about some of it, about this tentative feeling that things might after all turn out to be all right, and that now he wasn’t calling Cecil because he couldn’t trust himself to sleep, but because he wanted good endings to surprisingly good days.

***

‘I found something!’ shouted Andrzej as he fell into Carlos’s lab. ‘I found something, oh my merciful god you have to see this!’

After five minutes of unintelligible excitement and superlative swearwords that weren’t exactly in English, the grad student was finally capable of coherently explaining that he had found reports of a newly discovered sub-species of newt that may actually manufacture an enzyme similar to the one Carlos was trying to reconstruct. The newt Carlos saw on the photos looked quite unremarkable, a small, slimy creature with beady black eyes, but if it could do what Andrzej hoped it did, they could break through that wall they kept hitting with his research.

‘Oh God, not the newt again.’ Said Rita as she entered the room.

‘Whaaaaat, it’s a good neeeeewt.’ Whined Andrzej.

‘It’s an OK newt, but it’s still no excuse for waking me up at four in the morning.’ She said strictly. ‘Anyway, I made the calls you told me to make, and that species has been declared highly endangered, the authorities won’t let them be killed or transported, and they are only available in a system of caves on the Hungarian-Slovakian border, so I think we might as well drop it.’

***

That is how, four days later, they ended sharing a flimsy tent in a Northern Hungary camping site, waiting for formal permission to be allowed into the Baradla caves to take samples from slippery little amphibians.

Carlos wanted to call Cecil when their usual night rolled around, but he found his cell phone had no service. He was a little annoyed, but he didn’t mind – after all, he could afford to miss a few calls, even if he would miss Cecil quite terribly. But he exiled that thought to the back of his mind when the go-ahead letter came, and he started in on the research. The next few weeks were spent wading in freezing underground streams, chasing newts with nets, examining newts in the knowledge that if even one died, they would have to pay an astronomical fee to the Hungarian government, testing the tissue samples extracted from newts in a makeshift lab they set up in the camping site’s communal dining hall, eating the local staple of ‘bread spread with pig’s fat and topped with raw onion’ and sleeping very little in a terribly cold and uncomfortable tent.

It took almost a month of frenzied activity to isolate the enzyme that allowed the newts to regenerate damage to their nervous system even after extensive trauma. This, of course, didn’t mean anything yet. Only that with a few more month’s work they could publish a tentative hypothesis, and then other researchers would join in the project, and in a few years they would come up with a way to reliably synthetize the enzyme, then the medical profession would take over, and test it on paper and on animals and on people, and figure out uses and dosage, and maybe, maybe, if everything went well, in ten years they would transfigure Carlos’s discovery of a newt’s mucus into a drug that could sometimes probably cure certain specific types of brain damage. Put like that, it didn’t sound like something to celebrate, but nevertheless the three scientists went out to a local pub, (actually, the only local pub), and made a spirited attempt at getting blind drunk.

Carlos couldn’t remember the last time he felt this – this all right in a crowded room. The locals looked at them with slightly reserved interest, the barmaids were nice and not unbearably flirty, the home-brewed plum cordial was dirt cheap and water-clear, and it warmed Carlos right up to his fingertips without bringing on that unsettling disorientation drink usually did. His grad students, on the other hand, got hammered in an undignified but quite endearing way. Rita was apparently an enthusiastic singer, first just humming rock ballads to herself, then standing on chairs to belt them out a cappella – her favourites were Janis Joplin songs, but she did a mean Patti Smith too. The patrons of the bar didn’t seem to mind, and eventually they started clapping, probably because she was reasonably young, reasonably attractive, and above all, female. Andrzej on the other hand kept trying to talk about the magnitude of their discovery, but lapsed into his native Polish midway through most of his sentences. When one of the two barmaids walked over to their table and spoke two stumbling lines in Polish, Andrzej stood to something very vaguely resembling attention, and responded with something that must have been in Hungarian and might have rhymed. The barmaid then proceeded to kiss him on the mouth, and since the kissing didn’t stop either with the passage of two minutes, the staring and eventual clapping of the patrons, or the fact that the two of them have collapsed into a wall, Carlos decided that it was probably time for him and Rita to leave.

She was clinging to him on the way back, too unsteady to stand on her own feet. She also kept pointing to random things on the darkened village street, and giggling loudly at the fact that they existed. Carlos didn’t particularly mind – he was far more sober than either of the two, but relaxed enough to be warmly aware of the gratitude he felt towards her, and towards Andrzej, for their work and their company. When they got back to the camping site, he tried to drop her off at the low grey building that housed the showers and toilets, but she grabbed his hand.

‘Carlos.’ She said, with an audible attempt not to slur words. ‘We did it. We did the awesome thing, but lemmetellyou- we only did it cos of you. Cosyou’re awesome.’

‘It was teamwork and awesome is not something I am.’ Said Carlos briskly.

‘Why can’t you believe people like you?’ She asked plaintively. ‘I like you.’

‘I – thank you’ he stuttered. ‘But I hope you don’t – mean it – I mean mean it like that – like ‘like like’ – because I can’t.’

‘Nah, calm down.’ Said Rita affectionately. ‘You’re cute, but I know enough not to go for guys who are obviously – ‘

‘Damaged?’ asked Carlos.

‘Taken.’ Finished Rita. Then she lunged out to hug him anyway.

‘You are awesome.’ Said Carlos, awkwardly patting his head. ‘And I’ll tell Andrzej that he’s awesome too when he gets back in the morning.’

Rita vanished towards the showers with a smile, and Carlos walked back to the tent, blearily wondering why would Rita think he was taken.

***

They packed up their equipment the next morning. Well, Carlos packed up while Rita was nursing a hangover and Andrzej was making his way back through the village, lacking some crucial items of clothing. They caught a bus to the Budapest, a plane to London, and then they settled down to wait for the flight that would take them back to the states, back to their little university town. Suddenly remembering the phone he hadn’t used in weeks, Carlos fished it out from the bottom of his backpack, and switched it on in the hope it would have reception now that they were back in the English-speaking world.

It did. Carlos had twenty-five voicemail messages. All of them from the same, unknown number.

He excused himself, and walked off to a relatively silent side corridor to listen to them. He had no idea what these were. Could they be from the university? But no, he did manage to find internet in the next village over, and sent regular updates on his research to his department head. What then? He already felt sick with worry, but he pressed ‘play’ before he could change his mind.

‘Hello Carlos’ said Cecil’s voice. ‘You were supposed to call me yesterday, it was our usual Thursday. Do let me know if you are all right. This is Cecil.’

Carlos smiled to himself as he pressed play on the next message.

‘Hello Carlos’ said Cecil again. ‘It’s been a week since you last called. I wonder if something happened? If you lost the Night Vale number, feel free to call me on this, my personal phone.’

The next call came a few days later.

‘Hello Carlos’ said Cecil. ‘I absolutely do not mean to bother you, but if you have a second, could you call me? I do not mind that you decided to stop using Night Vale’s services, but I cannot help worrying if you are all right. Just drop me a text saying you are done with me, and I’ll be fine.’

With a lurch of guilt in his stomach, Carlos scrolled on. The next call was dated more than a week later.

‘Carlos, have you heard the news about Desert B, if you haven’t, I’m going to have to warn you before it’s too late. They were not just a phone sex line, they were a front, a money-laundering scam, they reported roughly three hundred times the income they actually produced. But that’s not the problem, they are a sub-set of StreXXX Inc, that huge sex-work corporation, and it seems like StreXXX itself was run by the mafia? Or it was running the mafia, I don’t know. Anyway, I only found that out because the police got involved, and now it’s as bad – ‘

The recording cut off, and Carlos clicked on to the next message without thinking.

‘As bad as it gets. They were arrests, and disappearances, and I have no idea what’s going on. The police hasn’t told us everything, but I think there were some girls brought illegally to the US, and they were unwilling, and probably underage. Oh God, and now the police has freaked out, and they are tearing all other sex-related businesses in the area to shreds, including us, and that’s fine, we were careful to always be a hundred-percent legal and above-board so it doesn’t even matter, it’s just that people who have been customers of Desert B are also brought in and questioned, and some people have been detained while –‘

Carlos clicks to the new one.

‘While the police figure out who just used legal services, and who was involved in this entire horrifying mess. And also, people have started disappearing, some of them were guilty of something and went on the run, but I don’t think all of them were? Maybe StreXXX is trying to prevent potential witnesses from speaking up? Anyway, point is I’m worried, and if you could call me, that would be great.’

Carlos listened to the next nineteen messages with increasing agitation. They came at irregular intervals every few days, and they were just reiterations of the same thing – that Cecil was worried, and that he wanted Carlos to call. His heart in his throat and nauseous with guilt, Carlos pressed play on the last message, the message that was just a few hours old.

‘Hello Carlos.’ It said, and Cecil’s always-steady voice sounded distinctly shaky. ‘Or Welcome to Night Vale, isn’t that what I normally say? Anyway, I was just sitting here in my office and it occurred to me that it has been an entire year since you first called me. Do you remember? You tried to heckle me, maybe you were a little drunk, and definitely terrified, and then we talked about the desert, and it just worked? But you won’t answer me because you’re in jail or the mafia did something to you, or maybe you just don’t want to call me, and if I just knew maybe it would be better, dammit. But I’m still sitting here, talking to you like an idiot, and I won’t be able to – to stop calling – oh god –‘

The recording cut off, but not before Carlos could catch a stifled sob – Cecil was crying. Cecil was sitting in his office, crying because he, Carlos didn’t call him, and Carlos felt such a strange mixture of cold guilty dread and fever-hot elation that sweat beaded down his forehead. The thought of calling Cecil after this, after all this, was terrifying. What would they say to each other? But he recalled Rita’s sharp look, penetrating even through the haze of alcohol, as she told him he was obviously, obviously taken, and called Cecil’s number.

‘Whozzat?’ asked a confused voice, and Carlos was unbelievably, unbearably happy to hear it.

Chapter Text

Carlos took a second to enjoy the fact that Cecil was there again, there on the phone, close and tangible despite the thousands of miles between them.

‘Hello Cecil.’ he said, ‘It’s me, Carlos.’

Carlos could hear a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line, then a long moment of silence.

‘Is it all right that I called you?’ he asked, disheartened by Cecil’s lack of answer.

‘You are all right.’ breathed Cecil, ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, I’m fine.’ said Carlos, ‘I was working in Hungary with my team, and we had no cell phone reception.’

‘Oh.’ said Cecil quietly, then tentatively he added, ‘I was somewhat worried.’

‘I know.’ answered Carlos, ‘I got your messages.’

‘Oh god no, I knew shouldn’t have sent those.’

‘It’s all right-‘

‘No it’s not, it’s utterly mortifying, but there’s nothing I can do about it, is there?’ snapped Cecil, ‘I don’t even know what got into me, it’s just that you disappeared without a single word, and I’ve had clients quitting before, but you have been around for so long and you have always been so good, I didn’t know what to think. And then the entire thing with the police, they took away all out paperwork and they made Intern Dana spend a night in custody, can you imagine what the poor girl must have felt like, and we couldn’t work for almost an entire week, so much lost in wages, and I wouldn’t even have cared, but then I heard about the disappearances and realised you have just as good as disappeared, and I sent you messages and you didn’t respond and what was I supposed to do? And I kept calling you and you kept not responding and it’s been weeks and then I realised it’s been a year, a goddamned year, and I have actually planned to reward you with something for being a one-year regular, I decided that back around month seven, I actually had the outlines for a Gulliver-and-Lilliputians-type bondage scenario, but what could I do if you weren’t there, and I called you like some idiot hoping that if I just keep calling you won’t be gone, you’ll be there, and I…’

Cecil’s panicked babble trailed off into hyperventilation, and Carlos wanted to calm him down, to hold him close and comfort him, he wanted it so much it hurt.

‘It’s all right, Cecil.’ he said, ‘I’m right there with you.’

‘You’re here with me?’ asked Cecil, softly and hopefully, and Carlos – Carlos was lost, Carlos was gone, Carlos melted, sank down onto the uncomfortable plastic bench.

‘Yes, I am right there with you. Where are you now?’

‘Um. In my bed.’ said Cecil bashfully, ‘Because it’s four in the morning here.’

‘I’m so sorry, I forgot about time zones, I’m an idiot, I’ll just hang up and you’ll forget I ever called.’

‘No!’ said Cecil swiftly, ‘Stay.’

‘All right. Is it all right if I sit on your bedcovers? I promise I’m clean, I deliberately saved a sweater and a pair of jeans for the flight back, because I knew everything else will end up covered in mud and newts.’

‘Newts?’ asked Cecil, and now that Carlos knew he just woken up, he did sound sleepy. In fact, there was a distinct quality of creased, tousled bedwarmth in his voice.

‘Yes, we were looking for newts. In a system of freezing underground streams that connect caverns full of really beautiful stalagmites.’

‘You sound like me.’ mumbled Cecil.

‘I couldn’t sound like you if I tried. You always make up wonderful things, and I was just saying what really happened. I hunted newts for a month, and when I found enough of them, I got drunk on plum cordial, but then I flew home to you, and sat down on your bed.’

‘I’m glad you’re here. But I’m afraid I’m in no state to come up with anything good. You came back, and I’m so…so….’

‘You never told me a story about kissing.’ said Carlos, ‘And I think I really like kissing.’

‘That is a huge oversight on my part. Who would you like to kiss? Is it one of the usuals, the man in the tan jacket, or the cactus woman, or a hooded figure, although I’m not sure they have a mouth…’

‘I’d like to kiss you.’ said Carlos. Sitting here, on the half-dark corridor deep in the underbelly of an intercontinental airport, it felt easier to say the unthinkable.

‘Me?’ asked Cecil, bewildered, ‘Why?’

‘Because – because you’re right there. You’re sitting up in your bed to turn to me, and your words sound warm, and I suppose your skin must be really nice and warm to touch.’

‘All right.’ said Cecil, ‘Kiss me then.’

‘Um, I would really like it if you ran your fingers through my hair, too.’ added Carlos, knowing that sleepy as Cecil was, he would need to take the lead, ‘You would probably hate my hair if you saw it, I mean, it’s all over the place, but your hands in my hair, that would feel so good.’

‘Of course I wouldn’t hate your hair. I’d really like it. I’d keep trying to brush it out of your eyes, but it would just spring back, and I’d have to start all over again.’

‘What are you wearing to bed?’ asked Carlos, hardly believing his own audacity.

‘A boxer, and an old T-shirt with a stupid joke on it.’ answered Cecil, ‘Is that OK, or should I – ‘

‘That’s more than OK.’ Carlos reassured him, ‘I like how your T-shirt feels soft and worn under my hand, and warm. I like how warm you are.’

‘I could warm you up, Carlos, I can cover you, press you down on the bed, warm every part of you while you kiss me.’

‘But then –‘ continued Carlos, biting his lip, ‘But then I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t keep still. I think – I think I’d try to press up into you, to push myself against you.’

‘Oh please.’ breathed Cecil. ‘Please do that.’

‘It would feel so good.’ murmured Carlos, ‘Just to be there with you. Warm. Skin against skin.’

‘So good.’ echoed Cecil.

Carlos stood up, and walked off in search of a room he could lock. There were signs indicating showers at the end of the corridor, so he took off in that direction.

‘You are wonderful.’ He continued, and as he talked it got easier and easier, ‘You are wonderful to listen to and wonderful to touch. I have listened to your breath over the phone for a year, but now I want to feel it on my skin, little gasps of air, that have been warmed in your lungs and trachea and your clever filthy mouth. And I want – I want to know if your hands are as steady as your voice is, as calm and relentless when you touch me, when you run your fingers over me.’

Cecil didn’t answer, but hummed a little in encouragement, so Carlos continued.

‘And Cecil, I want to be close to you, because I have to know if you smell like you sound, I know that synaesthesia normally only presents as artistic fancy or a symptom of a various neurological abnormalities but it’s still what I want right now, now I just want to press my forehead against your neck and inhale so I can feel the soap and sweat on your skin and know that you aren’t a disembodied voice but a very embodied person, a person whose body I can touch because he lets me, a person whose body I can change by making his breath come faster and his hands scrabble uncertain and his sweat tangle his hair, and he’ –

‘Stop!’ groaned Cecil, ‘Oh God, Carlos, stop.’

‘What – what’s wrong?’ asked Carlos, on the edge of panic, ‘What did I do?’

‘Nothing.’ Answered Cecil and hell, he sounded wrecked, ‘You did nothing wrong. It’s just not fair.’

‘What’s not fair?’

‘That you called me when I was off-guard and sleepy and I can’t come up with any good ideas, and you are talking to me and it shuts my brain down, and I can’t give you what you came here for and I am seriously running low on self-restraint.’

‘Why would you need self-restraint?’ asked Carlos.

‘Do you have any idea what you sound like?’ whined Cecil, ‘Shy and quiet at first, and then more and more confident, like you know you could actually do what you say? Do you have any idea what’s it like to listen to that?’

‘I don’t.’ murmured Carlos.

‘Well it’s really goddamned difficult.’ said Cecil, ‘I don’t have the faculties to come up with a new story on the spot, but I must, because you came here for to be regaled with eldritch wonders, not to listen to me jerk off in my own bed!’

Oh. Carlos knew that he probably should have felt surprise or panic or anything other than the warm turned-on tenderness that filled him from his toes to his ears.

‘Were you – ‘ asked Carlos shakily, ‘when I was talking to you, were you…?’

‘A little.’ admitted Cecil.

‘Then you were wrong.’ said Carlos, far braver than he felt. ‘That’s exactly what I want to listen to.’

‘Carlos.’ said Cecil. ‘I don’t know how to do this.’

‘It’s all right. I don’t either.’

Cecil huffed a little, off-balance laugh.

‘But you want the stories.’ he said, ‘You always wanted me to tell you a story.’

Carlos opened the door to a shower room that was all mirrors and grey tiles, a little windowless unplace, but it would let him be alone. Alone with Cecil.

‘The stories were wonderful.’ he said thoughtfully, ‘But right now you don’t want to tell me story, do you?’

‘No.’ said Cecil with great reluctance.

‘What you want right now is to lie in bed, touch yourself and imagine it’s me touching you.’

That part was easy to say, because it was a hypotheses carefully built on observations, and Carlos was normally correct when it came to those.

He heard Cecil loudly swallow. Correct indeed.

‘You want to come, wishing it was my hand on you.’ he forged on.

‘But you don’t want that.’ Said Cecil.

‘Why wouldn’t I?’ he asked. ‘Why shouldn’t I want to lie in your bed, warming up under the covers, touching you, maybe kissing a little?’

‘No, it can’t be like that.’ Said Cecil, desperate. ‘The bed could stand in one of those caverns, or on top of a skyscraper, or in the middle of the ocean –‘

‘But you don’t want me in the middle of the ocean, do you.’ Said Carlos. ‘You want me in your bed.’

‘… Yes.’ Groaned Cecil.

‘You want me underneath you, rubbing into you, hard for you, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Said Cecil, ‘I want you here so much, I want to touch you, I want to make you feel good.’

‘You always make me feel good.’

‘No, that doesn’t count, that’s not real.’ said Cecil, his voice thick with frustration, ‘I want to make you feel good with my hands, with my mouth, and I want to see you, not only hear you.’

‘Listen to me, Cecil.’ Said Carlos, sinking down on the floor of one of the shower cubicles. ‘This is real. I’m not there with you, but this is real. We are really talking to each other, you are really touching yourself, and now, so am I.’

He did open his fly to take his already-hard cock in hand as he listened to Cecil’s stilted breaths over the phone line.

‘What do you need me to say?’ asked Cecil. ‘Tell me, I’ll do anything.’

‘Just keep doing what you were doing. Keep touching yourself, I want to hear that.’

Cecil didn’t answer, apart from a low keening sound.

‘I have thought a lot about this.’ Carlos continued, ‘Of what it would be like to do to you what you have always done to me. To have you gasping and begging on the other side of the phone, desperate for just a little more. To make you fall apart just like I always fell apart, mindless with it, the world shrinking down to the voice on the phone and the things it does to you and how unbelievably good it feels. Did you ever think about that?’

‘I did.’ Answered Cecil in a small voice. ‘I couldn’t – oh – couldn’t help myself.’

‘But I can help you.’ Carlos was himself close to the edge now, and keeping his voice steady took a great effort. ‘I can help you, just let me.’

‘Let you – let you what?’

‘Let me in. Let me in you bed, let me kiss you, let me kiss your neck, your eyes, your lips just a little because you keep gasping for air, let me put my hands on you, everywhere, I don’t even know, I want to touch you everywhere, let me put my hand on your cock, let me make you come – ‘

‘Carlos – ‘ gasped Cecil raggedly, the last traces of composure gone from his voice. ‘I will – I can’t – oh god-’

‘Let me.’ Said Carlos, broken and low. ‘Let me hear you.’

Cecil let go with a wordless whimper, trying to breathe through the waves of pleasure, but every exhalation came out as a moan, speaking of ecstasy and mortification in equal parts, and there was no way Carlos could hold out against that. He came with Cecil’s name on his lips, so hard that the dingy little shower room disappeared in a haze of goldenwarm light, but when the drumming in his ears calmed down enough to allow him to hear, and his mind gathered itself enough to allow him to understand words, Cecil still seemed to be struggling for breath.

‘Carlos.’ He gasped. ‘Carlos, I didn’t. I don’t know how. Or what.’

He sounded lost and confused and Carlos couldn’t imagine how it was possible to feel this much tenderness towards somebody without spontaneously combusting on the spot.

‘Cecil. It’s all right. You were amazing.’

‘No, I wasn’t, I didn’t, that’s not how it was, you were, so lovely, and I just – ‘ he paused for a moment, trying to gather his wits. ‘Thank you, Carlos. Thank you.’

Then, before Carlos could answer, he hung up the phone. Carlos was left sitting in on the floor of a cubicle in an empty shower room in the middle of an enormous airport in an unfamiliar country, with his cock hanging out of his pants, smiling stupidly at the phone he held in his hand, and at the realisation that he was definitely and unquestionably in love.

***

Carlos didn’t wait until the next Friday to call – he didn’t think he could. After he got off the plane and then the bus, presented tiny bits of newt to his head of department, spent thirty mortifying minutes explaining the local police that he knew nothing about StreXXX activities and did some emergency grocery shopping, he went home and picked up the phone. Most of his books and clothes were still in the unwieldy giant backpack he took to Hungary, and he still felt shaky and light-headed with jetlag.

‘Hi Cecil.’ He said into the phone, awkwardly realising that he had called Cecil’s personal number instead of the official Night Vale dispatch.

‘Hello Carlos.’ Answered Cecil, and then added, almost bashfully. ‘Welcome to Night Vale. The town is fully of shadowy beings, empty like a bite taken out of the universe, and you are walking amongst them, knowing no fear.’

‘Could you not walk with me?’ asked Carlos hopefully.

‘Why would I do that?’

‘We could go on a date.’ Said Carlos, and almost laughed at how easy it was to say in this world of make-believe.

‘A date? You and me?’ asked Cecil, bemused, ‘Well, never mind. Let’s say we’re strolling along the street, side by side. I have my best furry pants on, and a nice embroidered tunic. What are you wearing?’

‘Oh, I’m not much of a dresser, I guess I haven’t taken my lab coat off yet.’ He heard Cecil’s appreciative hmm. ‘Because I was busy doing science the whole day.’

‘Where are we going on our date? Do you know anywhere nice around here?’ Carlos blinked – it was obvious from Night Vale’s landline number, but this was the first time Cecil had openly acknowledged that they lived in the same town.

‘Well, there is this really nice vegetarian Italian place.’ he said tentatively, ‘Their specialities are mushrooms, I think you would like it.’

‘Fine, let’s go there. Can we get one of those little booths with candlelight and a chequered tablecloth?’

‘Sure. We could just sit down then, make small talk until the waiter shows up.’

‘So, Carlos-‘ said Cecil, clearly aiming for a light, conversational tone and missing it by a mile, ‘What do you do?’

‘I’m a scientist.’ Said Carlos, dimly hoping that still sounded impressive, ‘I study the properties of certain organic molecules, most recently organic molecules that have been carefully cut out of newts.’

This time, he could almost hear Cecil’s smile.

‘Do tell me more, Mr Scientist.’

‘I’m afraid there’s not much more to tell, apart from the fact that it is terribly slimy and boring, and only slightly less boring now that I have underlings to take notes for me. So Cecil, what do you do?’

For a second, everything froze, and Carlos was fully prepared to throw the phone across the room, hide underneath his bed and never show his face to a living creature ever again.

‘I have this part-time job to pay the bills.’ answered Cecil contemplatively, ‘But actually, I’m a writer.’

‘A writer?’ exclaimed Carlos, partly out of surprise, partly relief that Cecil wasn’t angry with him. ‘What sort of things do you write?’

‘I have this post-modern horror theme going on, well, it’s the only thing that I feel I can write well. I haven’t managed to get much of anything published yet, just a bunch of short stories.’

‘I’m sure the stories are amazing.’ Said Carlos, knowing for a fact that the stories Cecil told him were nothing short of perfection. ‘Are you working on one now?’

‘I don’t know if I should tell people just yet, but I’ve started writing a novel.’

‘What is it about?’ prompted Carlos.

‘It has multiple plot lines, pretty vague at the moment, but it’s about this small town radio station, and this lovely little town where people have already accepted the intolerable strangeness of life. But then the plot kicks off when a scientist arrives from the outside world, and he wants to understand how the town works, and the more he studies the town, the more the town studies him back.’

‘A scientist, you say?’ asked Carlos.

‘Yes.’ Answered Cecil, with some indignation. ‘It is normal for writers to recycle their personal experience into fiction, haven’t you ever heard of the term write what you know?’

‘I look forward to reading it.’ said Carlos, more touched than he liked to admit, ‘So, where would we go after dinner?’

‘We could take a walk in the park.’ suggested Cecil, ‘The light pollution is not so bad there, on a clear night you can see some stars, and there are also some trees you could do science on.’

‘Cecil, I’m not the kind of scientist that… you know what, never mind. If I do some science-y measurements on the nearest tree, will you put it into your book?’

‘Who said you were the scientist I was writing about?’ asked Cecil.

‘You just did.’ pointed out Carlos, ‘Now let me examine this tree.’

Cecil was silent for a few seconds, then let out something that was unmistakeably a giggle.

‘What is it?’ asked Carlos, startled and a little wary.

‘It’s just that… I touched your face while you were looking at the tree, and you probably didn’t even notice.’

Carlos had to smile at that, and Cecil’s presence on the other side of the phone warmed him from his head to his toes and he stood there smiling with his eyes closed in the middle of his own room, lifting his free hand to touch his cheek like the love-struck idiot he was.

‘I should probably be getting home.’ Said Cecil, and he sounded genuinely regretful. ‘I have a car, I can give you a lift home if you want.’

‘Sure, that would be great.’ Answered Carlos on autopilot.

‘When we arrive, will you invite me in?’

‘No.’ answered Carlos, still feeling unaccountably warm.

‘Don’t you want to?’ asked Cecil. ‘I’m sorry, I thought you wanted to.’

‘Of course I want to.’ Said Carlos, easy and honest and true. ‘I want to, more than anything. But this is our first date, and you were so very amazing, and I am already overwhelmed, and I don’t think I have the guts to tell you to come in. Maybe after two or three more dates, I’ll get my act together and ask you to stay.’

‘All right.’ Said Cecil. ‘That’s fair. So you just get out of the car, and I drive away, is that how it’s going to be?’

‘No. I want to kiss you first.’

‘Kiss me?’ asked Cecil, sounding so surprised that Carlos felt his heart drop.

‘Just a scared little kiss when I get out of the car, and then I’m off.’

‘I would probably drive home like a drunk, narrowly avoiding traffic accident on every corner, staring blissfully into space and sometimes lifting my fingers to my lips just to make sure that I remembered that kiss correctly.’

‘Thank you for the date, Cecil.’ Carlos said, strangely satisfied despite the ridiculous tameness of the entire scenario.

‘Thank you too, Carlos.’ he answered, ‘But did you call me to ask only for this?’

‘No.’ said Carlos, and took a deep breath to regain the confidence he seemed to have while examining imaginary trees for his Cecilm ‘I wanted to say that we could go on a date like that. For real. If you’d like to. I’d really like to.’

‘Wha – what?’ sputtered Cecil, ‘You want to meet me face-to-face? Why would you want to do that?’

‘Well, I really like you.’ said Carlos, ‘And I would really like to talk to you in person.’

‘Like a… blind date?’ asked Cecil, tentatively.

‘Cecil, it’s fine if you won’t like me, I promise.’ said Carlos, desperate to be understood. ‘I’m telling you right now that I probably look much worse than you think, and I’m older too, and I look even older than I am because of the greying thing, and my hair is terrible and I have huge teeth, but I will really try to do my best. Just please, please give me a chance.’

‘You don’t even know what I look like either.’ pointed out Cecil.

‘I don’t care what you look like, I already like you for your voice.’

‘For my voice.’ said Cecil, and he sounded crestfallen, ‘That happens a lot. People like my voice. They love it. They adore it. They imagine I must be just like my voice, and then they see me, and boom – disappointment. I don’t exactly look forward to that happening again.’

‘But- but Cecil!’ protested Carlos, ‘It’s not just your voice! It’s the things you say, the things you do, it’s you.’

‘Me? I don’t think you have the slightest idea who I am.’ answered Cecil, his voice growing cold. ‘You don’t even know my full name, all you know is the fragments of foolish made-up stories I fed you so you could get off, and so you created this, this Cecil in your head who is so great and so perfect and so good for you, but was that enough? No, no it wasn’t, you had to drag it out into the real world where the entire thing will go up in toxic-fuming flames and you will be left standing on a pile of disillusionment and shame.’

‘Please, Cecil, I really do lo–‘

‘Shut up!’ snapped Cecil, then fell silent – the next few words came out choked, as if he had difficulty breathing, ‘You made attempts to personally contact a Night Vale employee, in direct violation with our customer policy. From now on, I reserve the right not to accept your calls. And let’s just forget about what you were trying to say. Good night, Carlos. Good night.’

Chapter Text

Carlos was left staring at the phone in his hand, baffled and blindsided. He had so much to tell Cecil, so much to explain – that it wasn’t about the voice and it wasn’t about the stories and it wasn’t about the sex, or at least not entirely. That Cecil talked to him and listened to him and knew him, and that he would do anything, anything to repay that, that he would talk to and listen to and know Cecil as well as he could. But it wasn’t about gratitude either – Cecil was a real presence in his life, not visible or tangible but not the slightest bit less important for all that, and he wanted that presence – he wanted Cecil sitting at his tiny kitchen table eating cereal, Cecil curled up in the one chair he owned, his fingers clicking away at the keyboard of the laptop he was balancing on his knees, Cecil slowly falling asleep tucked into his arms. He wanted this, he was certain of it, without knowing what Cecil looked like.

One year ago he would have accepted that he was alone in wanting it, alone in this hopeless pathetic longing, but since then, Cecil had taught him to trust his own judgement. He remembered Cecil’s shy confession that he was writing a book, his honest hopeful gasps that night in the airport, his tearful panic at the thought of losing Carlos, his insistence that all his stories had value and meaning, his star-struck wow when he found out what Carlos’s job was, and even things he didn’t notice before, like the hint of joyful surprise in his voice the very first time they talked, when Carlos incoherently whined his approval of whatever lovely horrors Cecil came up with. It was not certain, nothing ever could be certain, but it was definitely possible that Cecil wanted just what he wanted. And if that was true, if it had the slightest glimmer of a hint of a chance of being true, Carlos couldn’t afford not to try to unravel whatever misunderstanding came between them.

***

Carlos didn’t want to push too much, but he was no longer afraid to push at least a little. So he immediately left a message: ‘If you change your mind, please call me. I would very much like to talk to you again.’ He called again the next day, and the next, and the one after that, always leaving a single message asking Cecil to please agree to talk. After the third day, Cecil blocked his number. He took to calling the Night Vale landline instead – all of the other operators knew him by now, and every night it was Steve, Leanne or Pamela who politely but firmly informed him that Cecil was not available. This went on for a week, at which point Carlos had enough, drew a chart, used logic, figured out the time slots when Cecil was on dispatch duty, and felt like an evil stalker. Still, one call, that was all that he wanted, and Cecil still pretty much held all the cards – Carlos didn’t know his address or his real name, he didn’t have any other point of contact than that phone number, and the knowledge that it was local.

The next time he called, he knew what he was doing – he excused himself from Andrzej’s newest demonstration, shut himself into his lab, waited until 6.45 pm when Cecil would definitely be the one behind the phone, and called.

‘Welcome. To Night Vale.’ said Cecil, but his voice lacked the usual mysterious lilt – it just sounded tired and grey.

‘Hello Cecil.’ said Carlos, uncomfortably aware of his heart beating on the brink of barely-suppressed panic.

‘Carlos.’ groaned Cecil, ‘Don’t you understand that I don’t want to talk to you? I blocked you and I told the others not to forward your calls to me.’

‘But Cecil, I just - ’

‘You have no idea what you sound like, do you?’ sneered Cecil, his voice on a knife’s edge between calculated attack and near-tears despair, ‘You are pathetic, that’s what you are. You are lonely enough to crush on a sex phone operator, you are pathetic and ridiculous and disgusting and I am allowed to put the phone down if I’m being harassed by some idiot who has lost track of reality.’

Once again, Carlos was struck by the realisation that one year ago, words such as these would have hurt him so much he would have to drop the phone and cover his ears in a retroactive attempt to unhear them. But now, he knew that they were only words, and not even true words. Not words that were meant.

‘Cecil, listen.’ he tried again.

‘I am going to hang up now.’ said Cecil, pained and unsteady.

Carlos had to prevent that, he had to get his message across and it did not matter how he did it. A sudden stupid idea occurred to him.

‘Dana!’ he blurted out, ‘I want to talk to Intern Dana.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘Because I’d like to talk to someone and you keep refusing me.’ said Carlos, ‘The policy that you keep quoting gives you the right to refuse my calls, but it doesn’t say anything about me paying for the services of the other operators, does it?’

There was a long moment of silence, with Carlos helplessly hoping that Cecil would not hang up.

‘Fine.’ said Cecil finally, his voice more brittle than Carlos had ever heard it.

There was the sound of buttons being pushed, the mechanical dial tone music of a re-connected call, and then Intern Dana’s kind cheerful voice.

‘Hello! I mean Welcome to Night Vale! How may I help you this evening?’

‘It’s me, Carlos.’

‘You? How dare you?’ cried Intern Dana, sharp-shrill with anger, ‘How dare you call me after what you did to him?’

‘What I did to him?’ echoed Carlos dumbly.

‘I don’t know what it was, but it must have been pretty brutal. He sounds like hell and looks even worse.’

‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘You guys have been talking for what? A year now?’ continued Intern Dana, a little bit calmer and more quiet. She must have heard the note of heartfelt worry in Carlos’s voice. ‘I know you two started a little after I took the internship. And it must have worked because you kept calling back, and he kept making himself available, and I don’t know, maybe you got bored with him or something, that’s fair, but it meant so very much to him.’

‘What did?’ asked Carlos, plaintive in his utter confusion.

‘You did, you moron. Nobody listened to him like you did. He told me that he couldn’t have beaten writer’s block if it wasn’t for you, listening to him. And writer’s block is the reason he had to get into this line of work in the first place. The week before last, he told me he started writing a real book for the first time in five years, he looked like he was finally getting it together, you were so good for him, and now – nothing. Back to zero. It’s a good thing I had a copy of his manuscript because he deleted it from his own computer.’

Carlos didn’t know what to say. The wish to hold Cecil and tell him everything was going to be all right clashed with the need to shake him and call him an idiot, and both were overruled by sheer shock.

‘I told him I wanted to meet him.’ he said finally.

‘Oh.’ breathed Intern Dana, ‘Oh. I kind of see why he freaked out.’

‘But I wasn’t rude or threatening or anything!’ argued Carlos.

‘I know. But we get people begging to meet us every single week.’ she said tiredly, ‘And none of them mean it, none of them care, not really. It’s just another symptom of desperation.’

‘… I did mean it.’ he said quietly.

‘I believe you.’ she sighed. ‘But Cecil didn’t, he couldn’t. We talked about the possibility of meeting you before, I mean he seemed quite smitten with you for months now, but he always backed out of it.’

‘I understand.’ Said Carlos, swallowing, ‘He kept calling me perfect, during our… you know… but he probably he didn’t trust me to live up to his expectations.’

‘Don’t you get it?’ snapped Intern Dana, raising her voice again, ‘He couldn’t imagine being disappointed by you, he just couldn’t bear the thought of you being disappointed by him. I know he spins stories like he has a sterling silver tongue, but it’s different if he doesn’t have the phone between himself and the world. He’s the sort of person who always worries about saying something embarrassing, and he always expects people to laugh at him or just walk away.’

Carlos had to close his eyes and take a few deep breaths before answering. In that moment he loved Cecil so much that he felt his heart would explode on the spot.

‘Can you pass on a message?’ he asked, trying to sound resolute but still feeling shaky all over.

‘That depends on the message.’

‘Tell him – tell him that I will obey his wishes, and never call him again.’ he could hear her sharp intake of breath.

‘And tell him that I would still very much like to meet him, somewhere safe, on neutral ground. Tell him that tomorrow afternoon from five to six I will be in Carter’ Coffeehouse just opposite the Ralph’s. Tell him that every single thing I have ever told him was true, and that I cannot believe that even a single one of the things he had told me was a lie. That the only reason I scared him was that I was too scared to realise he was scared too. Tell him I just want to see him, and tell him… tell him that he made me see that the sky is more stars than void.’

‘All right.’ she said, a little awe-struck, ‘I will repeat it to him verbatim, but I can’t promise you anything. You know what Cecil is like. I’m not sure he will dare to face you after all this.’

‘That’s all right.’ said Carlos, even though it really was not, ‘Thank you for everything, Intern Dana.’

‘It’s only Dana now, actually.’ she said, ‘I got promoted to full employment last month, for doing an hour-long twin threesome fantasy all by myself.’

‘Uh… congratulations, Dana.’ He said, but she just laughed.

‘Good luck, Carlos.’ She said. ‘I think we can dispense with the formal farewells, since nothing even vaguely sexual occurred. Although you are still paying for it.’

Carlos said goodbye, hung up the phone and dropped his head in his hands. He had one single chance to talk to Cecil.

***

Carlos tried not to panic too much over their meeting. He couldn’t decide whether to think of it hopefully, as a first meeting, or desperately, as a last meeting, since both adjectives and attitudes were equally correct. He put on his only pair of jeans that weren’t destroyed in the excursion to Hungary, ironed his dark blue shirt, tried to comb his hair into an acceptable shape and left his lab coat at home, even though he felt a little naked without it. Wearing it this time would have felt like play-acting, like he was perfect-Carlos-the-scientist as opposed to an imperfect Carlos who happened to be a scientist, and this time he wanted to prove that he knew that what he had with Cecil was real.

He arrived to café a few minutes before five. The single pink-painted, airy room of the café was already packed with people, and with a staggering punch Carlos realised the flaw in his plan. He had no idea what Cecil looked like, and Cecil had no idea what he looked like. If Cecil didn’t have some sort of a tell, if he didn’t make it obvious, then they would definitely miss each other. Any of the men in the café could have been Cecil.

Trying to take no notice of his racing heart and sweating hands, Carlos stood in line, and ordered a small latte. He wasn’t a connoisseur of coffee, all he knew was that it was good for sleepiness and bad for shakiness, but since he had been stupid enough to chose this as a venue of their first meeting, he paid for his order, gave his name, and settled down to a small table facing the door.

He could call Cecil’s mobile again. He could just stand up and call out Cecil’s name, or his own, it didn’t matter, if Cecil was here he would recognise it. If Cecil was there, the big if. If he wasn’t wrong about Cecil, if Dana wasn’t wrong about Cecil, he would want to show up, but it was possible that they were both wrong, and it was possible that Cecil really wanted to be there and just couldn’t – Carlos honestly couldn’t say that he didn’t understand the feeling. But even if he called, or called out, what would that prove? It would only prove that they didn’t know each other, that they didn’t see each other, that they didn’t mean anything to each other. Cecil was already uncertain, and this would definitely eat away at what little certainty he had left. At a loss, and unable to decide what to do, Carlos chose to look around.

Any of the men there could have been Cecil, or at least the ones who were there alone. The tall man with the sharp nose and the waist-length braids, scribbling into a notebook. Or the delicate man with light-blond hair, sitting in a wheelchair and thoughtfully sipping a cappuccino. Or the beautiful brown-eyed man with the dreadlocks, smiling at something he was reading in his smartphone. Or the slightly older man with a trimmed beard wearing a sweater vest, anxiously drumming his fingers on the table. Or the broad-shouldered redhead with the freckles and the flowery summer dress, eating a croissant. Or the Asian man wearing red suspenders, raking his fingers through his hair over and over again, a nervous tick. Or the young man whose arms and neck were covered in intricate swirling tattoos, demolishing a large cup of whipped-cream topped something. Or the man walking through the door right now… he would never be able to tell. No, he couldn’t decide which one of these men was Cecil, or if Cecil was even among them. All he knew was that he would be glad to love Cecil in any of those men, that he would not turn away from any of them, that different as they were, they would be equally beautiful if Cecil’s voice lit them up from the inside.

But he didn’t know, and all or none of those men could have been Cecil and he did not know how to address the nebulous possible presence that was in the café with him. He was jolted out of his reverie by the sharp cry of the barista –

‘Small latte for Carlos! Carlos, the small latte is ready.’

Carlos stood up and walked across the room to pick up his drink.

All of those men could have been Cecil.

But only one of them knocked their coffee over with a startled gasp.

Only one of them turned to look at Carlos with a look of terrified adoration.

Once Carlos ran to them, abandoning his latte, only one of them buried their face in Carlos’s neck as Carlos wrapped warm relieved arms around them.

Only one of them whispered ‘my Carlos’ in a voice that was choked between tears and laughter, a voice that made it obvious that only one of them was deeply, hopelessly and hopefully in love with the armful of scientist they were clinging to.

Only one of them was Cecil, and Carlos kissed only one of them with a kiss that tasted of nothing but reality.

 

THE END