Flowers (fiction)

"Hello?" she answers, wondering why she always answers with "hello" instead of "hi" or "what's up?" since she has call display and she always knows who it is that is calling her in the first place.
"Hi," he says, and his very voice sends chills down her spine and makes her close her eyes momentarily. She can keep this on the straight and narrow, right? "How's your night going?"
She clears her throat and does her best to sound nonchalant, which is rather ridiculous given that it's past eleven o'clock on a Saturday night and she clearly has nothing going on. "Yeah, it's going good. Just... hangin' out. Reading Craigslist posts. Some people are pretty funny."
"Yeah," he agrees. "Some are pretty out there, though. So-"
She cuts him off. "Do you ever wonder why you don't end up as a Missed Connection on CL? I mean, do people not notice me? I shop. I go to the gym. I sunbathe. I saunter down major thoroughfares, effortlessly swinging my purse and pondering over succulent persimmons."
"Are you drunk?" he asks.
"A little," she admits.
"You don't eat persimmons. I bet you don't even know what a persimmon is," he suggests.
"I do!" she retorts. "It's that fruit that looks like an orange colored tomato. They lend themselves to such CL postings as 'Hot blonde with a penchant for persimmons on Broadway today'. You know, things of that ilk."
"So... you're feeling a little sorry for yourself because random men aren't posting about you on Craigslist? You need a little ego stroking? You want to desired and fawned over and paid attention to?"
"Hey," she interjects. "You're the one who called me."
He laughs softly. "You're something, you know that?"
"Yes. I am something."
"What do you want?" he asks, softly so that she closes her eyes again and presses one hand to her mouth. Moments pass and she doesn't answer.
"What do you want?" he asks her again, more insistently, more urgently.
She stands up and walks away from the desk, pressing her forehead against the cool glass of her sliding window and staring absently at the flickering, pale light emitted from a television in one of the apartments across the street from her.
She feels flushed. And guilty. She stares at herself in the reflection of the glass, running two fingers along her lips as he says her name. She looks around her apartment, already assessing what needs to be cleaned up, what can be left. She last shaved her legs one, or maybe two days ago - not that he will care, ultimately.
"I want you," she says softly.
"You can have me," he answers, roughly. "Invite me over."
She can say the two words: come over. He will be in her apartment in under half an hour. She doesn't have to feed him. He will not stay over. Nor does she ask how his day was, nor he hers.
"I need to see you. Tell me you'll see me," he says, when all he hears is her soft breathing.
"Why?" she asks. It's part of the ritual. It's one of the many intricate thrusts and parries that they will go through before she acquiesces. She needs to hear the words. They help to absolve her. They make it meaningful. They help to justify it.
Her husband says that words are meaningless: it is one's actions that one should be judged on.
"Because I can't get you out of my head. You keep me awake at night."
"Good," she tells him.
"There's nothing more in the world that I want right now than to have you," he whispers.
"Why?" she asks again.
"Because it's you. I love you. Don't tell me no."
She is lying on her couch now, the fingertips of one hand pressing against her eyelids. He doesn't love her, she knows this. And she doesn't love him, though she will say that she does from time to time because it's part of the interchange of phrases and utterances that are a vain attempt to make this appear to be something less guttural and basic than it is.
"Come over," she advises, softly hanging the phone up.
She relaxes her body into the leather couch and exhales slowly, wondering about actions, and about words.