Of Phone Calls and Second Chances

It was nearly three in the morning when the phone rang for the first time.

Ronnie wasn’t asleep – not quite, anyways. His eyes were closed, face slack in a half-feigned expression of exhaustion as his mind drifted somewhere along the fuzzy line between consciousness and dreamscape. It was as close as he could get most nights – if he pretended hard enough, he thought, maybe he could trick himself into believing he was functioning as he should.

It was a mantra that he lived by nowadays.

So when the phone rang, shrill and piercing through the darkness like the screech of metal on metal with an undertone of rumbling vibration on polished wood, his eyes slid open almost immediately, mind snapping back into awareness as though giving in to the pull of a straining rubber band.

Still, he was far enough gone that he forgot to check the caller ID before answering.

“Hello?” The greeting was a half-formed mumble into the darkness, barely identifiable as a word, but really, what kind of person calling at three in the morning deserved enunciation?

“Ronnie?”

He was awake then, almost instantly, every sluggishly functioning part of his being shocked into alertness and buzzing with energy. He sat up straighter in the bed, grip tightening on the slim plastic casing of the device in his hand as though he were trying to throttle it, the inside of his cheek catching between dull canines almost hard enough to draw blood.

He knew that voice; of course he did. He knew it all too well. What he didn’t know was how to respond to its presence in his ears again.

“Baby? Ronnie, it’s me.”

Ronnie felt his throat work silently a few times, Adam’s apple rolling beneath ink-strewn skin, before he finally managed to spit out the only word he could think of to say.

“Max?”

A soft hiss of breath brushed through the speaker between them, making Ronnie shiver almost as though he could feel it on his skin, sounding almost akin to a sigh of relief.

“Yeah, it’s me. Look, I…I know it’s late, and…I...I really have no right to be calling you and I know that, after everything I mean, yeah, but I mean…I just, I’ve been thinking about stuff a lot lately, and I just…”

Ronnie was silent all through his rambling, biting down on his tongue so hard it hurt, unable to fathom a response to the sudden outpouring of disorganized babbling that told him this was less than thought out.

“I miss you.”

Finally, Max fell silent, nothing but his breathing on the other end of the line as Ronnie sat there silently in the bed, hand fisting the sheets so hard they were in danger of tearing as he waited for Max’s final words to register in his brain.

“You…what?” His tongue felt strangely heavy in his mouth and he knew he’d heard Max just fine the first time, and Max probably knew it too, but he needed some sort of confirmation, something to keep him grounded and tell him that all those sleepless nights weren’t taking even more away from him than they already had.

“I…I miss you, Ronnie. And I know I’ve hurt you and I don’t deserve anything from you…but I just…I miss you so much baby, and I miss what we used to be and I miss-”

“Are you drunk?”

It was the first question he should have asked, really, when he realized that this was Max calling him at three in the morning, words disjointed and maybe a little bit slurred as they tumbled over each other in a rush to escape his mouth, in search of something they’d left at the foot of Ronnie’s bed months ago.

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line, and that gave Ronnie all the answer he needed before Max even spoke.

“…Does it really matter?”

Ronnie felt himself sigh more than heard it, a heavy, substantial rush of air from somewhere deeper than his lungs that seemed to carry so much more than sound waves with it.

“Go to bed, Max.” He said softly, feeling something uncomfortably heavy twist in his chest.

“Ronnie, please, I know you’re still mad at me, and you have every right to be, but can we just-”

“No, Max.” Ronnie interrupted his shaky pleading before he could go off on another tangent, “Do you really think calling me in the middle of the night when you’re fucking drunk is going to make me want to take you back?”

There was a long silence on the other end.

“If I was sober…would you consider it then?”

Ronnie felt something sticking in the back of his throat, forcing his words back inside, choking him until he could barely breathe. He didn’t know what to say.

So he said the only thing he could.

“Good night, Max.”



It was twelve in the afternoon when the phone rang for the second time.

Ronnie was awake, by the barest definition of the word.

He’d been awake since he’d hung up the phone, to be honest. For a while afterwards, he’d tried to go back to sleep, failing miserably in a way that he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t come to expect. So instead, he lay motionless in bed, watching the first rays of dawn slowly start to creep through the curtains, and tried to choke down the thoughts racing a mile a minute around his skull.

He’d finally slipped into a sort of half-doze around seven, sheer exhaustion overcoming emotional distress, but was awoken for good just a few hours later by the inescapable sounds of the day. He hadn’t moved from his bed since then, however, feeling no motivation whatsoever to leave his sheltered hole and face the world.

Sleepless nights weren’t so bad – he’d gotten used to those since the other side of the bed had grown cold. Even the daylight hours were getting easier to deal with – he usually managed to tear himself out of his thoughts for a good few hours at a time these days, maybe even the entire day, if he was lucky. He couldn’t forget, not entirely. But he could pretend.

And then Max had to come right back into his life and ruin it all.

Well, back wasn’t the right word for it. Back implied that he had left in the first place.

And sure, he had, physically. But he was always there, always flitting around the back of Ronnie’s mind. Always there, sitting in a chair at the kitchen counter when he turned on the coffee maker, chin on his hand and eyes heavy with sleep as he spared a laugh for Ronnie’s ridiculous bedhead. Always there, running a flat iron through his last few locks of hair as Ronnie brushed his teeth in the morning. Always there, calloused hand attached to Ronnie’s wrist as he touched himself at night.

Somehow that made it even worse.

Still, although it was a space he was a long ways away from filling, it was a space he’d been learning to work around. Melatonin and morning trips to Starbucks had lessened the ache, at least a little.

Then Max gets to just waltz right in and tear it back open like he doesn’t have a care in the world.

What a dick.

That was what Ronnie was thinking about when the phone rang again, buzzing across the surface of his nightstand like the humming of a wasp when it gets close enough to sting, and again, Ronnie found himself too preoccupied to bother with identifying the caller.

He wouldn’t be spending long talking to them anyways.

“Hello?”

“Ronnie.”

The voice was soft and hoarse, just as he remembered, with a bit of extra scratchiness telltale of bloodshot eyes and headaches, still managing to dance through his ears like the melody of the most beautiful song he’d ever heard.

“Why are you calling me?”

He didn’t want to deal with pleasantries right now – didn’t want to dance around awkward greetings and halfhearted ‘how-are-you’s. Max had opened this all up inside of him again, easy as tearing off the wrapping paper on a birthday gift, and dammit, he owed him a straightforward answer.

There was a soft, almost nervous huff of breath on the other end of the line that might have been a chuckle before Max replied, “You never answered my question.”

“…huh?”

Either Ronnie’s own exhaustion had taken more of a toll on his memory than he thought, or Max had been drunker than he sounded last night, because Ronnie had no idea what he was talking about.

“You know what I’m talking about, Ronnie. I want an answer.”

After a bewildered moment of silence on Ronnie’s part stretched to almost a minute, Max sighed into the speaker, sending shivers down Ronnie’s spine, and murmured, “If I was sober, would you think about taking me back?”

Ronnie felt his heart stop.

No way. He knew he was exhausted, but this was way too delusional to be healthy. Max was drunk. That was the only reason he’d been saying the things he had last night…he was drunk and lonely and reminiscing in all the wrong places. Fine. Ronnie had been there.

But this?

He wasn’t serious. He couldn’t be. Maybe he’d just kept drinking after Ronnie had told him to go to bed and he hadn’t sobered up yet.

Yeah, that had to be it.

It was twelve in the afternoon and there was no trace of a slur in his voice, but that had to be it, because there was no way Max was seriously asking him this.

“Max…no. You’re not…this isn’t…” He knew he was stuttering, knew he wasn’t making any sense, but his thoughts were more tangled than his tongue at the moment and he still wasn’t quite sure whether any of this was actually happening.

“Ronnie…I know I’ve hurt you. Everything got so fucked up, and it just fell apart, and I know we’re both to blame for that. But I’ve been thinking so much lately and I just…I love you, Ronnie. I really do, and I…you’re the only one that I can see myself with. You’re the only one.”

Ronnie simply sat there, stunned into silence, unable to believe he was really hearing this. Maybe he should have read the side effects on those sleeping pills more carefully before he took them.

“I know I said some shitty things to you, and you didn’t deserve that much anger from me. But I want to fix it, Ronnie. I’ve missed you so much and I tried to be happy without you, I really did, but I just can’t. And as much as you might hate me for saying this, I can see that you’re not happy either. I know you well enough for that.” There was a soft chuckle.

And maybe, if it had been any other day, any other situation, Ronnie would have gotten angry – the arrogant little shit, and after they’d broken up, too.

But he was right, and they both knew he was right, so what was the point in arguing?

“Max, I…” Ronnie trailed off, sighing, breath catching in his throat and dipping in a way that told him what he was going to say before the words had even formed in his mind.

Evidently Max could interpret him now as well as he used to, because he interrupted the older man before he could even get the words out.

“Do you still love me?”

The question threw him for a loop. Of all the things to come out of Max’s mouth, that was one he wasn’t expecting.

“Huh?”

A sigh, as though he were preparing himself for something he knew he may not like. “Just answer the question for me, and then if you want to hang up, I won’t stop you.” A deep breath echoed through the speaker. “Do you still love me?”

The question was soft, almost sad, as though he felt that there was no point in asking it at all. Ronnie knew what Max thought his answer would be – not consciously, maybe, but something in the back of his throat and in between his lungs was telling him, throbbing with the beat of his pulse in his ears.

Ronnie remembered coffee and flat irons and rumpled sheets and the ring he’d tucked into the back of his dresser drawers and thought that Max was really such an idiot sometimes.

“Of course I do.”

It was Max’s turn to fall silent in surprise, the soft stutter of breath in the speaker the only sign that he was still on the line. Ronnie remained silent as well, somehow lighter now that the words were finally out, almost feeling as though if he walked out of the bedroom right now, he’d be met by piercing green eyes over a cup of coffee, laughing and asking him why the hell he’d slept so late when there was so much they could be doing.

“You…do?” There was an audible smile in his voice now, all pink lips and teeth and maybe a little bit of tears.

“I never stopped.”

There was a deep sigh on the other end of the line, relief audible in every decibel, and Ronnie hadn’t realized just how heavy every other breath Max had taken had sounded compared to that one.

“So…maybe…”

Ronnie remained silent. He didn’t know how he felt about that yet, and he knew Max could tell. There was just too much there, too much heaviness, too much hurt.

“You know…we’ve hurt each other, but we can heal each other too.” Max’s words were soft and gentle, but somehow buoyant, lifting him up and filling his lungs with something that was more than air.

A beat of silence.

“You know, I think that’s the cheesiest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

And then they were both laughing, and Ronnie was vaguely aware of a wound that had been festering somewhere deeper than his skin slowly beginning to heal.

“Well…do you think…we can talk? Maybe just…I mean…I just wanna see you again. And if…you know, something happens…”

Ronnie felt a smile brushing its way onto his cheeks in spite of himself, almost able to imagine pink flushed across pale skin and the little smile Max was giving the endless sky as he spoke.

“Yeah. We can talk. And if something happens…we can get to that then.”

For the first time in half a year, Ronnie hung up the phone with a smile on his face.