Saturday Phone Sex

Just as a heads up, if you’re not a fan of some sex, this particular piece isn’t your vibe.

Meghan’s picture is one with a wide, comforting smile. My thumb runs over her button nose on the screen. I like to look at her every now and then to get her details right, even if she’s not real.

Toweling off and air drying naked to a warm breeze from the bedroom balcony, I eventually shut the French doors, warding away the mosquito buzz of a far neighbor’s landscaper. I sit on cool linen sheets, stretching and unclenching one muscle group after another, which tense again when a client’s email pings through my phone. That, I ignore. That’s the junior’s job, and he better be fucking doing it. Saturday mornings are for me.

I hear women used to make house calls for these things, but not anymore. I got promoted just when urgent emails hit us while we slept. And now that everything and our watches track our location, and with people happy to judge Wall Street’s coping mechanisms, some of us with imagination turn to the phone. I flip to her page and grin at her profile pic showing one extra finger and one tooth too many on that bright smile. She doesn’t even have pores. Her picture’s all AI, but her voice is still human. I dial the extension.

Meghan breathes into my earbuds just as another work email goes off, and she asks me how my week has been. I take a deep inhale because this is not where I wanted my head to go. What do you want to know, Meghan? That I tore through a bottle of wine, got distracted by the come-hither glances from a staffer, now that she knows I’m divorced, and managed to push a promising junior away from my team via my distant, acerbic personality—all at the same recruiting dinner? That halfway through I stepped out to coordinate delivery of fucking signature pages? Because some executive in Mauritius couldn’t find a fucking printer and my junior apparently shoved his phone up his nose, along with everything else he shoves up there?

“It was good.” I shake it off. “Busy. Just happy to relax.” I shouldn’t be upset over signature pages.

“Let me take some of that stress and drain it out of you.” There’s a teasing laugh in her words, and she croons long on “drain.” I chuckle low. I imagine her open face with dark, flowing hair and breasts that fit perfectly into my hands. I imagine her cheeky smile before words spill from a brain that I know is whip sharp, probably sharper than mine the way she spends hours painting visceral pictures. I’m pulled to sea by the musical quality to her voice. “Lay back. Relax. We’re going to a French market town, and you’re going to follow me through the crowds. I’m wearing a yellow sundress for you…” 

Sounds nice. South of France. While I tuck in between my sheets, I’m at an open flower market on the water in Cassis. I’m trailing the swish of Meghan’s soft yellow dress, and she reaches for my hand. With her voice in my head, my muscle stiffness has migrated to my cock and I get her permission to stroke myself, lightly, but just the tip. And I groan at the touch, sinking into the pillows, in momentary relief from carrying a world stitched untenably together by old hopes. 

Email pings are coming in rapid fire and I know something in a deal must be heating up. But that normal, vague sense of panic is smothered by her soothing instructions. Squeeze my cock. Tell her how I’d open her legs, and slide my tongue along her clit. Meghan decides. Meghan takes control. She doesn’t need me to tell her what to do. I’m just her tool. Whoever is really on the other side of that line is a goddess breathing fresh air into my lungs. 

“I’d marry you.” I say, finally spent and sticky on my bed. For the first time in our long acquaintance, she gives an awkward pause that she fills with an equally awkward, perhaps well-meaning giggle. We both quickly say our goodbyes for the week, as if I hadn't just proposed to a fake AI profile. I don’t know why I did that.

Like clockwork, a text chime tells me Meghan has charged my card. And I’m a decompressed machine rinsing myself off for afternoon emails.

Photo by Jorge Fernández Salas on Unsplash