Aaron wanted me to call him.

Aaron wanted me to call him.

Aaron wanted me to freaking call him.

Because he was inviting me to go to Florida.

Because all of a sudden, he’d decided he wanted to meet me. Spend time with me. And he didn’t want to wait until the next time he had leave.

No pressure.

I gulped as I sat there at the kitchen counter, picking at a bowl of Fruity Pebbles with my heart in my throat and my stomach attempting to do somersaults. I should have been freaking out at the idea of traveling with someone who, in a tiny way, was a stranger, but I wasn’t. Not really.

It would be the first time I met someone in a different place for a purpose that didn’t revolve around fittings for dresses or costumes. I wouldn’t be Ruby in work mode. It would just be… me.

That was the terrifying part. Just me and my poor heart that seemed to pick the worst people to have feelings for. People who didn’t see me as anything other than someone’s little sister and a friend.

Then there was the whole “we had never met in person” aspect of it.

Not like that had stopped me from pretty much falling in love with him or anything, so there was that. At some point, after a few months, I’d started going on dates with other guys to get my mind off him because I understood my feelings were pointless. He didn’t feel the same way. Plus, he’d told me to date. How much more obvious did I need our situation to be?

And if none of that was reason enough to convince myself that going was a stupid idea, I knew what I would tell anyone who was going to meet a stranger they’d met online.

I’d tell them they were out of their minds. And if I told any of my family members what I was thinking about doing, they would think the same thing.

The thing was, for once in my life, my gut wasn’t telling me not to go do this crazy thing. It was telling me the exact opposite. Go, go, go. Despite being scared and worried about my safety. Hadn’t I just told him a couple of days ago that women traveled by themselves all the time?

Then again, I couldn’t afford to buy a plane ticket. It would also be really irresponsible of me to charge something that expensive on my credit card when I didn’t exactly have a steady income coming in. I hadn’t been rich when I had two steady jobs; now, I was even further away from that point.

Yet, even knowing all of this, I flexed my tingling fingers and typed in the phone number Aaron had given me.

I ran up the stairs just as I hit the call icon, which in hindsight, wasn’t exactly the smartest decision I’d ever made because by the time my legs got me to the second floor, I was out of breath and still hadn’t made it to my room. My mom and Ben were at work, so they weren’t going to be looking at me like I was crazy for running up the stairs for the first time in my life.

The phone kept on ringing as I dashed into my bedroom, and just as I thought a voice mail recording was going to pick up, I closed my door.

The familiar clicking sound of someone answering the call had me freezing as I turned the lock, and then I heard it. My name. “Ruby?”

I was panting and trying not to pant at the same time, as the baritone voice on the phone seemed to steamroll my entire soul to the carpet floor. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting from Aaron, but I hadn’t been expecting the not-too-soft but just-deep-enough voice on the other end of the line. It was just in the middle. Friendly. Deep but not too deep. A little raspy. Perfect.

It was right then that it sank in.

He’d answered. I’d called Aaron and he’d answered.

I was on the phone with Aaron.

“Rubes?” the male voice came over the phone again, still that beautiful pitch, a natural narrator, sounding… amused? What was he amused over? “You there? I hear you breathing.”

I stopped breathing. Through my mouth at least. And I swallowed even though I was fairly certain it sounded more like a gulp.

Then the man on the line chuckled, easygoing and almost sweet. “What are you doing?” he asked like he’d asked me the same question a thousand times before. Like we hadn’t been pen pals for almost a year and instead had been friends for the last ten.

This was Aaron. Aaron. The only person other than my best friend who knew I’d stepped in human crap once. And just like that… “I ran up the stairs and I’m out of breath,” I told him, holding my phone away from my mouth at the end so he couldn’t hear me panting.

His—Aaron’s— relaxed chuckle lengthened and somehow, someway, relaxed me. It reminded me of our IMs when we were messing with each other. Normal. Playful. Friendly. Like always. Like my friend. “Just from running up the stairs?” he asked, and for some reason I could picture him raising an eyebrow of a color I wasn’t sure of, like he was teasing me. Like normal.

“It’s a lot of stairs.” I didn’t even realize I’d started smiling into the phone until I laughed. This was Aaron. No big deal. “I’m so out of shape.” And there it was. What in the world was coming out of mouth? “That’s embarrassing, I’m sorry. You can probably run ten miles at a time. The only time I run is… never. I never run. I don’t want to lie to you. I’m rambling, I’m sorry. I get nervous and I ramble.”

“What are you nervous over? It’s me,” he drawled, steady and consistent, that slight Louisiana accent tinting his words just enough. It’s me, he’d told me a few times before, and each time, just like this one, shot an arrow straight into my heart that seemed to cripple every excuse I gave myself for why being more than a little in love with him was a stupid idea.

Because it was a stupid idea.

A really stupid idea.

And you would figure with my track record of stupid ideas, I would know when to get rid of them.

But I hadn’t. Knowing me, I wouldn’t because I was an idiot like that. Weak. I was so weak. That term “wearing your heart on your sleeve” had been written with me in mind.

Oblivious to the fact he’d taken an imaginary baseball bat to my kneecaps with his tone and his words, he kept going in that smooth voice that I would listen to read the dictionary. “You sound…” He made a noise of hesitation.

“Like an idiot?” came out of my mouth before I could stop it.

Aaron laughed that time, clear and loud, sweeping my legs out from under me one more time, because it wasn’t like he could be awkward and graceless and unlikeable and laugh like a donkey. That would just be too easy. And fair. This was the guy who’d had two dozen crazy girlfriends for a reason. It all suddenly made sense. “No. Your voice is different than I thought it’d be.”

Taking another deep breath to try and not sound like I was as out of shape cardio-wise as I was, I finally took a step away from my door, ignoring the clothes hanging off two chairs and the pile of dirty clothes that was way too close to the pile of clean clothes I’d pulled out of the dryer and dumped on the floor three days ago. This is Aaron, I reminded myself. I could do this. “What do you mean?” I asked him, sounding more like myself than I would’ve expected while on the verge of flipping the heck out.

It wasn’t my imagination he made another hesitating noise.

I got this sinking feeling…. “What? Did you think I was going to sound like Minnie Mouse?”

His “Uh” didn’t even take a second. I burst out laughing, forgetting I was out of breath and that I’d been nervous all of ten seconds ago.

“You did?”

He started chuckling, like he was trying his best not to and failing. “I don’t know! I thought you were going to sound younger, not—”

“You’re wounding me, Aaron. You’re wounding my pride here.” I snorted into my cell as I plopped down on the edge of my messy full-sized bed, feeling too at ease.

It was his turn to laugh again, louder than his chuckle, the sound fuller and from the belly. “You don’t sound like you’re twenty-four,” he tried to argue, his words getting broken up by his steady laugh.

“That’s not what you mean. You thought I was going to sound like a fifteen-year-old cheerleader from the Valley or something. Didn’t you?” There was no response, just a hint of a sound that was suspiciously distant… like he was laughing with his face away from the receiver… That was it, wasn’t it? “I cannot believe you.”

“I’m sorry!” he tried to say, but he started laughing harder, that time directly into the phone, the sound making me smile so wide, I was glad no one was around to see it, otherwise they’d ask questions I didn’t want to answer.

“It’s because I told you about the cosplay, isn’t it?”

There was a pause by the man I’d been e-mailing for over year. “No—”

“You’re a liar.”

Aaron’s laughter suddenly got lower in volume, and I knew he’d pulled the phone away from his face again, for sure. My best friend did the same thing when she was laughing as hard as she could.

“And the no-boyfriend thing,” I added.

Even with the phone not being close to his mouth, I could tell he’d started cracking up all over again. I shouldn’t have loved the sound as much as I did, but… guilty.

“I can’t believe you.”

“You sound like you work for those phone sex lines,” he finally managed to get out, sometime ten minutes later.

What? “No I don’t.” Had he not ever listened to his own voice before?

“Have you heard yourself? I was watching TV last night after I messaged you and the commercials for those chat lines came on. You sound just like those girls….” He trailed off for a moment, his voice changing. “Are you sick?”

I had no right to smile as wide as I was, but I did it anyway. “No, I’m not sick anymore. This is my normal voice, thanks.”

There was another pause over the line and then, “Are you really Ruby?”

“What do you think?” I snorted. “Do I need to ask about your butthole for you to believe me?”

Aaron choked. I didn’t need to see him to know he’d done it. He didn’t try to hide it or pull the phone away from his mouth. “Now I know it’s you for sure.”

I was a fool, and it didn’t matter. “Are you sure? Because I can,” I offered him before I could shut myself up.

“I’m sure.”

“If you change your mind…”

Aaron shot out another laugh. “No, I know it’s you. We’ve been on the phone… four minutes and you’ve got me laughing more than I have in weeks. It couldn’t be anybody else but you, Ru.”

I couldn’t count the number of times he’d said something to me like that in written word, but just like every other time he had, I felt like… I felt like I’d done something amazing. And I needed to get it together and control myself. I needed to act normal. Normal, Ruby.

“You could’ve warned me before I called,” he said quietly before I could get my normal game together, but somehow I could tell he was smiling as he said the sentence.

Plopping down on the edge of my bed, I pulled my knees up toward my chest, heels on the mattress side by side. I tried not to wonder what he was doing right then, what he looked like, what he was thinking… and I failed. Like usual. “What would you need a warning for?” I asked, almost hesitantly but definitely a little distracted.

There was another soft chuckle. “For that voice. Jesus, Ru. You told me you were worried I wasn’t going to like you, so I had this plan in my head for how I’d get you to talk to me in case things got awkward. And you start giving me shit thirty seconds in,” he argued. “You threw my game off.”

Act normal. Act normal. Don’t ask what his plan was. Don’t tell him you love his voice too. “You? I was nervous. I am nervous. My hands started sweating, then they started tingling, and then it took you half a year to answer the phone—”

He choked again. “I thought I had enough time to use the bathroom—”

“How long does it take you to use the bathroom?”

Aaron shouted out a laugh that pulled at the corners of my mouth.

“I ran up the stairs to call, and I was dying, then you start messing with me—”

“I told you I thought it was going to take a minute for you to warm up talking to me.”

“—and then I learn my friend Aaron, who is basically my best friend, thought I was going to sound like Malibu Barbie, and I forgot I was nervous.”

“You didn’t have anything to be nervous about. It’s just me.”

Just him. Why did he have to keep saying that to me? Like he wasn’t aware….

“I know everything I need to know now,” he stated evenly.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“We get along fine.”

“We’ve been on the phone—” I pulled it away from my face and watched the counter on the screen. “Five minutes.”

“I know and you made me laugh more in five minutes than I have with everybody else in the last year combined.” He had no idea how those words affected me. No idea at all, and I could never tell him. I squeezed my eyes closed without thinking about it. There was a pause on his end, and then totally seriously, he said, “Come with me.” He cleared that throat of his and added, “Us.”

“Where?” I regretted it. Like there was somewhere else he’d invited me to.

He let out this huffing noise that was pretty close to a groan and had me wondering what face belonged to that voice and personality. It wouldn’t be the first time that thought had crossed my mind. “Florida, Ruby,” he said a lot more patiently than anyone else would have.

It was my turn to groan as I rolled onto my back on the bed. Something on the mattress dug into my shoulder, but I ignored it. He really was inviting me out. For real.

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Since before we left for Scotland. I wanted to invite you, but…” He trailed off. There was a sound I couldn’t figure out before he said in a totally confident tone, “I want to meet you.” Just like that. I want to meet you. He let out a soft breath over the phone. “I’m not going to kill you in your sleep.”

That made me snort. “I wasn’t thinking that.”

“You could have your own room. I’m sure there’s a lock on it.”

Anxiety and stress and nerves and vomit all rolled around in my belly. Go with him. To Florida. By myself. When I didn’t technically know him or his friends.

Meet him. Meet Aaron.

Meet this person I thought the world of who had basically called me his little sister.

What if he didn’t like me in person? What if I liked him even more once I met him in person? What if I liked him even more and he decided he didn’t like me for some reason once he met me? What if—

“Yes, then?”

Yes? My heart rate sped up, excitement and nausea and something I couldn’t completely identify filling my veins. “Aaron, do you understand what you’re asking me?”

“Yeah,” he said, but it really came out more like “duh.”

“We’ve never met in person.”

“So? We e-mailed each other back and forth for nine months. I talk to you more than I do my family and friends.” There was a rustling sound in the background, and I swear I heard a door close. “It’s only weird if you make it weird, and we wouldn’t make it weird. We already hit it off.” Neither one of us said anything for a moment, but when he finally spoke again, it made the hairs on my arms stand up. “You don’t think so?”

Did I not think so? Was he insane? I groaned and brought up a closed fist to my eye socket. “Look, I want to go with you. I really do, but—”

His voice was soft and determined. “I would never do anything to you, or let anyone do anything to you.”

“It’s not even that—”

“I know I’m coming on strong, but the more I think about it, the more I want you to come with us. The entire time I was in Scotland, I regretted not inviting you to come when Max bailed. I wish I would’ve invited you even if he hadn’t bailed.”

He had?

I blew out a breath and curled my toes together once more. Why did every single cell in my body get excited at the idea of going to Florida with someone I didn’t know that well and other people I didn’t know at all? If my best friend were to tell me she was going to meet up with her online friend at a cafe by herself, I would tell her she was out of her mind and that her body was going to show up on the nine o’clock news for being a total idiot.

But my brain rebelled against that completely.

Completely.

Some part of me deep down knew that Aaron wouldn’t hurt me. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I did. I really, really did. And I did love going to Florida…

“Look, I don’t have any money. I have a lot coins saved I can go get cashed and I have some money, but I shouldn’t be blowing it on a ticket that’s probably going to be crazy expensive because it’s so last minute—”

That calming voice cut me off. “I got your ticket.”

I felt myself scrunch up my nose and groaned. “You can’t pay for it.”

“You just said you don’t have any money. I’m the one who wants you to come…” He trailed off. “If it makes you feel any better, I can afford it.”

“I have to leave next week for California—”

“I’ll make sure you’re back before you have to leave.”

I was making a terrible mistake, wasn’t I? Who the heck goes to a beach house with strangers, one stranger I was pretty much totally in love with who had no idea because I’d never even seen his face—

I’d thought about it. He could basically look like a troll and chances were, if he was as wonderful in person as he was online, I would still be in love with him. Beauty fades, a good personality and chemistry doesn’t.

“I can afford it, Ruby, and I’ll make sure your flight gets you back home before you need to leave. You’ve sent me hundreds of dollars worth of stuff while I was deployed—no, don’t say you didn’t because we both know you did. I can cover your ticket. You’re the one doing me a favor.”

“How am I doing you a favor?” I asked him in a mumble.

“Because I could’ve had a better time in Scotland, and I’m being selfish inviting you to come to Florida because I want to be around someone….” He trailed off again. “I want to meet you, and I’m not giving you any time to think about it. You’re telling me you’re worried, and I’m pushing you into it. That’s selfish, and you know what, Rube? I don’t give much of a shit.”

Was I dead? Was this a dream? Had my mom baked mushrooms into dinner last night and I was still on some sort of weird trip?

I moaned. This was crazy, and I told him exactly that.

“So what? It’s crazier for me to think about a girl your age going places by herself,” he said. “I’ve got you, Ruby Cube.”

Ruby Cube. It had killed me the first time I read it and killed me every time since then when I saw the RC he wrote me. I was so dumb. So damn dumb to fall into this position again. Even knowing I was dumb didn’t change anything.

“I want to tell you yes.” How could I explain this to him? “I really do. I’ve only gone places by myself for work without my family. They’re going to think I’ve lost my mind if I tell them I’m going with you.”

“You’re twenty-four not ten.”

Those words hit my chest with the force of a thousand of Thor’s hammers. Hadn’t I told him all this before? How much I hated getting treated like a little kid? It was my fault, I knew it. I let them all boss me around. I’d let them all clip my wings, and then I’d finished off the job myself.

“I know we’d get along. I know it. You know it. I’ll send you my social if you promise not to post it on the Internet or pull out a bunch of credit cards under my name. You can have my dad’s address and all the beach house information where we’ll be staying. It’s a big house. You can have your own room.” There was another pause, but it was his calm, steady breaths that I couldn’t help but pay attention to. He breathed like my sister. Like someone who didn’t get out of breath running up stairs. “I know you’ll get along with all of us.”

My heart thought it was a downhill skier going for the gold. How I could be so excited and so scared at the same time, blew my freaking mind.

Why wasn’t I telling him this was crazy?

Why?

Because it was crazy freaking stupid, but not in a bad way. I wanted to go so badly I could taste it. That part of me that wasn’t scared of what he would think of me, of what could happen if we didn’t get along in person, wanted to go so badly it made the rest of my brain shut up.

How could I tell Aaron I didn’t usually even get to choose my seat when I flew with my family? Just thinking that made me feel so young and—

“Ruby, don’t worry about the money. We can figure it out. I’m not expecting anything from you. I told you the truth when I said you’re my closest friend. You are. I tell you more than I tell anyone else. How the hell could I let anything happen to the one person who’s made me laugh when it was the last thing I wanted to do?”

My whole world seemed to stop.

And he kept going, oblivious. “If you really don’t want to go, I don’t want to force you or give you a guilt trip. Come because you want to. If not, we’ll make it work some other time. All right?”