"Hello, this is Jason."
"Hey, its me," her voice greeted him from across the wire. Light and lilting, cool and comforting, soft and seductive, and a thousand other things besides, the voice on the other end of the phone was, as clichéd as it might be, the music that could soothe his savage beast.
Cradling the phone against his shoulder, Jason continued on his quest for that elusive file folder buried somewhere in the pile of a hundred identical file folders on his desk.
"Hey me," Jason said into the phone, his voice taking on that special tone that guys only used when talking to women, the same tone that Dave, Jason's best friend and cubicle-mate, liked to call "Chick Voice". Dave had long-since lost interest in teasing his friend about it - he needed more of a challenge. Sitting with his feet propped up on his own desk, directly behind Jason's, Dave peered over the sports page and just shook his head.
"Hey you," she almost purred back, completing the long-standing joke between them.
"Hey Allie," Dave called from behind the sports page, an almost-but-not-quite-there note of exasperate distaste in his voice.
"Dave says hi," Jason said, dutifully relaying the message.
"Hi David," she replied in that sickeningly sweet, flirty 12 year old schoolgirl kind of voice that women reserved for friends of their mothers, little babies, dogs, and guys they really really really didn't like. While David had never met Alexandra's mother, nor was he a little child (at least not technically), that still left two rather plausible explanations for her tone.
"Hi David," said Jason, turning to his friend and mimicking the voice to the best of his abilities, knowing how it bothered him so. David just "harrumphed" and snapped the paper in front of him.
Turning back to his desk, a smile creeping across his face, Jason began restacking the folders into tidy little piles that utterly lacked any sense of order or organization.
"What's up?" Jason asked the phone.
"You feel like seeing a movie tonight?" Allie asked.
"Sure... no, wait... what's today?"
"Thursday," she replied indulgently with a little laugh.
Tap, tap, tap went his fingers on the computer's keyboard, pulling up his schedule. Jason was notorious for a good many things, one of them being that he was incredibly disorganized, but in annoyingly neat and tidy sort of way. His disorganization, in turn, manifested itself in many different ways, one of them being an almost biblically proportioned ability to double and, at times, triple book. The fact that he was still alive was testament enough to how much his friends liked him, or at least tolerated him. Alexandra, too, took it in stride these days, but not before she had tried to "modify" his behavior by buying Jason a Palm Pilot which he, of course, promptly lost.
Even before his calendar appeared on the screen, Jason could feel David's eyes boring a hole through the back of his head, reinforcing the nagging suspicion that he had something else planned for the evening. Yup, there it was: "Thursday, 7pm, watch game with D".
"Um, actually, Dave and I were gonna go watch the game at McDougal's tonight." Without even looking, Jason could tell Dave was nodding his head in that "damn right we are" sort of way.
"Oh, OK," was Alexandra's reply. One of the things that Jason loved about her was that she wasn't the sort of woman to come between a guy and his friends. She wasn't the sort of woman that would demand that her boyfriend blow off his friends for her. She wasn't the sort of woman that would get jealous or pout if her boyfriend chose to go out with his friends instead of her.
It just wasn't in her to be that direct about it.
"Rain check?" Jason asked.
"Sure, no problem. Maybe tomorrow night," she replied in a matter of fact sort of way.
"So, what ARE you gonna do tonight?"
"Oh, I don't know. I'll find something to do. It might be nice to have this place to myself tonight."
"Wait... you're at home?" Jason asked, a little stunned.
