worth getting out of the tub

When the phone rings at midnight, I expect an emergency. I have relatives a thousand miles away who are expecting babies, anticipating surgery, planning weddings...if things go well, they don't call me. Or maybe the friends I used to live with in the next town had another baby emergency and wanted me to look after their preschooler. If I had the water so comfortably hot at 9:30, and I'd just been getting to the spearpoint of _Talking To Strange Men_, I would probably have stayed in my bath and let the call click over to voicemail. But midnight is different.

It was a distant sweetie, who wears a watch all the time but apparently doesn't look at it. He missed me. He wanted to chat. Having time and space for a conversation, he called. My heart was pounding in my throat, the phone slipping in my wet fingers. This was the sort of talk that used to terrify me, just because it was so fraught, so breathtakingly exciting I didn't know how to deal with it. I can remember feeling that way, in another apartment with wooden floors, dripping on this same old phone table after rushing out of the shower. And now? I took my tense, dripping, self over to the couch, where the blanket I'd washed yesterday was almost dry. I wrapped myself up and relaxed.

It would not have been worth getting out of the tub to eat girl scout cookies. Even for the sake of discovering I don't like Peanut Butter Patties nearly as much as I did when I was a kid. But as long as I was up...