About a week or so ago, I made an international call to someone who doesn’t like speaking on the telephone. I knew this was risky – and her fear of a disembodied voice proved to be an issue the last time I saw her in person (to the point of her masturbating in the same room as me, so she wasn’t distracted by any noises I made) – but this was, to put it mildly, important.

I had something to say, and I wanted to do so without preamble… but then, what kind of friend would I be had I done that?

“Er, yeah, hello, this is ILB,” I said hesitantly. “I’m sorry for calling, I know you don’t like it very much. And it’s an international call, so I’ll have to be brief.”
“What’s this, a booty call?”
“Uh…” I looked around at this point, the grey work building I had ducked out of at lunchtime surrounding me like three looming monoliths. I couldn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, think of a place less designed to be making a booty call. “No, it’s not an 8,419-mile booty call. What it is is…”
“So it’s not a booty call?”

In all fairness, it’s not out of the realms of possibility for Louise to genuinely travel eight and a half thousand miles for sex. I’m fairly certain she’s done more.

“…and that’s why I think you need to check your e-mails. Do you still use that old address?”
“No, but I have the password for it. I mean, I used to use it for…”
“Sex,” I supplied. “You had a directory of people you liked to bang; do I have that correct?”

There were a few seconds of silence before she burst into a loud, wheezy laugh.

“Well, I can hardly use my work e-mail for that!”
“You can’t?”

Another wheezy laugh. I’d forgotten how breathless she sounds when she’s amused. Something else which slipped my mind in the intervening seventeen years.

“Okay, I’ll check. I’ll e-mail you what I find out.”
“Cheers. You’re okay with e-mailing me everything, yeah?”
“You tell me. How much of me do you want?”

What?

“What?”
“You’re the one that made the booty call!”