He calls her at 2 AM from a truck stop in Flagstaff. She answers.
Matthew’s been running long-haul for twenty years. He knows every interstate, every weigh station, every lonely stretch of highway between California and everywhere else. What he doesn’t know is how his executive assistant became the person he can’t sleep without talking to.
Taylor’s been staying at his place for three weeks while her rental gets foundation work. She waters his plants (all still alive, miraculously). She keeps his schedule tighter than it’s ever been. And every night, when the diesel fumes and the loneliness get too loud in that sleeper cab, he calls her.
It started as schedule calls. Then they got longer. Then they got later. Then they stopped being about the schedule at all.
She tells him about the fern she named Gerald. He tells her about the mechanic who charged him $380 for a fuel filter and a shrug. She reads him Wikipedia at 1 AM. He learns the sound she makes when she’s deciding whether to be annoyed or fond.
Neither of them has said what this is yet. The “something-like-that” that the mechanic in Flagstaff recognized with a knowing grin. The undefined thing that’s become the load-bearing wall of both their lives.
But some calls change everything. And some voices, once you’ve heard them in the dark, you can’t unhear.
FaceTime After Hours is Book 3 in the Taylor Quinn Romance series — a slow-burn, blue-collar love story about the intimacy of a voice in the dark, the courage to name what you’re afraid to lose, and the 2 AM calls that become the best part of the day.
For everyone who ever stayed on the phone — and for the ones who answered.