- You're a monster! - shouts a loud girl in the first row of protest line, as he shows his ID to a policeman to enter the building.
The sound goes through his spine as electric shock. It cannot be…
- Hey, mister! - shouts she even louder, possibly encouraged by a sight of his frozen posture. - I'm talking to you!
This voice!
Ben turns back to face the picket. They hold quite abusive posters about his company decision to demolish a couple of suburban districts in Manchester. But it's not so important right now.
He finds the girl and tries to study her facial features, connecting this nose and freckles on it, greenish-brown eyes and a messy bun above to a voice he knows better than anything. Sound of this voice was with him every day, whispering sweet nothings through the cords of his headphones, giving him a slightest hope there is still some love and tenderness in this damn cursed world. This voice wished him goodnight and sweetened his morning coffees. This voice was calming him down, when he returned after the greasy weekly meetings of law department. Rarely this voice was doing unspeakable things to him, so he would shyly relax a belt on his trousers to cross the line… But he knew it was just an ASMR podcast, and it wasn't even a very popular one.
- Why are you looking at me like this? - asked a very confused girl with HER voice.
The enchantment fell, and Ben found out he was standing face to face with the girl and was looking at her for a whole good minute. Some activists in the line giggled. He had to explain himself. And all he, a head of department in one of the biggest international construction companies in the world, could say, was:
- It is you…