Call Me Maybe

Call Me Maybe is a contemporary romantic comedy by Cara Bastone, the first book in her Love Lines series. Vera has three hours on hold and a broken website to fix before a business expo she cannot afford to miss. The customer service representative who finally answers is called Cal, and he turns out to be genuinely helpful, unhurried and disarmingly awkward — the sort of person who orders her takeout while he works through her site with her.

The call ends with an exchange of numbers, and the story continues from there in texts, voicemails and DMs sent between New York City and New Jersey. Bastone builds the whole romance out of that back-and-forth: the flirtation, the small daily absurdities and miscommunications, and the friendship that arrives before either of them is willing to name what it has become. The question the book keeps returning to is whether it is possible to fall in love at first talk, with someone you have heard but never seen.

The story first appeared in 2020 as an Audible Original, written during the pandemic as a deliberately feel-good, laugh-out-loud comedy, and performed as an audio epistolary by Luci Christian and Neil Hellegers. It was later published in print and ebook editions. Two further Love Lines books followed.