Chapter 2
two
. . .
By six-thirteen, I had already ignored three messages, one story reply, and a woman on Threads who had decided my opinion about live albums meant we should probably get drinks.
That was the thing about being visible online. People mistook access for intimacy all the time.
I sat back in my desk chair at Three Rivers Trust, the bank’s name etched into the glass beyond my office in the kind of understated lettering rich people trusted, and made a few last edits to a credit memo I needed off my desk.
Most of the lights were still on, but the day had changed shape. Jackets were coming off chairs. Laptop bags were getting zipped. Somebody laughed near reception with that tired little Monday edge people got when they were ready to be done pretending work was the main event of their lives.
And now here came this damn mixer.
On a Monday.
That alone should’ve made a nigga suspicious.
Monday nights were for getting out of work without adding another obligation to your back. Going home. Loosening your tie. Eating something decent. Letting the day get off you before the rest of the week started making fresh demands.
Not this.
Not putting another shirt on for a room full of smiling strangers, half-networking, half-fishing, all of them acting like the first workday of the week hadn’t already taken enough.
Which was probably why I was still sitting there arguing with myself about whether showing up counted as effort or self-sabotage.
Devon had already left early to see his girl, Leisha, before the mixer. Claimed he was only circling back later to make sure I actually went and not because he planned to do any mixing himself.
My phone buzzed again beside the keyboard.
Devon: You leaving or you planning to send your fine, antisocial regrets at 7:41?
I smirked and typed back.
Me: I’m working. Some of us have careers.
The bubbles came right back.
Devon: And some of us know you hide behind yours when you don’t feel like being bothered.
Then another one.
Devon: I’m with my woman, so don’t start. I’m only pulling up to make sure you don’t punk out.
I looked at the screen a second longer than I needed to, then set the phone facedown.
He wasn’t wrong.
Commercial banking had a way of rewarding men who liked structure.
Numbers made sense. Deals either held up or they didn’t.
A client either qualified or he was wasting everybody’s time.
Even when things got messy, the mess still had logic underneath it.
You could rework terms. Tighten a package. Ask for more collateral. Move on.
Real life didn’t move that cleanly.
My office overlooked a narrow slice of downtown, enough glass and late light to remind me I had built something decent here.
Vice president looked better on paper than it felt most days, but the money was right, the work made sense more often than people did, and I liked being good at something that didn’t ask me to perform a version of myself to survive it.
Two client meetings. One lunch I didn’t want. A credit package that finally made sense after three revisions and one business owner acting like optimism should count as liquidity.
Long day. Not a bad one.
Still, by now my real life had started tapping the glass.
Tonight, technically, I had plans. The Link Up mixer downtown.
Same Black professional social orbit I drifted through online and showed my face in just enough to stay connected, mostly for business opportunities, but sometimes to watch people, people, without giving it too much of me.
On paper, it was what it always was: networking, music, cocktails, maybe somebody talking too loud about real estate, grant funding, or building legacy under warm lights.
Under all that, it was still what it had always been: a dating pool dressed in business casual.
Everybody knew it.
The Facebook page was all job openings, headshots, panel flyers, brunch recaps, support Black business, and civic uplift. Then came the comments. The little jokes. The flirting dressed up as community. The DMs after the event pictures. The “you going?” that never only meant one thing.
You could always tell who was there to network and who was there to see whether somebody looked as good in person as they did on the timeline and hope they let them fuck.
Most people were there for both.
I didn’t judge that part. I liked women.
Beautiful women. Fat asses too, if we were being honest. I was a grown man, not a monk.
But chasing tail got less interesting when the woman attached to it felt fake the second you got close enough to know better.
A good time was still a good time. I wasn’t acting above that.
I was just tired of wasting it on people who turned out to be all presentation and no center.
That was the part that got old.
By the time you met a woman in person, you already knew her angles.
Her captions. Her politics if she posted them.
The brand of her humor. What kind of music she wanted people to think she listened to.
Which side of her face she trusted more.
Whether she posted books she never read, flights she couldn’t afford, or healing quotes right before acting a fool in somebody’s DMs.
You could know all that and still have no idea whether she was real where it counted.
Twice in the last year I’d met women who looked one way online and walked into the room as somebody else entirely.
The issue wasn’t age or imperfection. It was deception.
Filters. Angles. Borrowed energy. Curated identity.
One woman had edited herself so hard she’d built a whole different face.
Another talked online like a woman with range and showed up in person with nothing behind her eyes but phone light and catchphrases.
That kind of shit would wear a man out if he had any sense.
And I had enough.
My phone buzzed again.
A story reaction from a woman I vaguely knew from the group. One of those little lazy replies under last weekend’s bourbon post.
You look like you need a drinking partner.
I looked at it for a beat, then locked the phone and dropped it in my pocket unanswered.
That kind of thing used to be easier to entertain before I got tired of the gap between what showed up online and what sat across from me in real life.
And that gap was real.
The worst one had been maybe a year ago.
Fine enough online. Pretty, sure. But that wasn’t even what irritated me after.
It was how hard she had edited the truth.
Filters smoothing her face younger. Features shifted just enough to make you question your own memory.
The whole presentation softer, more racially ambiguous, then all the coded Blackness laid over top of it.
Braids. Language. Styling. Curated Black girl cool, packaged up neat for the app.
Then she sat across from me in real light and the whole shit fell apart. I felt stupid after, not for wanting her, but for believing what I had been shown long enough to show up in person.
That kind of letdown changes a man. Makes him slower with screens, quicker with his discernment, less likely to give the benefit of the doubt just because somebody knows their angles and can dress up a caption.
I shut down my laptop, slid it into my bag, and stood. My suit jacket hung on the back of my chair. Charcoal. My shirt was pale blue and still holding up. Cuff links already off and in the top drawer.
I checked myself once in the reflection of the glass.
Still together. Still looked like I had somewhere to be and good reason for going there.
That had its uses.
People liked to act like men moved through the world untouched by presentation. That was bullshit. We just got to pretend ours was more accidental.
By the time I got downstairs to the garage, Devon was calling.
I answered through the car speakers as I pulled open the driver’s door of my black Benz GLE 450.
“You clocking my every move tonight?”
“Somebody got to. You get in that bag and start acting like niggas don’t exist.” His voice came through warm and smug. “You leaving or what?”
“I’m getting in the car.”
“See. Growth.”
I dropped my bag in the passenger seat and started the engine. “Don’t make me stay home on principle.”
“You not staying home. I know what you look like when you about to stay home, and this ain’t that.”
“You sound too invested in another man’s business.”
“You need friends, man.”
“I have friends.”
“You got me. That’s why I’m saying it.”
I backed out slow, one hand on the wheel. “I’m coming.”
“That’s all I needed.” A beat. Then, because Devon never knew how to leave well enough alone, “Who you think gon’ be there?”
“People.”
“Women?”
I sighed. “Probably.”
“Open your heart, Micah.”
“Open your own.”
He laughed. “Mine already open and it’s with Leisha. Yours got a keypad and a front desk.”
I ended the call smiling in spite of myself.
By the time I left Three Rivers Trust, downtown was already shifting into evening. The mixer was happening less than ten minutes away, on the other side of downtown, close enough that the drive should not have given me much time to think.
It did anyway.
That was probably the problem.
I kept the music up just high enough to fill the car. Leon Thomas first. Then Lucky Daye. Then something older, because I liked a set to move the way a good room did—current first, then back into something with memory in it. Something that knew what grown folks had survived to get here.
I cut through the city the way I knew it best. Past corners that still felt familiar even now, places Garfield had trained into my body before offices, credit memos, and glass walls started shaping my days.
Pittsburgh was like that. No matter how well you dressed your life up, the city still kept a hand on your shoulder.
Traffic wasn’t doing too much, but even a few blocks, a red light, and one slow bus gave my mind room to move where I didn’t need it going.
By the time I pulled up, I was more ready to get out of the car than I wanted to admit.