Chapter 8 #2
Smoke from the charcoal drifted low through the yard, mixing with the smell of barbecue sauce, baked chicken, hot links, and the sweet beans cooling in foil pans on the serving table.
Potato salad. Deviled eggs. Corn wrapped in foil.
Watermelon already split open in a metal tray.
The music had shifted into Maze, and all around me there was that particular Fourth of July cookout noise Black families made when nobody was in a hurry to go anywhere.
I had dressed for exactly that. Summer. Family. Heat. A little attention if it found me.
The sleeveless denim dress fit the way it was supposed to, close through my waist and ass, the hem falling high on my thick thighs, silver studs catching little bits of light whenever I moved.
My platform sandals gave me height without asking too much of me.
Gold sat warm against my skin at my throat, my ears, my wrists, with the diamond bracelet and the extra little studs in my second and third piercings throwing back just enough light to matter.
By the time I set the tea down, the yard had already turned into what family cookouts always became.
Too much food. Too many opinions. Everybody half in a conversation with the person beside them and the person three seats down at the same time.
Uncle Raymond was already deep in an argument nobody had asked him to start.
Aunt Denise kept correcting people’s plate choices like she owned the menu.
Shay was on her second cup of sweet tea and her first joke that should have stayed in her mouth.
My mother moved through all of it with that particular authority women had when the food was good and the yard knew it.
I had just started reaching for the tongs when my phone buzzed in my hand.
A text.
Micah: You knew exactly what you was doing with that comment.
Heat moved through me low and quick.
I looked up from the table on instinct, like somebody in the yard might somehow know.
Nobody did. My mother was still talking. My father was still halfway focused on the grill and halfway focused on me. Shay was outside laughing too loud near the deck railing.
I looked back down at the screen.
Me: Did I?
The reply came fast.
Micah: Talia.
Just my name.
Heavy enough all by itself.
Then:
I need to see you tonight.
The yard kept moving around me. Somebody asked for more ice.
My uncle called for hot sauce from the far end of the table.
One of the little boys got fussed at for waving an unlit sparkler too close to the citronella candles.
My mother told my father to stop hovering over the ribs like nobody else knew how to eat.
And all of it drifted back.
I read his words again.
Then another message.
Micah: I’m serious. I can’t wait till next week. Not for more of you.
My thighs pressed together beneath the table.
All week we had been talking. Laughing. Circling. Letting the line between curiosity and want get thinner every night. And now here he was, not pretending patience he did not feel, not wrapping desire in ten polite layers, just saying it plain.
He had to see me.
My whole body heard that before my pride did.
I set the phone facedown in my lap and tried to listen to Shay dragging somebody’s fiancé for wearing too much cologne to family functions. I could not have repeated a word if my life depended on it.
Because something in me had already started leaning.
It was reckless. Probably too soon.
Exactly the sort of thing a grown woman with family all around her and sense and history and enough disappointment behind her ought to make herself think through properly before acting.
And yet.
All week he had been calling because he wanted more than the phone could hold. All week I had been waiting for the next little pulse of him. My body had gotten there first and was standing there now with its arms crossed, unimpressed by caution.
I picked the phone back up.
Me: Where?
His answer came fast enough to feel like he had been waiting with the screen open.
Micah: Velvet Room. 9:30.
I checked the time.
8:17.
My pulse kicked again.
“You all right?” my father asked, cutting his eyes at me over a paper plate loaded with ribs and potato salad.
“Fine.”
“Mmm,” my mother said.
I ignored both of them and typed:
Me: You are very sure I’m coming.
Three dots.
Micah: No. I’m hoping you are. Big difference.
I looked across the yard at my mother. She was laughing now, one hand at her chest, telling Aunt Denise she was too old to be cutting up like this in front of company.
Fireworks had started popping somewhere a few streets over, quick bright little bursts above the trees.
The yard was full of food and smoke and music and people who had known me before I knew how to protect myself properly.
This was the kind of evening a woman should have been satisfied by.
And I was. That was not the issue.
The issue was that somewhere under my dress and jewelry and all the sense I had spent years building for myself, I wanted to go see a man in low light and let the week finally have a body again.
I typed back.
Me: I can be there by 10.
Micah: I’ll be there.
I locked the phone and slid it into my purse.
Then I looked up and found my mother already looking at me in a maternal way that made me feel briefly fourteen and fully seen.
“You leaving early?” she asked.
“A little.”
“For what?”
I reached for my cup, buying myself a sip I did not need. “I’m meeting somebody.”
That changed the yard in the smallest possible Black-family way. Nobody gasped. Nobody clutched pearls. But the air shifted. Aunt Denise went quiet on purpose. Shay’s eyes widened. My father leaned back in his chair like he had just become casually interested in absolutely everything.
Then my mother said, “Okay.”
That was all. No interrogation.
Just okay.
Maybe because I was thirty-six and not sixteen. Maybe because mothers knew when a daughter needed to walk into something on her own feet. Maybe because some part of her recognized the look on my face and remembered being a woman before she had to become somebody’s mother.
Still, when I stood to gather my purse, she caught my wrist lightly and said, low enough for only me:
“Make sure he meets the woman you are. Not just the one he likes looking at.”
That stayed with me all the way to the downstairs bathroom even as I was thinking I wanted this man to see all of me, dammit.
I slipped inside long enough to freshen up. Gloss. Powder. Perfume at my wrists, behind my knees, and a little at my throat. I smoothed both hands down over the denim and looked at myself in the mirror.
I had not dressed for Micah.
That was the truth.
I had dressed for summer. For the holiday. For myself.
But suddenly I was very aware that I looked like a woman a man might have trouble letting leave twice in one week.
When I came back outside, the yard was louder, the sky darker, and fireworks were starting to split open over the neighborhood in red and gold flashes above the trees.
My father looked up from his chair near the grill and stared for one second too long.
Then he smiled.
“Drive safe.”
That was all.
My mother kissed my cheek. Aunt Denise said nothing, which meant everything. Shay grinned like a woman with no shame at all.
I got out of there before anybody could start acting new.
The Velvet Room sat just off Penn Avenue behind a smoked-glass door and a bronze plaque too understated for the amount of money they charged for bourbon.
I had been there before, usually with Kendra or a few other women when we wanted good drinks, low light, and music old enough to mean something.
No harsh LEDs. No bottle girls doing too much.
Just amber light, velvet booths, dark wood, a backlit bar glowing gold, and a room full of people who looked like they had dressed for the possibility of being remembered.
Tonight the DJ had the room sitting somewhere between the late nineties and early two-thousands. Faith had just given way to Donell Jones, the beat low and warm enough to get under a woman’s skin without asking permission.
I paused inside the door for one second and let my eyes adjust.
Then I saw him.
Micah sat in a corner booth with one arm stretched along the back, drink in front of him untouched enough to tell me he had been waiting. White tee. Dark denim. A fresh pair of Military Blue Jordan 4s planted flat beneath the table like he had settled in with no intention of leaving soon.
The shirt fit across his chest and shoulders in a way that felt almost disrespectful in public, the cotton pulled just enough over muscle to let a woman know what was under it without making it seem like he had tried.
His forearms rested bare against the booth, brown and sculpted, veins moving low beneath the skin.
His hands were big. Bigger than they had looked the night we met.
Fingers long. Palms the kind a woman could imagine on her waist, her thigh, the back of her neck, and get herself into trouble too early in the evening.
When he turned fully toward me, the diamond stud in his left ear caught the light.
His gaze moved over me once, controlled and full enough to make heat start low and spread.
My dress suddenly felt more aware of his eyes than it had in the car.
The denim hugged me close through my waist and ass, the silver studs along the seams catching little bits of light whenever I moved.
The hem sat high on my thighs already, and with him looking at me like that, I became too conscious of exactly how much leg I had brought into the room.
I crossed the lounge toward him, and his gaze stayed on me the whole way.
“That look on your face is already a problem,” I said when I reached the booth.
Micah stood before he answered, unfolding from the seat with a smooth kind of ease that reminded me exactly how tall he was. Close, he was worse. Broader. Warmer. Too much man for me to pretend I had come in there casual.
“Good to see you too, Talia.”