Chapter 23
twenty-three
. . .
By the time I pulled up to Devon’s, I already knew I had left something wrong between me and Talia. I had texted her hours ago asking if she was in from the salon yet, and nothing had come back, which felt like an answer all by itself.
Talia usually had more music in her than silence. More curve. More dry humor tucked under a line, even when she was busy. Today felt flat in a way I couldn’t talk myself out of, and the longer I sat with it, the more certain I became that I had not imagined the shift.
I stayed in the Benz a few seconds longer than I needed to and checked the screen again.
Nothing.
Devon opened the front door before I made it all the way up the walk.
“There go the free labor.”
“You still too cheap to pay Best Buy?”
He stepped back laughing. “Why would I pay strangers when God gave me friends?”
“God need to take me back.”
That got a laugh out of Leisha from somewhere deeper in the house.
The TV was huge.
Too big for the wall.
Too big for Devon’s common sense.
Exactly the kind of purchase a man made after comparing five specs online and deciding competence would reveal itself later.
“Why’d you buy a damn movie theater?” I asked when I walked in.
“Because I’m grown,” Devon said.
“Because you’re foolish.”
Leisha came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a towel, looked at the box, then at me, and shook her head. “He been pacing around that thing since noon like it was gone mount itself.”
“I had a vision,” Devon said.
“You had delusion,” she said, then looked at me. “Hey, Micah.”
“Hey.”
There was food somewhere in the house. Some soft little candle Leisha had lit. Music low. Her throw blanket folded over the arm of the couch like she actually lived there and not in that half-floating way some women occupied a man’s space before anybody said it out loud.
I noticed all of it because Devon noticed all of it too, even while pretending he didn’t.
He moved different with her.
Softer around the edges.
Quicker to listen.
Less performative in his own damn house.
Leisha asked if we wanted drinks before we started. Devon said, “Yeah, baby, if you don’t mind,” in a tone I had never heard him use with another human being in life.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
“Shut up,” he said.
I hadn’t said anything yet.
That got me laughing for the first time all day.
Mounting the TV took longer than it should have because Devon believed in reading instructions only once a problem had already happened.
We argued over studs, measurements, wall anchors, and the basic dignity of hiring help.
Leisha came in twice to ask if we were alive and once just to stand there and watch Devon act like he knew what he was doing.
“Pass me the leveler,” I said.
“It’s right there.”
“That’s a screwdriver.”
“It’s tool-adjacent.”
I looked at him. “Leisha.”
She leaned in from the doorway. “Yes?”
“Come get your man.”
She laughed so hard she had to grab the frame. Devon told both of us to go to hell.
Eventually, the TV got on the wall without killing either of us or taking half the plaster with it.
That counted as victory.
After that, we collapsed onto the couch with controllers in hand and Madden 26 lighting up the room.
“This still don’t feel real,” Devon said, leaning forward like the screen might change if he got close enough. “New one drop in days too.”
“You too old to be this excited.”
“And yet.”
The game started. Trash talk came natural. Wings hit the coffee table. Leisha disappeared upstairs talking about leaving us to our little boy joy, and the second she was out of sight, Devon looked at me and grinned.
“You saw nothing.”
“I saw enough.”
He pointed a wing at me. “Mind your business.”
“Can’t. It’s in the room.”
That got him shaking his head, but he was smiling into the game now, and I caught myself thinking that maybe this was what it looked like when a man stopped acting like being settled had taken something from him.
Maybe the right woman just let him stop performing every version of himself except the real one.
That thought sat with me longer than I wanted.
My phone buzzed on the couch cushion beside me.
I looked down too fast.
Talia: Just got out. With Kendra. I’ll holler later.
That should have eased something.
It didn’t.
Because even through text, I could feel the difference. There was no teasing, no comeback, nothing to stretch one moment into two.
Devon saw my face change immediately.
He paused the game without asking.
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
He looked at me like I had insulted both of us.
“Talk, nigga.”
I leaned back into the couch and let the controller rest against my thigh.
That was the problem with old friends. They remembered your face from before you learned how to edit it for other people.
Finally, I said, “Tuesday, one of the women I used to talk to posted some raggedy shit about banker men moving dirty.”
Devon looked over. “What woman?”
“Candace.”
His face stayed blank for a second. “Who?”
“Exactly.”
That got the smallest laugh out of him, but I wasn’t there yet.
“She used to be in the inbox for a minute,” I said.
“Not even long enough to count. We never fucked. Never got close. Soon as I realized she was mostly performance and angles, I left it alone. But she saw something with me and Talia, got in her feelings, and posted like she had history worth mentioning.”
Devon nodded once. “Aight.”
“I told Talia the truth. Went to her place. Sat with her. Reassured her. Thought I’d handled it.”
“But.”
I scrubbed a hand over my jaw and looked down at the controller in my hands.
“But then Bryce happened.”
Devon leaned back into the couch. “Walk me through it.”
I exhaled once through my nose.
“We were out. Good night. Good food. She invited me to her parents’ for Labor Day.” I shook my head once because even now, that mattered. “Bryce walked up, said something about it being good to see us off the timeline.”
Devon waited.
“And I had a whole opening right there,” I said. “A clean layup. Could’ve said yeah, that’s my woman. Could’ve said we together. Could’ve said anything that sounded like I knew what she was to me in public the same way I know it in private.”
He didn’t interrupt.
That made it worse.
“And instead,” I said, “I hit him with, we just came out for a drink.”
Devon’s face changed then, just enough to let me know the line landed the way it had landed in Talia.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “That’s different.”
“Exactly.”
Devon was quiet for a second.
Then he said, “I can see you blocking Candace and moving the fuck on because she was so nobody I never even heard of her. But if you and Talia are moving how you say y’all moving, why not say that? Why not let Bryce know what it was?”
There it was.
The million-dollar question.
I sat back and looked at the ceiling for a second because once I really let myself touch the answer, it made me sound like exactly the kind of man I had no respect for.
Not a player.
Not a liar.
Just a scared man calling it privacy because privacy sounded better.
Devon looked at me for a long second.
“Because you scared it’ll all be a lie,” he said, giving shape to the thing before I could. “Even after all the real shit you done seen, you keep waiting for it to turn into something else.”
I leaned back and closed my eyes for one second.
“Yeah, man.”
There it was.
The whole ugly thing.
Not fear of Talia exactly, but fear of how much she had started to matter.
Devon shook his head.
“But she the realest woman you ever in your life had,” he said. “And you gon’ fuck around and have her be nothing but a dream.”
That got me up off the couch.
I started pacing before I even knew I was moving.
My mind started working all at once. Talia at the mixer.
Talia at my table. Talia letting me into her place when Candace’s little public tantrum had touched a nerve.
Talia FaceTiming me instead of playing games.
Talia asking the hard questions only after she had already kept showing up.
Talia online and in person and in real life, giving me the same woman every time.
She had done her part.
More than done it.
She had been vulnerable. Soft. Present. She had put herself out there in comments, in rooms, in my bed, in my family plans, in her own damn head even with all her old reasons not to.
And I had left her cold like a dumbass because I thought I was doing all that mattered.
The private shit.
The real shit.
Whole time, online was real too once you were together.
Public was real.
The room was real.
How a woman felt standing beside you was real.
I picked up my phone. No text. Called. She didn’t answer.
My heart sped so hard it made me stand still. Because Talia always answered my calls. Always.
I looked at the screen like maybe it would fix itself if I stared hard enough. Nothing. Just her name.
Then voicemail.
“Damn,” I muttered.
Devon looked up from the couch. “She pick up?”
I shook my head once.
That made everything in me go colder than I liked, because when you were already standing in the doorway of a mistake, every small silence sounded bigger.
What if I fucked up enough that maybe not today turned into maybe not ever again?
I stood there in Devon’s living room with Madden still paused on the TV and my phone hot in my hand and knew exactly one thing for sure.
I was not sitting down again until I fixed it.