Grown Folks
alyssa
My phone buzzed and “Carter Sisters” flashed across the screen.
A FaceTime call. I almost didn’t answer, but I knew if I ignored it, they’d just call again…
and again. I’d told them about the moment Julian and I had after the gala, and they knew that he had been out of town and would have been back by now. They wanted an update.
I hit accept and three faces popped up at once.
“Good morning, glow worm,” Jada sang, squinting into her camera. “Oh, yeah. Look at that skin. That’s a man-glow if I ever saw one.”
“Oh my God,” I groaned. “Can y’all not?”
Jordan gasped. “Wait. Hold up. She ain’t denying it. You did! Didn’t you?”
Tamika dropped her fork. “Alyssa Carter! Did you finally break your fast?”
I couldn’t stop the grin that crept up, even as I shook my head. “Y’all are ridiculous.”
“Don’t try to play us,” Jada said. “You got that post-game serenity all over your face. That’s not sleep. That’s satisfaction.”
Jordan fell out laughing. “She got that ‘my back still sore but I ain’t mad about it’ face!”
I buried my face in my hands, laughing. “Y’all are the worst people I know.”
“So?” Tamika pressed. “How was it?”
“Tamika.”
“How many times?”
“I’m not telling y—”
“HOW. MANY.”
I peeked between my fingers and held up four. All three screamed like somebody won the lottery.
“FOUR?! FOUR?!” Jordan clutched her chest. “Sis, that man got superpowers!”
Jada fanned herself. “You mean to tell me you been celibate for damn near a decade and came back with four rounds on the first night? Won’t he do it!”
I couldn’t stop laughing long enough to speak.
“No, ‘cause you know what that means, right?” Tamika said. “That man was studying you. He done wrote a whole dissertation on your body.”
“Why are you yelling?” I asked, still laughing.
Jada smirked. “You happy?”
That quieted me. For a moment, I just sat there, rubbing my lips together, thinking.
“I am,” I said finally. “Really happy. It’s just… weird. Feels almost like I dreamt it. Peaceful, but scary at the same time, you know?”
Tamika nodded, serious for once. “Yeah. That’s what happens when it’s real.”
Jordan leaned forward. “You can’t go into it scared about losing it. You have to just… live it. Enjoy it.”
“Exactly,” Jada said. “One day at a time. Don’t start overthinking.”
“I’m trying not to.”
Tamika smiled. “I’m so happy for you Alyssa. You two been dancing around this for months. It’s about damn time you stopped pretending.”
I leaned back in my chair, the smile still stuck on my face. “Yeah, I’m happy for me too.”
“Good.” Jada winked. “Now drink some water, stretch, and be prepared to thank that man properly again later.”
“Goodbye!” I said, hitting end call before they could say anything else.
But I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face if I tried.
I was happy. And it wasn’t just the sex, though, Lord knows, that man made me forget how to spell my own name.
It was the way he made me feel safe and understood.
That made me more nervous than I wanted to admit.
Because I knew now what it felt like to be cared for like that, and that meant if I lost it, I’d really feel it.
I took a deep breath, looked at my smiling reflection in the dark screen of my phone. “One day at a time, girl. One day at a time.”
Weeks later, the newness had not worn off. The shower kicked on down the hall, and Julian had me immediately backed against my kitchen counter before the pipes finished knocking.
“He just got in,” I said, already losing the thread of why that mattered, my hands curling into his shirt instead of pushing him off.
“He’ll be in there twenty minutes.” His mouth was at the corner of mine. “He’s discovered acoustics.”
About a month ago Micah had discovered that the bathroom made him sound like a stadium act, and now every shower came with a concert.
The same forty seconds of the same song, the only part he knew, performed at full volume.
Right on cue, his off-key wail started up, and Julian smiled against my mouth.
“See? He’s committed to his set. We’ve got time.”
We weren’t going to really do anything with the time.
This was the thing we did now. Make the most of the window, kiss like we were getting away with something, his hands finding my waist, mine finding the line of his back under his shirt, both of us half-laughing into it because we were two grown people who ran a company and courtrooms, and had been reduced to making out against a counter while a third-grader murdered a song down the hall.
The water cut off suddenly and we both froze. The singing had stopped.
“That was not twenty minutes,” I whispered.
"It wasn't." Julian's forehead dropped to my shoulder, and he was already laughing. "Give him the sniff test. He might have taken a faux-shower. Runs the water, never actually gets in, comes out dry as a bone telling you he bathed.”
“He would not.”
“He’s a boy, Alyssa. He absolutely would.” He straightened up and fixed my shirt, kissed my forehead, then turned to the stove like he'd been standing there cooking the whole time.
Micah's door banged open and he came down the hall already mid-sentence. "MOM! Is Zhaire still gonna sleepover here tomorrow?"
"We'll see."
Julian didn't even turn around. "Come here a second, lil man."
Micah detoured over and Julian crouched down to his level, took his forearm, turned it over, and ran a thumb across the back of his hand. Then he leaned in and smelled his shoulder.
Micah's whole face fell. “What?”
“Mm-hm.” Julian nodded slowly. “You turned on the shower and stood by the sink, didn't you?”
"I got in!" Micah protested.
"Your skin is dry, your hair's dry, and I don’t smell any soap.”
“Micah!” I said in disbelief.
Micah looked between me and Julian, deciding whether it was worth it to keep denying it, then stared at Julian, genuinely perplexed. “How come you even know that?”
"Because I know everything," Julian answered pleasantly. He clapped him once on the shoulder. “How about you go do it for real.”
Micah dragged back down the hall muttering. I stared at Julian. "How did you know that? You were so sure.”
“You forget Zhaire's the same age. Boys that age run the same con, Lyss."
The shower kicked on again, the singing resumed, and I went back to watching Julian move around my kitchen like it was his.
Something about him standing barefoot in my kitchen, handling my son with his easy, certain patience, that did something to me. I wanted to cross the kitchen and climb him right there. Lock my bedroom door and forget there was a third-grader scrubbing behind his ears down the hall.
Which was exactly why I'd set the rules I’d set.
Because left to my own devices, with this man in my space looking like that and being like that, I had no self-control to speak of.
And I had a child in the house. So I decided to draw lines early and hard.
I’d made them, and Julian had accepted them without an ounce of argument.
The first one was simple: we did not have sex when Micah was in the house.
Julian did not spend the night. He might stay late, but he’d always go back to his own place to sleep.
Julian had agreed to it before I finished saying it and held it more strictly than I did, honestly.
There were nights Micah was dead asleep behind his closed door, white-noise machine going, and we’d end up tangled up kissing like teenagers, Julian’s hands under my shirt and mine working at his belt, and I’d be the one to keep going and he’d be the one to catch my wrist, and say not here.
He never made it about willpower. He just made it not a question, the same way I had, and somehow that made me want him more, which was its own cruel joke.
So when Micah was home, we lived on stolen minutes. But we weren’t sexless. Far from it. We’d just learned to manage a calendar.
We still ran a couple mornings a week, and those runs had a way of ending at whoever’s place was closer, with forty minutes before either of us had to be a professional and Micah already dropped at school.
We still had our lunches downtown, sometimes eating takeout in bed at one of our condos blocks from our offices.
And then there was the one reliable thing: Micah’s nights at Raschad’s. He’d go to stay with Zhaire, the two of them more brothers than cousins now, and that night would become the night. I’d stay at Julian’s. Or he’d stay at mine. And we’d get to be loud and slow.
It was a whole operation, the way Jada put it when I broke it down. She’d laughed so hard she’d had to set the phone down.
“You waited years, found a perfect man, and now you’re rationing him out around a third-grader’s sleepover schedule?”
“It’s necessary, Jada.”
“It’s you overthinking, Alyssa. Your default setting making you feel bad for finally putting yourself first.”
She was kind of right. This was the part I hadn’t expected: guilt.
It caught me at the strangest times. Packing a small bag for a night at Julian's, folding new lingerie into it, and then standing there with this sneaky feeling crawling up my neck like I'd been caught.
Caught at what, I couldn't have said. Micah had no idea.
To him, Mommy stayed at Julian's sometimes the way he stayed at Zhaire's.
A sleepover, grown-up edition. There was nothing in his world that made it a thing to think about.
But I'd lie in Julian's arms after, satisfied and stupidly happy, and some other part of me would be quietly doing math on whether any of it made me selfish. Whether, when Micah was old enough to do the arithmetic backward, he'd decide his mother had been something other than what he'd thought.
When I finally said it out loud one night, lying against his chest, he didn’t even pause.
“I think Micah knows the things that are his to know,” he said.
“That his mother is happy. That there’s a man in his life who shows up and doesn’t leave.
He doesn’t need to know how his mother spends a Friday night any more than he needs to know what’s in your bank account or what you and your sisters talk about on the phone.
Some things are yours. You’re allowed to have a life that’s yours, Lyss.
Being his mother is never supposed to cost you the whole rest of you. ”
“It feels like sneaking.”
“It’s not sneaking. It’s privacy and prudence.
Sneaking is when you’d be ashamed if he knew.
Privacy is when there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just not his business.
” He pressed his mouth to my shoulder. “You’re not doing anything to him.
You’re doing something for you, somewhere he isn’t, with somebody who’d put a brick wall up before he let it touch that boy’s world. That’s not selfish.”
I let that settle, because it was the thing I hadn’t been able to say to myself.
I’d spent so long being one thing — Micah’s mother — that wanting something strictly for myself felt like stealing hours from him.
Micah wasn’t owed those hours. He was loved and more secure than he’d ever been, with steadier ground under him than before.
None of that had been taken from him by what I had with Julian. If anything, it came with it.
It took me a few weeks to believe I was allowed to draw a careful line around my son's world and have a full, warm, ridiculous, eight-minutes-against-the-counter life on the other side of it.
The guilt still rode along sometimes. It just didn't get to drive.
After all this time, I stopped apologizing for being a whole person.