Chapter 6
six
. . .
My house got quiet after we hung up, but it wasn’t the same quiet I’d had before he called.
It had his laugh in it now.
The low one. The real one. The one that had slipped out when I asked if he was too good for Kool-Aid. The one that had made me lean my hip harder into the kitchen counter and smile into the dark like I’d lost some private little fight with myself and wasn’t even embarrassed enough to lie about it.
I stood there for a second with my phone still in my hand, my eyes moving over the half-rinsed glass in the sink, the lamp near the sofa, the robe loosening at my thigh, and the room around me somehow carrying not just the echo of me, but a little of him too.
That was new. Wanting a man was easy enough to recognize.
Liking the sound of him in his own home settled deeper than that.
I could picture too much now. The condo. The city behind him. The low music. The easy way he laughed when something actually got him. The fact that he had Kut Klose playing in the background like a man with substance and taste and no need to announce either one.
That had gotten to me in a place lust alone didn’t reach. Not deeper, exactly. Just elsewhere.
I set the phone down on the island and pressed both palms to the cool marble.
“Okay,” I said softly, to myself. “You need to get a grip.”
The front door lock beeped.
I turned my head.
Then Kendra stepped in with a tote bag on one shoulder, a brown paper takeout sack in one hand, and the expression of a woman who already knew she had been right and intended to enjoy every minute of it.
Kendra was always put together, but in a different way than me.
Where I leaned soft, glossy, and sensual, she came sharp.
Tailored slacks, silk blouse, blazer cut close enough to remind people corporate did not have to mean boring, her hair swept back from a face pretty enough to disarm you if her mouth didn’t get there first. She looked like exactly what she was: a woman who could argue a contract into submission by day and still show up at my door after work with love only a true friend could give.
“You abuse access,” I said.
“I use community resources.” She shut the door behind her with her hip. “Also, if I have to drive all the way back to Westmoreland after spending nine hours at Hollis, Grant & Mercer pretending rich men understand contracts, I deserve one stop somewhere peaceful before I get on the Parkway.”
Kendra lived out past the county line in Murrysville because she liked space, quiet, and pretending she was not still close enough to Pittsburgh to be in everybody’s business.
Her office was downtown, though, and my place in the Lower Hill had become her unofficial decompression stop at least once a week.
Sometimes she brought wine. Sometimes she brought legal gossip she swore was not legal gossip because she changed the names.
Most times, she brought food and an opinion.
Tonight, she had both.
I took the bag from her and glanced at the red-and-green stamp on the side. “You went to Island Vybez?”
“Jerk wings, fries, and coconut cake,” she said. “Because I love you, and because that merger client tried my entire spirit at four-fifty-two.”
“The one with the son who thinks being copied on emails makes him counsel?”
“That exact demon.”
I laughed and moved toward the kitchen. “Did the partner say anything about your memo?”
Kendra’s mouth shifted, just enough for me to catch what somebody else might have missed. “Not yet. He said he’d review it in the morning.”
“That means it was good and he needs time to figure out how much credit he can take.”
“See?” She pointed at me. “This is why I stop here. You know how to affirm me and feed my bitterness.”
“I’m a full-service friend.”
“You are.” Her eyes moved over my face for half a second too long. “Oh, wow.”
“No.”
“Oh, yes.” She set her tote on one of the stools and leaned against the island like the workday had finally let go of her shoulders. “I’m even more glad I brought cake because that is not your regular face.”
I opened the takeout bag before she could study me any harder. “You came here to eat my food and harass me.”
“Yes,” she said, following close behind. “And because you were suspiciously contained after that mixer, which is always how I know something good happened.”
I pulled containers from the bag and lined them up on the counter. The smell of jerk seasoning and fried potatoes hit the air fast, warm and peppery and familiar in a way that made the townhouse feel lived in again.
Kendra set two plastic forks down between us and leaned on the island.
“Well?”
I opened one of the containers and bought myself a second with steam. “Well, what?”
“Did he kiss you?”
“No. I ain’t even seen the man since last night, so how he gonna kiss me?”
“Did you want him to?”
I looked up.
Kendra smiled. “See?”
I sighed. “You’re exhausting.”
“And right.”
I laughed because fighting her on certain things only made me tired.
She pointed a fry at me. “Talk.”
So I shared. Not everything. Not every thought. Not the shower. She didn’t need all that. But enough.
I told her he’d called.
That stopped her cold for exactly one second.
“He called called?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, that’s different.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean that’s really different.” She dropped into one of the stools at the island and stared at me like I had just admitted somebody built a shrine in my honor.
“Men do not call anymore. They send reactions. They hover. They make you do all the work of turning a text thread into something with a pulse.”
“That’s what threw me.”
“What he say?”
I thought about it for a second, not because I didn’t remember, but because I remembered too clearly.
“That texting started feeling thin.”
Kendra sat back and blinked. “Oh. He’s good, Tal.”
“Exactly.”
She chewed slowly, looking at me in that way best friends do when they’re trying very hard not to smile too big at your vulnerability.
“And?”
“And we talked.”
“How?”
I laughed once under my breath. “Like people.”
“No, I know that. I mean how did it feel?”
That was the real question.
I set my fork down and looked at the counter for a second before answering. Kendra was like another sister, someone who understood the real me. She could sometimes see what I couldn’t see about myself, and most times that did nothing but get on my nerves.
But I knew she was safety.
I could leap.
“Easy,” I said. “Too easy, maybe. He sounded like himself, but more. Less... packaged.”
Kendra nodded once, slow.
I kept going because now that I’d started, it wanted saying.
“In the room, that mattered. But on the phone it mattered more. There was no audience. No low light helping. No chemistry to hide inside because we were standing too close in good clothes.” I looked up at her.
“He was just a man in his own place, playing ‘Surrender’ by Kut Klose, asking me what I was drinking, laughing at me over grape Kool-Aid like he already knew me a little.”
Kendra went still for a second.
Then she said, “Oh, baby.”
“I know.”
“No, because that part right there would’ve got me too.”
That made me laugh.
“He said grape was his favorite too.”
Kendra dropped her fork. “Yeah, see? No. That’s intimacy. That’s some Black-ass domestic foreplay.”
I laughed so hard I had to put a hand over my mouth.
“You are so ridiculous.”
“And always right.”
Unfortunately.
I leaned back against the counter and looked off toward the living room.
“The bad thing is, now I can hear him in my head.”
Kendra smiled into her food. “Girl.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are.”
“No, I mean his actual voice. The way it dropped. The laugh. The pauses.” I shook my head. “It’s one thing to want a man because he’s fine. It’s another thing when you start liking the sound of him just being him.”
My honesty fell somewhere between us and stayed there.
Kendra reached for another fry.
“Well,” she said, “that sounds like a real problem.”
I laughed.
Then, because she was still Kendra, she ruined the tenderness with perfect timing.
“And the man had Kut Klose on? He’s playing chess not checkers. That’s a grown Black man with memory.”
I bent over the counter laughing.
“That is such a ridiculous sentence.”
“And true.”
“It is a little true.”
“It is very true.” She took a bite of cake. “You know what this sounds like?”
“What?”
“A man who might actually know how to use his own dick and a conversation.”
I choked on my drink.
“Kendra.”
“What? You want me to lie? I’m just saying. The ones who call, laugh, know old music, and like grape Kool-Aid usually not useless.”
I covered my face with one hand and laughed into it, the kind that loosened me all the way down into my ribs.
By the time we ate, talked, and let the room settle, the night had softened around me in a different way than it had before she came over. Less fevered. Less solitary. Still charged, but no longer only living in my body like a secret I had to manage alone.
Before she left, I packed the last piece of coconut cake back into the bag and pushed it toward her.
“You taking this. And tomorrow, you’re going to text me after that partner meeting.”
She looked at me. “I know.”
“No, I mean it. If he acts funny about that memo, we’re not letting you spiral in your office behind a closed door. You call me.”
Her expression softened, all the teasing gone for a second. “I will.”
“And if he tries to steal credit, I’ll come down there in a blazer and embarrass everybody.”
“You would too.”
“I absolutely would.”
She smiled, then hugged me longer than usual at the door.
“Don’t talk yourself out of a good thing before it gets a chance to be one,” she said.
I held onto her for one more second because she had given me her evening after a day that had clearly taken too much from her, and because that was what we did. We showed up with food, with warnings, with jokes, with truth, with whatever the other one needed before she knew how to ask for it.
Then I let her go.
“I won’t,” I said.
Or at least, for the first time in a long time, I wanted that to be true.