Chapter 19
nineteen
. . .
By Sunday evening, the week had had Talia all through it.
I still went to work. Still took calls. Still reviewed numbers, signed what needed signing, and answered the same tired questions from people with too much money and not enough nerve. But underneath all of that, my days had started bending her way.
That part was getting harder to ignore.
When I pulled up to my parents’ house, my phone buzzed before I even cut the engine.
One of the women from the old version of me.
BT.
Before Talia.
The messages from women had thinned out over the last couple of weeks.
That was what happened when a man stopped feeding the line.
Folks could feel when your attention had picked a lane, even if you hadn’t made some big public speech about it.
Still, every now and then, somebody peeked back in to see if the door was really closed.
This one was Candace.
We had “talked” for a minute months back, right up until I realized half the woman in her pictures was filters, angles, and creative identity choices. Never slept with her. Never even got close. But she had laid it on thick in my inbox before I figured out what time it was.
Her message sat under a screenshot of Talia’s Facebook story.
Candace: lol that your bourbon glass in her story?
I looked at the screen again.
Talia had posted one of those little casual clips she liked. Nothing obvious. Just a corner of my coffee table, Maxwell playing low, a glass of wine, and the edge of a heavy square Baccarat tumbler sitting in the frame like it paid rent there.
Mine.
Between the glass and the view out of the windows, anybody who had spent enough time watching my stories knew exactly where she was.
I wondered for half a second if Candace and Talia were already Facebook friends, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if they were.
Pittsburgh was a big small town, especially if you were Black.
Everybody knew somebody who knew your business before you had finished deciding whether it was business yet.
I smiled before I could help it.
Then something quieter moved under that smile. Not shame. Not regret. Just the first edge of discomfort I did not have a clean name for yet.
I liked the little signs that Talia was with me. Liked seeing her things in my space. Liked knowing she felt comfortable enough to post a piece of my world like she had a place inside it.
But I did not like everybody looking in.
That was the part I kept tripping over. I loved the feeling of Talia being mine, but maybe that was exactly why I wanted to keep people out of it. Not hide her. Never that. Just protect what was still becoming real from folks who only knew how to turn softness into something to watch.
I locked the phone without answering Candace and went inside.
My parents’ house looked like they had been missing us all week.
Too much food already happening. Television going in the den with Pops watching loud enough for the rest of us to know the Pirates game had reached the part where he believed his commentary mattered.
Mama was at the sink, moving between rinsing greens and checking something on the stove like she had eight hands and no intention of asking for help until somebody got in her way.
Ciara was in the kitchen too, a dish towel over her shoulder and that look she got when she felt ownership over every room she stepped in, even rooms she had technically moved out of years ago.
Ari sat on the floor with markers everywhere, looking like the smallest person in the room and somehow the one running it.
Usually, the place settled me on contact.
Tonight, I was there and somewhere else too.
“Look who decided he still got a family,” Ciara said when I came through the kitchen.
“You always this loud before seven?”
“You always this late when a woman got you smiling at your phone?”
Mama laughed low from the sink.
From the den, Pops called, “Leave that boy alone. Let him come in the house first.”
“Thank you,” I called back.
“He ain’t defending you,” Ciara said. “He nosey too.”
“I heard that,” Pops said.
I set the wine I brought on the counter and kissed Mama’s cheek. “Good evening to you too.”
She looked me over once, the way mothers did when they already knew something was different and were waiting to see if you planned to volunteer it or make them work.
“You eating?” she asked.
“That’s why I’m here.”
“That’s not why,” Ciara said.
I ignored her because sometimes starving a thing was the only way to make it die.
It did not die.
Dinner moved around me in pieces. Greens.
Chicken. Too much cornbread. Pops coming in and out of the den with updates nobody asked for, plate already in his hand before Mama told him everything was ready.
Marcus, Ciara’s longtime partner, came in ten minutes later with Ari wrapped around his leg like she had appointed herself his manager.
Ciara talked about one of the parents at school like she was trying to stay saved and needed us all to know it.
Mama listened and said very little, which was always more dangerous than if she had just joined in.
The house was loud, warm, familiar.
Forks against plates. Ari asking three questions in a row without waiting for answers. Marcus laughing at something Pops said from the den. Ciara telling me I looked “entirely too rested and suspicious” for somebody who claimed he had been working all week.
And still, Talia stayed with me.
Not in the distracting way from those first few days, when wanting her had been all heat and interruption. This was different. Deeper. She sat somewhere under everything now, part of the quiet in me even when the room was full.
I thought about her Facebook story. The little corner of my living room she had shared without making a declaration out of it. Her wine glass beside mine. Maxwell in the background. Nothing loud, nothing performative, but enough to say she had been there.
Enough for somebody like Candace to notice.
Enough for me to understand that whatever Talia and I were building had started leaving fingerprints outside the rooms we kept to ourselves.
Ciara’s foot bumped mine under the table.
I looked up.
She was watching me over her glass with entirely too much satisfaction.
“You heard anything I just said?”
“No.”
Pops laughed from the doorway. “At least he honest.”
Ciara pointed her fork at me. “I know exactly what this is.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“I know a man who’s gone when I see one.”
Mama’s eyes moved to me then, softer and more careful than Ciara’s, like she wasn’t interested in the gossip of it so much as the truth underneath.
I reached for my water and took a sip just to buy myself a second, but my phone buzzed again on the table before I could settle.
I didn’t have to look to know it wasn’t Candace.
Talia had her own text vibration now.
That probably said enough all by itself.
Ciara caught my face before I could do anything about it.
“Oh, he sick,” she said.
Mama’s smile came slow.
Pops looked between all of us, then at my phone. “Who got him smiling like that?”
“Nobody,” I said.
“Lying at the dinner table,” Mama murmured. “That’s new.”
Ciara laughed so hard she almost choked on her water.
I picked up my phone anyway.
Talia: You surviving family dinner?
And there I was, sitting in my parents’ kitchen with greens on my plate, my sister reading me for sport, Ari coloring on the floor, and my whole mood shifting because Talia Vaughn had thought about me in the middle of her evening.
I typed back before I could talk myself into acting cooler than I felt.
Me: Barely. Ciara already diagnosed me.
Talia: With what?
I glanced up at my sister, who was still watching me like she had been waiting her whole life for this moment.
Me: According to her? I’m gone.
The dots appeared fast.
Talia: Is she wrong?
I stared at that for one second too long.
Then I smiled down at my phone like a man with no defense left.
Me: No.
When I looked up, Mama was still watching me.
Ciara leaned back in her chair, smug as hell.
Pops shook his head and went back toward the den. “Boy finally got got.”
Ari looked up from her markers. “Uncle Micah got what?”
“Nothing,” I said.
Ciara grinned. “A girlfriend.”
I opened my mouth.
And then I closed it, because the correction did not come.
How could it?
The kitchen went quiet in that quick, dangerous way family rooms did when everybody heard the same thing and decided to see who would be brave enough to touch it first.
Ciara bit the inside of her cheek.
Mama reached for plates like she hadn’t heard a thing, which told me she had heard everything.
Pops appeared in the doorway with his reading glasses low on his nose and the game still loud behind him. “Well?”
I looked down at my neice. “Why would you ask me that?”
She shrugged. “You keep smiling.”
That got me too.
I laughed once and scrubbed a hand over my jaw. “Finish your picture.”
She went right back to coloring like she hadn’t just thrown a grenade under the table.
Pops looked at me for one more second, then made a sound like he had learned plenty and did not need to ask another question yet.
“Mmhmm,” he said, and went back toward the den.
Dinner moved on after that in the usual layers.
Mama wanting the clean version of work. Ciara talking about school and somebody’s ignorant mama.
My niece demanding hot sauce just because the adults had some.
Pops adding commentary from the den like the rest of us had asked for color analysis on the game and the conversation.
Through all of it, my phone stayed warm beside my plate.
Talia posted again while I was halfway through my second piece of cornbread.
“Micah.”
I looked up.
Mama had stopped moving.
“What?”
“You smile like that at spreadsheets too?”
Ciara laughed so hard she had to grab the counter.
From the den, Pops called, “What he smiling at now?”
“Nothing,” I said.
Ciara pointed her spoon at me. “A woman.”
Ari looked up again, serious as church. “The girlfriend?”
Ciara lost it.