Epilogue
By day three in San Juan, my hair had given up.
Humidity had already been testing me, and Micah Sutton had finished the job.
I had arrived on the island with my pixie laid smooth, bronze and auburn catching light exactly where it was supposed to, every edge respected, every layer in formation.
By the third morning, after ocean air, rooftop heat, and a man who kept putting his hands in my hair like he paid my stylist himself, it had bloomed into a soft little curly wash-and-go that no amount of mousse and prayer was going to talk back into obedience.
Micah loved it.
Of course he did.
That was his character flaw.
I stood at the mirror in our suite bathroom with gloss in one hand and a look on my face that said I was trying not to make this his problem, even though it absolutely was.
Behind me, Micah lounged against the bathroom door in an open white linen shirt and tan slacks, one hand in his pocket, the other holding his drink like he had nowhere to be except exactly where I was.
“Don’t,” I said, catching his smile in the mirror.
“I didn’t say nothing.”
“You were about to.”
He pushed off the doorway and came up behind me, warm and broad and entirely too pleased with himself. Both hands settled low on my waist. Then he kissed the side of my neck with the kind of lazy affection that made annoyance hard to hold onto.
“I like it,” he murmured.
“You like all the versions you cause.”
“That’s true too.”
I rolled my eyes, but my mouth softened anyway.
“Mena is going to cuss you out when I get home.”
He laughed low against my skin. “Mena been cussing me out in theory for months.”
I cracked up because he wasn’t lying.
At this point, even Mena had accepted that my maintenance schedule and Micah’s appetite were in direct conflict, and my scalp was collateral damage.
I turned in his arms and smoothed both hands up the front of his shirt.
“You are very pleased with yourself.”
“I’m in San Juan with my woman,” he said simply. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
It wasn’t the smoothest thing he had ever said, but it came out easy now. Just my woman, like the words had lived in his mouth long enough to become home there.
And maybe that was why this whole trip felt the way it did.
Not like a test.
Not like a performance.
Not like two people trying to prove they could survive outside the city that had made them.
Just peace.
By then, we had been together through fall folding into winter, through holidays and work weeks, through ordinary Sundays, family dinners, cold mornings, busy nights, and the kind of small disagreements that taught you whether a person knew how to stay kind when things stopped being cute.
Micah had kept showing me the same man in every season.
Private. Public. Tired. Hungry. Irritated. Soft. Mine.
And I had been listening.
The San Juan trip had started months earlier as another Link Up PGH idea that sounded half ambitious and half ridiculous when Bryce first floated it online sometime after Labor Day.
A destination mixer, he called it. A long weekend for Black professionals, creatives, entrepreneurs, and everybody adjacent who wanted warm weather, networking, music, good food, and just enough social opportunity to make people pack their best resort wear.
By January, he had a hotel block.
By February, the group chat had turned into a travel agency.
By May, half of Black Pittsburgh’s professional circle had either booked a flight, lied about why they couldn’t, or planned to watch from the timeline and act like they were not jealous.
Micah and I had booked together.
That alone still made something in me soften when I thought about it.
No separate rooms. No vague plans. No “we’ll see.” Just a confirmation email with both our names attached to the same suite, both our flights landing under the same reservation, and him asking me three weeks before the trip if I wanted aisle or window like this was simply what we did now.
So yes.
I was in San Juan with my man.
And there was no part of me interested in pretending that did not mean something.
I kissed him once to keep from saying something too soft too early and ruining my own makeup.
“Come on,” I said. “If we’re late again, Bryce is going to start making assumptions.”
Micah’s hands slid over my hips and down the back of my dress once before he let me go.
“Bryce been making assumptions since Pittsburgh.”
That was also true.
By the time we went up to the rooftop terrace, the mixer was already in motion.
San Juan looked like desire in a grown woman’s handwriting.
Gold light spread slow over the water. Palm leaves moved in the breeze with that lazy island rhythm that made everything feel more sensual than it might have anywhere else.
Music drifted through the terrace in soft waves, all bass and laughter and clinking glasses held by beautiful Black people in linen, resort silk, and expensive ease.
Some things never changed.
What had changed was me.
And what had changed even more was the man walking beside me.
My dress was bright orange tonight, fitted through the waist and fluid everywhere else, the fabric skimming my hips before falling long with one high slit that let the breeze find my leg every few steps.
Gold shimmered at my ears, my throat, my wrist, and one ankle.
My toes were white in delicate sandals. My natural curls, warm with auburn and bronze under the fading sun, framed my face in a way that looked more island than Pittsburgh and more sex than salon.
My skin carried that soft gleam lotion and oil gave a woman when she had been touched enough to know she still liked being looked at after.
Mostly by Micah.
He was in white, a soft resort shirt with the first few buttons undone, short sleeves, fabric moving when he moved. Against his dark caramel skin, it was unfair. His beard was fresh. His waves were clean. The diamond stud in his ear caught the last of the light every time he turned his head.
He looked like wealth, appetite, and bad intentions.
And months in, he still made my body react like this was new.
We moved through the crowd slowly, stopping for people we knew from home and from the wider orbit. Kendra looked me over once and said, “Yeah, okay, island Talia can stay.”
Bryce appeared a few minutes later with a drink in one hand and the self-satisfied smile of a man who was absolutely about to mind our business.
He saw Micah’s hand low at my back and laughed. “Aight, I’m not asking no questions. I know how to read a room now.”
That got a real laugh out of me.
Micah only smiled and pulled me a little closer.
Good.
Let them read it.
We had earned being obvious.
A little later, a woman in a sage silk dress and interest she was doing a poor job of disguising drifted into Micah’s line of sight and asked if he was joining a group heading downstairs after the mixer.
Micah looked at her.
Then at me.
“Nah,” he said easy. “Me and my woman already got plans.”
The woman smiled and retreated with enough grace to keep me from disliking her, but by then I was already too aware of my own body, the air, his hand, that phrase, all of it.
I looked up at him. “My woman?”
He leaned closer, mouth near my ear. “You got a problem with accuracy?”
“No,” I murmured. “You’re nothing else if not accurate.”
His laugh brushed my skin.
A little later, when the crowd thickened and the sun dipped low enough to make everybody look softer, Micah took my hand and led me out of the center of it.
Not far. Just far enough. Past the loudest voices.
Past the cluster by the bar. Down toward the quieter edge of the terrace where tropical greenery framed the overlook and the water stretched wide and darkening below us.
The breeze lifted the slit of my dress against my leg.
Micah came up behind me and wrapped me up from there.
His hands spread over me like this body was already familiar territory and he had every right to gather me back into him.
I felt the heat of his chest at my back immediately.
The brush of his open white shirt against my bare shoulder.
The warm masculine weight of him closing around me while the sea moved and breathed in front of us like the whole island understood exactly what sort of moment this was.
I laughed softly, but it came out thinner than laughter should when a man knew how to hold you that way.
“Micah.”
His mouth touched the curve of my cheek first. Then just beneath my ear.
“You wandering off?”
“You brought me out here.”
“Mmmmm.” His hand spread a little wider over my stomach. “That’s not the same thing.”
I leaned back into him because there was no point pretending I wasn’t going to. Not after all the ways he had earned that softness in me.
The breeze moved through my curls. His chin grazed my shoulder. The water stretched in front of us, sunset not yet fully gone, moonlight not yet fully arrived.
That in-between hour.
The one that made everybody prettier and a little more honest.
“You know,” I said lightly, “this looks a lot like showing off.”
Micah let out a low sound against my skin that might have been a laugh and might have been something dirtier.
“A little.”
I turned in his arms and looked up at him.
The terrace still hummed behind us. Music. Glasses. Bodies. Heat.
And there he was in the middle of all that, looking down at me with all that low, devastating attention that had first undone me in Pittsburgh and had somehow only gotten worse with tropical air and a white shirt involved.
My hands slid up his chest.
“I love you,” I told him.
I watched the pleasure of hearing me say it play out across his features.
“And I love you too, baby.”
Micah kissed me then.
It was a kiss that belonged to a man who knew exactly who I was to him and had stopped being interested in understatement where it mattered.