8. Josiah #2
Her brows lifted with a spark of interest I felt immediately. “Science?”
“Always.”
“That makes sense for you.”
“What about you?”
She looked down at her plate, then smiled in a way that changed her whole face.
“Flowers. Plants. Gardening. Anything I can put in soil and watch grow. I feel free when my hands are in dirt. I don’t have to perform there.
I can just be. Watering, pruning, waiting.
” She didn’t talk about gardening as a hobby.
She talked about it like it gave her room to breathe.
“That fits you.”
“Does it?”
“Yeah. You have a way of making people feel cared for without making them feel handled. Your kids don’t just listen to you because you’re their mama.
They trust how you love them. Your clients sit in your chair and put more than their hair in your hands.
Even this shop feels like somebody prayed over it and meant it. ”
She looked away, but not fast enough to hide the color warming her face.
“Your hands are gifted, Celeste. Anointed too. I can tell by how people sit in your chair and breathe easier.”
Her eyes came back to mine. “Thank you.”
“I mean it.”
“I know. That’s why I don’t know what to do with it.”
She looked down, but she didn’t run from the compliment. When she lifted her eyes again, they stayed on mine.
She wasn’t waiting for her turn to talk. She was listening. Fully. Folks got used to being wrong about me. Celeste wasn’t.
That changed the way I handled my own words.
She tilted her head a little. “How’d you get into electrical work?”
“Family first. Curiosity second.”
Her smile touched her eyes. “Family?”
“Yeah. My granddaddy was an electrician. My daddy too. Jeremiah Brooks could wire a house, fix half the church before Sunday service, and still have enough energy to fuss at me for taking apart Mama’s good lamp.”
Celeste laughed.
“I was the kid asking why about everything. Why the lights flickered during storms. Why copper carried current better than some other metals. Why a breaker tripped instead of letting the whole house burn down. Why magnets pulled some things and ignored others. I used to read science books at the kitchen table and draw little circuits on the back of church programs. Everybody thought I just wanted to fix stuff, but I wanted to understand what made things obey.”
Celeste set her drink down without taking another sip. “You were really into that?”
“Still am. Science made sense to me because it had order. You couldn’t sweettalk voltage. You couldn’t bully current. Power followed a path, and if that path was broken, overloaded, or poorly connected, something was going to tell on it eventually.”
She leaned in a little. “That’s actually beautiful.”
I smiled. “You calling electricity beautiful now?”
“I’m calling the way your mind works beautiful.”
The compliment hit deeper than she knew. She hadn’t noticed my hands or my business. She’d noticed my mind.
“My granddaddy taught my daddy the trade, and my daddy taught me. But Pops didn’t just teach me how to wire a building.
He taught me to respect what I couldn’t see.
Current. Heat. Pressure. A loose connection behind a wall can look harmless until it’s been burning for months.
He used to say a man needed to pay attention to hidden things before they became emergencies. ”
Celeste’s expression shifted, and I watched the words reach her. She didn’t blink fast or glance away. She sat with them, thumb resting near the salt on her glass, eyes steady on mine.
“That sounds bigger than electricity.”
“It is.”
She asked, “What did he teach you?”
I looked down at my hands. There were still faint marks near my knuckles from work, reminders of wire, tools, pressure, and years of reaching into places most folks avoided. My father’s hands had looked that way too. Scarred. Warm. Certain.
“He taught me not to fear what I didn’t understand. He told me fear makes a man careless in one direction, and pride makes him careless in the other. Either way, somebody can get hurt.”
Celeste nodded slowly, and her eyes shined with recognition. I kept going because she hadn’t made me regret starting.
“He taught me to respect power. Not just electricity. Any power. Words. Anger. Money. A man’s presence in a house. All of it can either protect or damage, depending on how it’s handled.”
Her fingers stilled on the table. When she looked back at me, the woman across from me wasn’t only the salon owner, the mother, or the widow everybody handled carefully.
She was Celeste, sitting in a corner booth with a margarita sweating beside her hand, letting me near a place most people probably talked around.
“What happened to him?”
“My father?”
She nodded. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
“I want to. My father passed suddenly. Heart attack. One day, he was here, fussing about Zeke drinking too much sweet tea and telling Mama he was going to fix the loose step on her back porch. Next day, the house sounded different.”
Celeste’s lips parted, but she didn’t interrupt. She placed her hand flat on the table, palm down, anchoring herself, or maybe anchoring the moment. I didn’t know which. I only knew she hadn’t looked away.
“It’s not the same as losing a husband. I won’t insult you by pretending it is.
But sudden loss has a sound. Folks think the loudest part is the crying.
Sometimes, it’s not. Sometimes, it’s the door that doesn’t open at the usual time.
The chair nobody moves. The question you almost ask before you remember the person who knew the answer ain’t there. ”
Celeste closed her eyes for one second. When she opened them, they were wet.
“That part,” she whispered.
I nodded.
Her voice stayed low. “People always talk about the funeral, the hospital, the moment. They don’t talk about after. The toothbrush. The shoes. The mail still coming with his name on it. The kids asking normal questions and not knowing they just split you open.”
I didn’t move. I barely breathed because there it was. Her grief, not dressed for church, not cleaned up for people who needed her strong, not softened for comfort. It came across the table, honest and unprotected, and all I wanted was to handle it with clean hands.
“I know I can’t understand all of it, but I can respect it. I can listen to it. I can make room for it without needing it to hurry up and get easier for me.”
Celeste looked at me then, really looked, and the whole restaurant seemed to lower its voice.
“That matters,” she whispered.
“It should.”
Her eyes held mine, wet but steady. “It doesn’t always.”
“I know.”
She didn’t answer right away. Something deeper than attraction had pulled up a chair between us, and I knew enough to sit still before I disturbed it.
I rested my forearms on the table. “I admire you, Celeste. Not because you’re strong. I know people throw that word at grieving women until it turns into another chore. I admire how you keep choosing love with what you still have.”
Her lashes lowered. A tear gathered, but she caught it with the side of her finger before it fell.
“Some days, I don’t feel like I’m choosing anything. Some days, I’m just making it to bedtime.”
“That counts.”
She gave me a small, broken smile. “You really believe that?”
“With everything in me.”
She took that in without rushing past it.
Her hand stayed near her glass, but she didn’t reach for it.
Her lashes lowered once, then lifted. Her mouth pressed together like she had a dozen feelings behind it and enough discipline not to let all of them come out in the middle of a restaurant.
Across the table, her grief, her caution, and her curiosity sat right there with us, close enough for me to understand that whatever I said next needed weight, not decoration.
Celeste wasn’t just hearing me. She was measuring me. Carefully. She was deciding whether I wanted access to her peace or responsibility for protecting it. I respected the hell out of that.
A beautiful woman could make a man want attention. A woman like Celeste made a man want to be trusted. I didn’t want to impress her for one evening and leave her spirit with more questions than answers. I wanted to be so careful with her that even her fear could stop bracing for impact.
She finally looked at me, and the question in her eyes came before the one on her tongue.
Celeste asked, “What are you looking for, Josiah?”
I didn’t shift. Didn’t smile my way around it. Didn’t dress the truth up to make it easier to swallow. “Marriage.”
Her brows lifted, but she didn’t laugh. That mattered. She sat back against the booth, one hand still on the table, her fingertips resting near mine like she had forgotten to move them away.
I held her gaze. “I’m dating with the intent to marry. My next girlfriend will be my future wife.”