“Maybe he’s private,” she said. “Maybe he was protecting something. Maybe he didn’t want Bryce in his business. Maybe he was trying not to let the outside get hands on something before y’all even named it.”
I frowned at her from under the dryer. “That makes sense in theory. But after Candace? After all that? I think I needed more than theory.”
“Fair,” she said.
Crystal pointed her rat-tail comb at me. “Baby, after a woman posts some raggedy nonsense about your man, the next night is not when he needs to get vague.”
A chorus of agreement moved through the shop.
“Exactly,” Rochelle called from her own dryer. “You already had one woman cutting up in public. Now he acting all light-skinned mysterious when another man walks up? No.”
I laughed so hard I had to shake my head. “Why are y’all like this?”
“Because we love the Lord and pattern recognition,” Ms. Mary said from the bowl, and the shop lost it.
When my hair was dry, Mena brought me back to the chair and peeled the strip away from my edges. The style had started to return to itself, the short layers molded close again, the crown smooth, the bronze in my highlights catching clean under the salon lights.
Mena brushed my edges down with the side of the brush and looked at me in the mirror. “Let me ask you this. He makes you happy?”
I smiled before I could stop it. “Yes.”
“He gives you toe-curling orgasms?”
My whole face got hot.
Somebody near the front barked out, “I know that’s right!”
The shop exploded.
Laughter. Claps. One of the newer stylists near the lounge almost dropped a comb. Rochelle pointed at me from under the dryer like she had finally reached the part of the sermon she came for.
Mena smiled and kept going. “And we know he sweats your hair out. Chile, you might as well come in here every two business days the way your hair be looking when you get to the bowl.”
“Oh my God,” I muttered.
“There it is,” Rochelle shouted. “He gotta be the right one if he keep fucking your hair up and you still smiling when you come in here.”
That got another round of laughter. Even I laughed, because unfortunately, it was funny and very, very true.
Micah’s dick, mouth, hands.
All of him was magical.
Mena shook her head like she had delivered wisdom and the room had received it. “Good sex don’t answer every question, baby. But it do buy a man time.”
“Not unlimited time,” Ms. Mary added.
“No,” Mena agreed, meeting my eyes again in the mirror as she cleaned up the shape near my temple. “And that’s the part. You don’t have to decide today whether he meant harm, whether he was scared, whether he was being private, or whether he just missed the moment. But you do need to ask him.”
I could sit in here and let ten Black women solve it for sport, or I could ask the man I had been in bed with all week why, in the one room where it might have counted, he had let us sound smaller than what we had become in private.
Mena’s mouth softened in the mirror. “Because if he’s the right one, he can handle the question.”
And there it was.
Sooner or later, Micah Sutton was going to have to explain himself.
twenty-three
