Devon’s face changed then, just enough to let me know the line landed the way it had landed in Talia.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “That’s different.”
“Exactly.”
Devon was quiet for a second.
Then he said, “I can see you blocking Candace and moving the fuck on because she was so nobody I never even heard of her. But if you and Talia are moving how you say y’all moving, why not say that? Why not let Bryce know what it was?”
There it was.
The million-dollar question.
I sat back and looked at the ceiling for a second because once I really let myself touch the answer, it made me sound like exactly the kind of man I had no respect for.
Not a player.
Not a liar.
Just a scared man calling it privacy because privacy sounded better.
Devon looked at me for a long second.
“Because you scared it’ll all be a lie,” he said, giving shape to the thing before I could. “Even after all the real shit you done seen, you keep waiting for it to turn into something else.”
I leaned back and closed my eyes for one second.
“Yeah, man.”
There it was.
The whole ugly thing.
Not fear of Talia exactly, but fear of how much she had started to matter.
Devon shook his head.
“But she the realest woman you ever in your life had,” he said. “And you gon’ fuck around and have her be nothing but a dream.”
That got me up off the couch.
I started pacing before I even knew I was moving.
My mind started working all at once. Talia at the mixer. Talia at my table. Talia letting me into her place when Candace’s little public tantrum had touched a nerve. Talia FaceTiming me instead of playing games. Talia asking the hard questions only after she had already kept showing up. Talia online and in person and in real life, giving me the same woman every time.
She had done her part.
More than done it.
She had been vulnerable. Soft. Present. She had put herself out there in comments, in rooms, in my bed, in my family plans, in her own damn head even with all her old reasons not to.
And I had left her cold like a dumbass because I thought I was doing all that mattered.
The private shit.
The real shit.
Whole time, online was real too once you were together.
