“Like you know yourself.”
She was quiet for a second, and when she answered, her voice had changed just a little.
“I worked for it,” she said.
I looked down at my glass, then back out at the city.
“Yeah,” I said. “I can hear that.”
A beat passed.
Then she asked, “What else can you hear?”
“You,” I said. “I can hear you. How beautiful your mind is, and how much you either want somebody who really sees you and values you for who you are or to just be left alone.”
She was quiet for half a second.
“You’re better on the phone.”
I laughed. “So now I’m improving?”
“No,” she said. “You’re just letting me see you by seeing me.”
I went quiet for a second, not because I didn’t have anything to say, but because I had too much of it all at once. I wanted to tell her she had been on my mind since the mixer. Thatsomething in me had keyed in on her before I even had a reason to call it anything. And yeah, her body had absolutely gotten my attention. That ass would’ve made any breathing nigga look twice.
But it wasn’t just that.
I had seen women built like trouble before. Been around women fine enough to stop a room. That wasn’t new. What had me sitting there with my drink in my hand and my whole focus wrapped around a voice coming through my phone was something else. It was her. The way she thought. The way she said things. The way she made me want to get closer without having to reach for easy shit to do it.
The more we talked, the more I felt that truth pressing at the back of my teeth, trying to come out too early. But if I said all that now, she’d think I was running game, and I wanted this conversation to keep living in the real.
So I let the feeling sit where it was.
And we kept talking.
Work. Music. The city. The weird way everybody online seemed determined to make themselves either more evolved or more mysterious than real life ever supported. She said something about men using a fitted shirt and therapy language as a substitute for an actual personality, and I had to put my drink down because I was laughing too hard to trust myself with glass.
At one point she said, “Half these men think saying ‘I’ve done the work’ is the work.”
“That’s ugly.”
“It’s true.”
“I can’t argue with you when you’re right.”
“You sure can’t! And women be letting them get it off because the beard nice and they know how to sit in a podcast chair.”
That damn near took me out.
“You’re not letting up on them, huh?”
“I don’t let up too much, Micah.” Her voice was teasing but I also heard the truth in it.
Fair. Very fair.
The song changed, then changed again, and somewhere in there my drink stopped mattering. Her voice quit sounding like a surprise and started settling into me like something a man could get used to if he wasn’t careful. By the time the conversation softened, Thursday no longer felt like a date on a calendar. It felt like something already moving toward us.
I looked back out at the city.
