I needed God.
I needed that man to quit living in my body like he paid rent here.
The texts had taken the wild edge off, but what they left behind was worse in some ways. A slower burn. The kind a woman could feel in her bones while she stared at the ceiling and admitted she was already in trouble.
Because I wanted him. The full length of him. The weight of him. Wanted to hear what his voice would do if he finally buried himself in me and lost some of that careful control. Wanted to find out whether he would stay that patient once my pussy had him for real or whether he would give me the harder, rougher version I kept catching in the tight set of his jaw.
And still, I was not calling him back.
I had said I wanted the whole thing. I wanted to feel how real this was before we crossed into something neither of us could pretend was casual. My body was more than ready to eat those words and ask him to come fuck me into my mattress tonight, but the rest of me stayed put.
He was becoming too real to spend that fast.
Sleep came in pieces after that.
By the time it finally pulled me under, Micah Sutton was the last thing on my mind and the first thing waiting for me when I closed my eyes.
thirteen
. . .
“If you smileat that phone one more time in my kitchen and don’t tell me what’s going on, I’m putting you out.”
I looked up from the counter and found Nicole standing at the stove with one hand on her hip and a wooden spoon pointed at me like she had legal authority.
“I’m cutting strawberries,” I said.
“You’re daydreaming over strawberries.”
“That’s dramatic.”
“You’ve smiled at the same message three times.”
I looked back down at the cutting board, at the neat little pile of sliced fruit I had apparently been hovering over instead of finishing, and pressed my lips together to keep from laughing.
Nicole made a sound under her breath.
“Exactly.”
That was my sister. Older by three years, nosey by birthright, and somehow able to run a whole house while clocking every emotion I thought I had hidden behind my face. She had our father’s build in a softer, womanlier way. Tall, long-limbed, lighter brown like him, with his easy smile and the same habit of looking at you like she had already read the first draft of your lie.
In the face, we looked more like sisters if you knew what to look for. The Vaughn mouth. Mama’s cheekbones. The same expressions when we were irritated, though Nicole’s annoyance tended to arrive with more patience and a grocery list attached.
She had been married to Jalen Parker for almost ten years now, long enough for people to stop asking how married life was and start assuming she had it all handled because the house was pretty, the children were loved, and nobody was posting sad quotes at midnight. Jalen was a good man. An operations manager for a logistics company, steady and funny in that dry way that snuck up on people. He loved my sister, loved their twins, and called our father “sir” even after Daddy told him to stop.
Their marriage was solid.
It was also life.
Jalen’s people were in Maryland, which meant when Nicole needed another set of hands, another grandmother nearby, another auntie to take the kids for an afternoon so she could sit still and hear herself think, that help came with mileage and planning. Some holidays, she packed Nia and Noah into the car and took them down there because marriage meant sharing roots, even when your own family lived close enough to smell what Mama had on the grill.
She never complained exactly. Nicole was not built for whining.
But sometimes I heard it in the pause before she said, “It’s fine.” Sometimes I saw it in the way she watched Mama and Daddy moving around each other, all those years of habit and help, and then glanced at her phone to see if Jalen was still stuck at work or on the way back from running the twins somewhere.
Today, I sat with Nicole in her mostly quiet kitchen, a pot on the stove, and apparently too much room to be fascinated by my business.
Monday had gone by like that, threaded through with Micah in ways that would not leave me alone.
