Page 10 of IRL: In Real Life
“I’m getting in the car.”
“See. Growth.”
I dropped my bag in the passenger seat and started the engine. “Don’t make me stay home on principle.”
“You not staying home. I know what you look like when you about to stay home, and this ain’t that.”
“You sound too invested in another man’s business.”
“You need friends, man.”
“I have friends.”
“You got me. That’s why I’m saying it.”
I backed out slow, one hand on the wheel. “I’m coming.”
“That’s all I needed.” A beat. Then, because Devon never knew how to leave well enough alone, “Who you think gon’ be there?”
“People.”
“Women?”
I sighed. “Probably.”
“Open your heart, Micah.”
“Open your own.”
He laughed. “Mine already open and it’s with Leisha. Yours got a keypad and a front desk.”
I ended the call smiling in spite of myself.
By the time I left Three Rivers Trust, downtown was already shifting into evening. The mixer was happening less than ten minutes away, on the other side of downtown, close enough that the drive should not have given me much time to think.
It did anyway.
That was probably the problem.
I kept the music up just high enough to fill the car. Leon Thomas first. Then Lucky Daye. Then something older, because I liked a set to move the way a good room did—current first, then back into something with memory in it. Something that knew what grown folks had survived to get here.
I cut through the city the way I knew it best. Past corners that still felt familiar even now, places Garfield had trained into my body before offices, credit memos, and glass walls started shaping my days. Pittsburgh was like that. No matter how well you dressed your life up, the city still kept a hand on your shoulder.
Traffic wasn’t doing too much, but even a few blocks, a red light, and one slow bus gave my mind room to move where I didn’t need it going.
By the time I pulled up, I was more ready to get out of the car than I wanted to admit.
I parked, checked myself once in the rearview, and got out.
The evening had settled warm over the city. Men in button-downs and expensive sneakers. Women in dresses, tailored sets, banging heels, slick ponytails with baby hairs, curls, locs, perfume moving past in rich little waves. You could always tell when a room had drawn Black professionals who cared what they looked like. The whole air changed. Not stiff. Just intentional. Everybody there for community, maybe, but also to be seen, and to get a good look.
I stepped inside and the music reached me first, a low, pulsing rhythm that seemed to live in the walls. Then came the glow of amber light washing over glassware, brown skin, easy laughter, and conversations rising and breaking in little pockets around the room.
The bar was already lined two deep.
Devon was near the entrance talking to a couple I half knew from the group. He looked up when he saw me and lifted a brow like a man taking credit for somebody else’s decision-making.
“You made it.”
