Page 165 of IRL: In Real Life
It wasn’t the smoothest thing he had ever said, but it came out easy now. Just my woman, like the words had lived in his mouth long enough to become home there.
And maybe that was why this whole trip felt the way it did.
Not like a test.
Not like a performance.
Not like two people trying to prove they could survive outside the city that had made them.
Just peace.
By then, we had been together through fall folding into winter, through holidays and work weeks, through ordinary Sundays, family dinners, cold mornings, busy nights, and the kind of small disagreements that taught you whether a person knew how to stay kind when things stopped being cute. Micahhad kept showing me the same man in every season. Private. Public. Tired. Hungry. Irritated. Soft. Mine.
And I had been listening.
The San Juan trip had started months earlier as another Link Up PGH idea that sounded half ambitious and half ridiculous when Bryce first floated it online sometime after Labor Day. A destination mixer, he called it. A long weekend for Black professionals, creatives, entrepreneurs, and everybody adjacent who wanted warm weather, networking, music, good food, and just enough social opportunity to make people pack their best resort wear.
By January, he had a hotel block.
By February, the group chat had turned into a travel agency.
By May, half of Black Pittsburgh’s professional circle had either booked a flight, lied about why they couldn’t, or planned to watch from the timeline and act like they were not jealous.
Micah and I had booked together.
That alone still made something in me soften when I thought about it.
No separate rooms. No vague plans. No “we’ll see.” Just a confirmation email with both our names attached to the same suite, both our flights landing under the same reservation, and him asking me three weeks before the trip if I wanted aisle or window like this was simply what we did now.
So yes.
I was in San Juan with my man.
And there was no part of me interested in pretending that did not mean something.
I kissed him once to keep from saying something too soft too early and ruining my own makeup.
“Come on,” I said. “If we’re late again, Bryce is going to start making assumptions.”
Micah’s hands slid over my hips and down the back of my dress once before he let me go.
“Bryce been making assumptions since Pittsburgh.”
That was also true.
By the time we went up to the rooftop terrace, the mixer was already in motion.
San Juan looked like desire in a grown woman’s handwriting. Gold light spread slow over the water. Palm leaves moved in the breeze with that lazy island rhythm that made everything feel more sensual than it might have anywhere else. Music drifted through the terrace in soft waves, all bass and laughter and clinking glasses held by beautiful Black people in linen, resort silk, and expensive ease.
Some things never changed.
What had changed was me.
And what had changed even more was the man walking beside me.
My dress was bright orange tonight, fitted through the waist and fluid everywhere else, the fabric skimming my hips before falling long with one high slit that let the breeze find my leg every few steps. Gold shimmered at my ears, my throat, my wrist, and one ankle. My toes were white in delicate sandals. My natural curls, warm with auburn and bronze under the fading sun, framed my face in a way that looked more island than Pittsburgh and more sex than salon. My skin carried that soft gleam lotion and oil gave a woman when she had been touched enough to know she still liked being looked at after.
Mostly by Micah.
