Page 9 of IRL: In Real Life
Under all that, it was still what it had always been: a dating pool dressed in business casual.
Everybody knew it.
The Facebook page was all job openings, headshots, panel flyers, brunch recaps, support Black business, and civic uplift. Then came the comments. The little jokes. The flirting dressed up as community. The DMs after the event pictures. The “you going?” that never only meant one thing.
You could always tell who was there to network and who was there to see whether somebody looked as good in person as they did on the timeline and hope they let them fuck.
Most people were there for both.
I didn’t judge that part. I liked women. Beautiful women. Fat asses too, if we were being honest. I was a grown man, not a monk. But chasing tail got less interesting when the woman attached to it felt fake the second you got close enough to know better. A good time was still a good time. I wasn’t acting above that. I was just tired of wasting it on people who turned out to be all presentation and no center.
That was the part that got old.
By the time you met a woman in person, you already knew her angles. Her captions. Her politics if she posted them. The brand of her humor. What kind of music she wanted people to think she listened to. Which side of her face she trusted more. Whether she posted books she never read, flights she couldn’t afford, or healing quotes right before acting a fool in somebody’s DMs.
You could know all that and still have no idea whether she was real where it counted.
Twice in the last year I’d met women who looked one way online and walked into the room as somebody else entirely. The issue wasn’t age or imperfection. It was deception. Filters. Angles. Borrowed energy. Curated identity. One woman had edited herself so hard she’d built a whole different face. Another talked online like a woman with range and showed up in person with nothing behind her eyes but phone light and catchphrases.
That kind of shit would wear a man out if he had any sense.
And I had enough.
My phone buzzed again.
A story reaction from a woman I vaguely knew from the group. One of those little lazy replies under last weekend’s bourbon post.
You look like you need a drinking partner.
I looked at it for a beat, then locked the phone and dropped it in my pocket unanswered.
That kind of thing used to be easier to entertain before I got tired of the gap between what showed up online and what sat across from me in real life.
And that gap was real.
The worst one had been maybe a year ago. Fine enough online. Pretty, sure. But that wasn’t even what irritated me after. It was how hard she had edited the truth. Filters smoothing her face younger. Features shifted just enough to make you question your own memory. The whole presentation softer, more racially ambiguous, then all the coded Blackness laid over top of it. Braids. Language. Styling. Curated Black girl cool, packaged up neat for the app.
Then she sat across from me in real light and the whole shit fell apart. I felt stupid after, not for wanting her, but for believing what I had been shown long enough to show up in person.
That kind of letdown changes a man. Makes him slower with screens, quicker with his discernment, less likely to give the benefit of the doubt just because somebody knows their angles and can dress up a caption.
I shut down my laptop, slid it into my bag, and stood. My suit jacket hung on the back of my chair. Charcoal. My shirt was pale blue and still holding up. Cuff links already off and in the top drawer.
I checked myself once in the reflection of the glass.
Still together. Still looked like I had somewhere to be and good reason for going there.
That had its uses.
People liked to act like men moved through the world untouched by presentation. That was bullshit. We just got to pretend ours was more accidental.
By the time I got downstairs to the garage, Devon was calling.
I answered through the car speakers as I pulled open the driver’s door of my black Benz GLE 450.
“You clocking my every move tonight?”
“Somebody got to. You get in that bag and start acting like niggas don’t exist.” His voice came through warm and smug. “You leaving or what?”
