Page 143 of IRL: In Real Life
“Bryce.”
His eyes moved between us, quick and knowing, then his mouth curved. “Good to see y’all off the timeline.”
Just a simple little opening, the kind that came easy when two people had already been half-noticed online and finally stood in front of somebody together in real life.
But because of Tuesday, because of Candace and the way one messy woman had already managed to put a scratch on something I cared about, because Micah had already shown me once how careful he could get when the outside started looking too hard, I felt myself brace before he even answered.
Micah smiled easy.
“Yeah,” he said. “We just came out for a drink.”
That was it.
Bryce kept talking, and the conversation moved on like nothing had happened. Another mixer coming up. Somebody from The Link Up getting engaged. Some rooftop event next month I already knew I wasn’t attending if the flyer copy was as corny as he made it sound.
I smiled when I needed to, answered when the moment called for it, even laughed once.
But under all of that, Micah’s words worked at me.
We just came out for a drink.
He hadn’t lied. It’s true that we did.
The words were small enough to pass as nothing, polite enough to sound harmless, but I felt the distance in them immediately. Felt how neatly they matched the carefulness from before.
Tuesday it had beenshe ain’t nobody to worry about.
Tonight it was this.
By the time Bryce moved on, I still wore a smile; I just didn’t feel it anymore.
Micah looked back at me and touched the inside of my knee under the table like nothing had shifted.
Maybe for him, nothing had.
“You good?” he asked.
I reached for my drink before answering. “Yeah.”
And that was true enough on the surface to stand, because the ugly part was, I didn’t even know what I had expected him to say.
We had not sat down and formally named this.
Whatever this was.
We had not announced anything to each other or the world, and we had not used titles big enough to make other people behave accordingly.
But still.
Candace had already gotten loud in public, and even though Micah had held me on my couch and promised there was no one else, the bruise from that had not fully faded. Ten minutes earlier, I had invited him into my family’s space, into the noise and warmth and history of my parents’ house. We had been spending almost every night together. He knew the intimate parts of me now, the way I sounded when I came on his dick, the way I looked the next morning in one of his shirts, the quiet pieces of me that didn’t make it to the timeline.
So when the moment opened in public, I felt the absence harder.
I didn’t need a spectacle. Bryce didn’t matter. I just wanted Micah not to shrink us down to two people out for drinks when I had already started making room for him in places that mattered.
That was the part sitting wrong in me.
twenty-two
