Page 20 of IRL: In Real Life
Because that was the truth I was trying not to dress up into something more respectable on the drive home. I wanted Micah. In the immediate, body-first, grown-woman way that made logic feel like a suggestion and not a rule. I wanted to know if he kissed the way he looked at me. Wanted to know if that restraint was real or if it only held because the room had witnesses. Wanted to know what his hands would do if nobody else was around to make him behave.
I should have been relieved I’d come home alone.
Instead, I felt unfinished.
My phone sat in the holder beside me, full of possibility in the way phones were now. One story. One reaction. One sentence, and the night could stretch itself past the place I had left it.
At the next red light, I picked it up, took a picture, and sent it to my story.
Just my hand on the wheel, lavender nails against black leather, the dashboard lit low and pretty, Carl Thomas sliding through the car like he had been sitting in my lap all night telling me to quit bullshitting myself.
I typed the caption before I could talk myself out of it.
maybe some things really do hit different in person.
I posted it and set the phone back down.
The light turned green.
Halfway to the bridge, the screen lit.
I looked.
Micah had replied to my story.
That caption got a little too close to the truth for me not to feel like I was in it.
My mouth curved before I could stop it. His wordplay was dizzying. It was …foreplay.
At the next light, I typed back.
Did it?
This time, his reply took long enough for me to feel the space between messages. Long enough to picture him reading what I wrote, maybe smiling to himself a little, maybe deciding how much honesty to hand me back.
My thighs pressed together on instinct, a small, useless movement that only made me more aware of the ache gathering there.
Because that was the problem. Micah was fine, yes. He had sense, which made the fine worse. But the conversation hadbeen good enough to follow me out of the room, into my car, through the city, and all the way into places I was trying to ignore while operating a vehicle.
It was the way he had looked at me like wanting me was not a performance. Like he had clocked exactly what was happening between us and saw no reason to insult either one of us by pretending otherwise.
That sat lower than flirtation. That sat in my body.
I knew better than to answer him. I also knew if I didn’t, I’d think about it all the way home anyway, and there was something even more embarrassing about acting indifferent in private when my whole body had already picked a side.
The city moved around me. Red lights. Passing headlights. Glass and steel and soft dark between buildings. And all through it, Micah kept coming back to me in pieces.
His hand at my back. His eyes on me. That voice. That little current under his words like he knew exactly how close he was standing to saying something he couldn’t take back.
By the time I got to the townhouse, I was tired in the wrong places.
Tight. Too aware. Full of heat with nowhere useful to put it.
I parked, grabbed my clutch, and let myself in with the kind of practiced calm I had spent years learning. Keys in the bowl. Heels off by the door. Lights low. The city beyond the windows all gold points and soft distance.
And still, under the silk of my dress and the gloss on my mouth, the truth sat plain as day.
I had gone downtown for a drink.
