Page 32 of Call Me Baby 2: Side B

I turn on my heel, head back to the table.

While I got him in the chair, might as well run a few hypotheticals. See how a man’s head fires under emotional cross-examination.

“Let’s say you’re into a girl, but the two of you are not in a committed relationship. Never were. If she were to—hypothetically—have sex with someone else…” I pluck a yellow Starburst from the bowl… “she obligated to tell you?”

“What does this have anything to do⁠—”

“Tells me what kind of man you are," I bite out. “Now answer the question.”

This has nothing to do with Andrew, but I still feel Celie’s stare hot down my back, like she’s burning a six-point-five inch line with a blow torch.

“Obligated? Nah,” Jalen says. “Not my place to know. But if I meant somethin’ to her at all, I’d hope she’d tell me. That’s the kind of woman I respect—one who tells me anyway.”

The Starburst’s stuck to the roof of my mouth. I scrape it off with my tongue. “So lemme make sure I’m understandin’ you correctly. You’d lose respect for someone for not disclosing information you didn’t know existed?”

Celie shifts in her seat behind me,

her side-eye loud as fuck.

He laughs under his breath,

then looks around.

This isn’t going the way he rehearsed.

“I’ve learned keepin’ shit in? It leaks out. In your tone, your body, how you treat people.” He shrugs. “You hide a lie long enough, it starts shapin’ you.”

At some point, I stopped walking.

Sounded like something

Dr. Mitchell would say.

“Last question.” I cross my arms. “If a girl tells you up front she’ll hurt you. But then you fall for her anyway, and she hurts you, like she said she would, whose fault is it, really?”

He coughs into his fist, throwing a glance at Celie sitting behind me. “Depends. She honest with herself? Or she usin’ that line to dodge guilt? Either way, we both pretendin’ and sharin’ pain in the end.”

Yeah, this would never work.

He’s too emotionally intelligent.

“That’ll be all,” I say, gesturing toward the exit. “Appreciate your time. You can send the next Boy in.”

He pushes up from the chair,

about to say something⁠—

“We’ll let you know,” I say

before he can get a word in.

Soon as the door clicks behind him,

Celie’s glaring at me.

I avoid her start-talkin’ eyes. “He was disgustingly perfect,” I grumble, tapping the edge of the folder against the table to straighten the papers, even though they’re already straight. “You don’t sit on a face like that, you slap it with a marriage license. Still, lowkey wanna keep him to ask dumb shit when I spiral and make stupid ass decisions.”

“Uh...” Celie huffs a laugh. “You wanna explain what that was, ’cause from where I’m sittin’, it looked real personal.”