I had to laugh. Because what the hell else was I supposed to do. I went out for drinks with my girls on a celebratory night, and ended up in a hotel room with the first nigga I ever loved in my entire life. Nobody would believe that if I told them. I barely believed it myself and I had just lived it.
I started the truck and pulled out slow.
My girls had left the bar earlier in the night, ready to call it, and I had stayed back for one more drink because I wasn’t ready to go home yet. I did that sometimes, needed a little space between the bar and walking back through my front door into the life I had built. Nothing was wrong with my life. It just got heavy sometimes in ways I didn’t always have words for. Some days,I just got tired of being responsible, and tired of being a fiancé who had already fallen into the role of a housewife.
So I stayed. Ordered another drink. And then I looked down the bar and thought my eyes were playing tricks on me.
I actually looked away and looked back again. Studied him from a distance for a solid minute before I let myself believe it. It was his face that got me first, those same features just grown out and sharper, the kind of handsome that didn’t ask for attention but got it anyway. Then he flexed his jaw and that was it. He used to do that as a kid when something was sitting on his mind too heavy. Just clench and release, clench and release, without knowing he was doing it. Fifteen years later and the man was still doing the same thing in a Dallas bar.
I sat there for a while just watching him. Wondering what to do and say. Or even if I should do anything at all. After minutes of going back and forth with myself, I sent the drink over before I fully thought it through. This man was everything to me as a kid, him being here tonight had to mean something.
He looked at me like he was mad that I had sent the damn drink down. He just stared at me like I was a damn fool until I started talking, asking him if he really didn’t remember me.
And when I walked over to him I already knew what I wanted. I wasn’t going to sit here and lie like I didn’t. He had been a fantasy of mine since I was a teenager. My first real love and he didn’t even know it because at that age, you can’t take anything series. We were young and I didn’t know how to say it, but he was always my safe space, and then he was gone. His family packed up and moved, and that was it. I had carried that quietly for years the way you carry things that never got a proper ending.
So yeah. When I saw him sitting there looking like that, I knew. I knew that even if it was just for one night, I needed to be with him. I may never get this chance again.
One part of me didn’t want him to think that I was easy, because I wasn’t that at all. It was just something about him that I needed to experience. This big, chocolate ass nigga looked like he could really handle me. He was literally the man of my dreams. But, after realizing that he was never going to come back for me after we were grown, I had to stop dreaming and grow up. Now I had a whole other life.
As the conversations went on, and we caught up, I tried to tell him about Brendon more than once through the night. The words kept coming up and I kept pushing them back down. I told myself we were grown, we could have one night, enjoy it, and go our separate ways with no damage done on either side. I believed that. I really did believe that, right up until we got to that room.
And then that logic fell completely apart.
Because it wasn’t just the sex, though that alone had rearranged something in me permanently. Sex with this man had done something to me that I couldn’t place a name to. But before that, his demeanor and the way he carried himself had me dripping.
The way he moved through that room when we first walked in, checking it without missing a detail. He was clocking exits and corners like it was just how his brain worked. The way he took my phone without apologizing for it. The way he tipped that desk clerk and looked him dead in the eye and said exactly what he needed to say without a single extra word. This man had been through some things. Real things. You couldn’t move like that unless life had already taught you what happened when you got comfortable.
After going several rounds with him. Having the best sex of my life, we fell asleep talking and catching up. It felt natural like we hadn’t spent all these years apart. I had woken up in the middle of the night and had been asleep on his chest without knowing when I moved there. I just laid there for a while listening to him breathe. His heartbeat was slow and steady even in sleep, the kind of calm that comes from a man who has learned to rest in the middle of chaos because rest is a weapon too.
I wanted to stay. That was the honest truth. Every part of me that remembered who he was and felt what the night had been, that part of me wanted to just stay right there and deal with the rest of it later. Griz meant more to me than he knew, and I had never forgotten him.
But I wasn’t stupid. I knew what later looked like. Later was Brendon calling, later was explaining where I had been all night, later was a conversation I was nowhere near prepared to have.
I laid there until I couldn’t justify it anymore. Then I got my ass up out of bed with that man, and wrote the note because leaving nothing felt cold. Even though leaving while he was sleep wasn’t much better.
I had to get ahead of these feelings. I was sitting my dumb ass up here imagining a life with this man, knowing damn well that would never happen. I had to leave now. I folded the note and put it on the dresser, then walked out without looking back because I knew myself well enough to know that if I looked back I wasn’t leaving.
—
I used the drive home to get my story straight.
Brendon was already going to be skeptical of the timeline and I needed everything clean before I walked through that door. My mind landed on my brother Wise. I would just say that he hadgotten locked up and I had been running around trying to sort it out and get him bonded out. It was believable because it wasn’t the first time one of my brothers had caught a charge, and it worked in my favor that Brendon couldn’t stand dealing with them. He was too far removed from that world to ask the kind of questions that would poke holes in my story. He would hear the word arrested and check out emotionally right there. He hated hood ass ghetto shit, and my family was full of it.
And that’s exactly what happened.
He was half asleep when I slid into bed and asked enough to confirm I was okay before he went back to sleep. No interrogation, no attitude. Just concern and then quiet snoring again. He was the kind of man who trusted me wholeheartedly and would never doubt anything that I said to him. Up until tonight he had every right to trust me. Never in a million years what I have stepped out on this man that I love so much. It was just something about Griz. That damn mannn.
I laid there staring at the ceiling for a while after that.
In the morning I got up before him and made breakfast. Eggs, turkey bacon, toast. Kept everything normal, kept my energy easy, handed him his coffee when he came downstairs and sat across from him while we ate. He talked about his day yesterday, and I listened then asked the right questions and smiled when I was supposed to smile. I was in a good mood honestly, because last night was everything that I didn’t even know that I needed.
He reached across the table at some point and squeezed my hand and looked at me the way he always did, like I was something he was grateful for. Brendon was a good man. I was never going to say otherwise. Seven figures, respected in this city, involved in the community, the kind of man other womenpointed at and said that’s what a man looks like. He loved me without conditions and showed it consistently and that was real.
But I had just spent the night with a man who had kissed me like he was trying to find something he lost and I was the only place it could be found. And I didn’t know how to sit across a breakfast table from Brendon and make those two things coexist in my head without feeling like I was losing something. I went from feeling good, to feeling guilty.
After breakfast, I didn’t dishes. Brendon kissed me before he left and I stood at the window and watched his car go down the street and disappear.
Then I just stood there in my kitchen in the quiet.
