“You made a sound…”
“That was between me and the girls. You weren’t invited.”
I knew that pause. Whatever he’d been about to say, he’d thought better of it. Wise choice.
“So… Laura Nyro,” Deion said instead, his voice quiet in that way it got when he already knew the answer and didn’t need to press for it.
I glanced down at the record in my hands, at the sleeve I had already started sorting in my head without thinking about it, where it would go, what it would sit next to, what it would do to a room once it was played.
His hand came in, not taking it from me, just touching the edge of the sleeve where my fingers held it.It wasn’t enough to stop me. It was enough to interrupt something. I looked up and noticed he wasn’t looking at the record anymore.
“You always do that,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Decide where it belongs before you even hear it.”
His thumb shifted slightly against the cardboard, just enough that I felt it, the contact small but unmistakable, the kind of thing that would have passed as nothing any other day. It didn’t pass as nothing now.
“It’s not deciding,” I said, though I was already aware of the way my voice had changed, the way my attention had shifted from the record to the space between us. “It’s listening.”
“To what?” he asked.
“To what it’s going to do when it hits the room.”
His hand stayed where it was for a second longer than it needed to. Then he let go, but the space didn’t go back to normal.
Here is something you should understand about me: I organize everything. My mom’s records by feeling, by what a song did to a space. My own by the same system, because she taught it to me and it is the only system I trust.
At work I know which rooms run cold, which patients need you to sit down before they’ll hear you, which days are going to run long before they even start. At home I know which records settle a room, which light to leave on so it feels lived in when I come back, which corners collect things I haven’t decided about yet.
I have a system for almost everything, including feelings.Especiallyfeelings.
My mom called it organized. Simone calls it avoidance. I call it maintenance and keep it moving.
The feeling I had about Deion Hill had its own folder, marked Not Right Now. Every time I found something new to put in it, whether it was a laugh, a look, his thumb moving across my knuckles two years ago… I put it there. I told myself I would deal with it later. The folder had been running out of room. And then I saw Laura, and folder be damned.
No thanks to her, my body did the thing it always did when he got close. It wasn’t subtle or polite. My whole nervous system saidoh, himbefore my brain had a chance to weigh in. The air shifted. My shoulders did something involuntary. I became aware of exactly how close he was, the way you became aware of a song starting in the next room.
Deion Hill is six feet, three inches of inconvenience.
He fits in a way that makes space feel like it adjusts around him without asking. Broad through the shoulders in a way you register a second too late, built like someone who uses his body for what it’s meant for, not for show. He knows exactly how much room he takes up and moves like it’s already accounted for.
He was at my left shoulder without announcement, just suddenly there, and I felt it before I fully processed it. The shift in air, the awareness, the quiet way my body clocked him before my brain had a chance to weigh in.
I tipped my chin up, just enough to take him in. Deep brown skin catching the light like it knew what to do with it. A beard kept clean at the edges without lookinglike it required effort. A jaw that explained a lot about the way other women behaved around him and had nothing to do with me. Gray sweats, of course, because ovulation has a way of turning perfectly reasonable women into unreliable narrators, a jacket, and the version of himself that always landed exactly where it needed to without trying.
Deion Hill is my best friend. A decade of knowing him and he has memorized every tell I have without ever turning it into something I had to answer for. He has always been my safest place, and here I was, about to risk all of that by glancing down to do a print check, which is absolutely not something I do, and definitely not with him, like, not ever… except he was standing there today like he had forgotten how to be my friend and remembered something else instead.
It didn’t help that I caught the scent of him, that familiar something I had never once asked about, because that would have raised questions I wasn’t interested in answering.
I didn’t look at his jaw. I knew better. I knew how women noticed him because of it. Still, my body adjusted when he got close, quiet and automatic, like it had been expecting him before I had.
“Let me see,” he said.
I turned the record toward him. Deion leaned in, close enough that I felt him through my jacket, and I watched his eyes move across it the way they moved when he was really looking. Low, unhurried, taking their time. His eyes went soft at the corners when something was good and he let himself feel it.
“She’s clean,” he said, in the voice he saved for things he meant without decoration, scratching his beard like the thought was still settling.
