“Thank you.”
“That wasn’t entirely a compliment.”
“I know. It still counted.”
The corner of his mouth moved. He picked up his fork.
“Reputation is vibes,” I said.
“Reputation is literally the opposite of vibes.” He pointed a piece of hard-dough bread at me with the energy of a man who had accepted he was going to lose this argument and was going to lose it with full commitment. “Vibes are intangible. Reputation is documented.”
“The distinction is vibes,” I said. “The tingle can’t be explained. My mom’s filing system can’t be explained. Vibe-based systems, Deion, functioning at an extremely high level.”
He looked at me with a long, even fondness that I felt land somewhere in my chest and chose, as I always chose, to move past it. “The tingle,” he said, “led you to a scratched Teena Marie.”
I set my fork down. “That information is classified.”
“You held it up in the middle of that flea market and said, ‘I knew it, I knew it, the tingle never lies,’ and then you put it on the turntable and the needle sounded like it was dragging itself through gravel.”
“That was a phantom tingle. Anomalous data. The system’s overall accuracy remains high.”
“The system’s overall accuracy?”
“Deion.” I said his name the way I said it when I wanted it to land like a full stop, and he closed his mouth. His eyes softened, then went amused. I watched him try not to smile and fail, the smile arriving in stages, one corner then the other, then his whole face taken over by it, eyes going to crescents, the laugh underneath it quiet and absolutely real. I knew that smile better than I should have. I felt it move through me like a note held past its natural end.
I looked at my plate and kept my face exactly where it needed to be.
He set his fork down. Looked at me like he was about to say something that mattered. “So,” he said, “I wanted to tell you something.”
“Go ahead.”
“I have a date tonight.” A beat. “I’ve been seeing someone. Her name’s Kendra.”
There are moments when the space around you doesn’t change at all and yet everything in it lands differently, like the sun shifted two degrees and nobody told the furniture. I kept my face exactly where it was. Lord, I kept my face. I reached for my glass because my hand needed something to do, and took a sip, let the cold of it be useful. “That’s really good, Deion. Tell me about her.”
He turned his water glass a quarter turn, the tell, the thing he did when he was choosing words more carefully than the surface of the conversation required. “She’s aschool nurse. Smart. Kind.” A small pause. “Easy to be around.”
Easy to be around.
That landed somewhere I wasn’t going to check just yet. I let it pass through and picked my fork back up like I hadn’t noticed anything at all. He kept going, not listing, just… adding to it in pieces. The way you talk about someone when you’ve decided they deserve to be spoken about properly. I nodded along where it made sense, asked a question at the right time so it didn’t feel like I wasn’t listening.
“What made you notice her?” I asked, like that was a neutral question and I was a neutral person asking it.
He answered, and I let myself smile where it called for it, let out a small “mhmm” when something sounded particularly right, the way I would if this were anybody else telling me about someone new. Because that’s what this was.
“Okay,” I said after a second, setting my glass down. “So she’s kind, she’s smart, she’s easy to be around. You’re clearly past the point where we’re checking for loud chewing.”
The corner of his mouth shifted.
“And?” I added, glancing at him. “Does she return her shopping carts, or are we dealing with a situation?”
The laugh caught him off guard. I saw it land before he decided to let it. “I haven’t had a chance to witness the cart thing and no, she doesn’t chew with her mouth open,” he said.
“Then you’re already ahead of most people. What does she think of your record collection?”
“I haven’t shown her yet.”
“Wise. Lead with your personality. Introduce the collection once she’s emotionally invested and deserving access to your space.”
