“Nova?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Your mom would have loved this room.”
I looked around at it. The sneakers, the gowns and the suits, the joy of a room full of people who understood that how you showed up somewhere was a form of expression and had taken it seriously tonight. The DJ moving into something slow, the energy in the room shifting, people leaning toward each other.
“Yeah,” I said. “She would have played it.”
“She would have known exactly what it needed.”
“She always knew.” I looked at him. “I think I’m starting to.”
He took my hand and held it at his side, easy, the way he held things he had decided to keep.
“Let’s go look at the 3s,” he said. He kept his hand in mine all the way there.
On the way home, I had already slipped my sneakers off and tucked my feet beneath me, the leather seats warm from the drive. I wasn’t putting them back on. Not tonight.
He drove with one hand, the other resting loose at his thigh, steady in a way that had nothing to do with the road and everything to do with him. Outside the city hadgone red for the Phillies, the skyline carrying it in waves. It started along Boathouse Row, that clean line of light along the water, then climbed its way across the buildings, catching glass and steel and bridges until it felt like the whole city had decided, all at once, to show up.
Philadelphia never did anything quietly. Not celebration. Not disappointment. Not love. You knew where you stood with it, always.
The color moved across his face as we drove, red light catching then slipping away again as we passed through it. It softened him and sharpened him at the same time, the way certain songs did when they hit just right, revealing something you hadn’t been looking for but recognized anyway.
Outside the window the city kept going, lit and alive and entirely itself, and inside the car it was just us, the quiet between us settled into something that didn’t need to be filled.
“I think it was seeing the 3s,” I said.
“The elephant print,” he said.
“Nobody makes an elephant print like that anymore.”
“Nobody makesanythinglike that anymore. That was a moment in design history that understood what it was doing.”
“The midsole on the original,” I said. “The visible Air unit was a statement.”
“The shoe said, ‘We are showing you the technology because the technology is beautiful and beauty is structural and structure is the point.’”
“Deion,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“That was a really good first date.”
He glanced at me. “Yeah,” he said. “It was.”
His hand found mine on the center console. I turned mine over and let him hold it. The rest of the way home, neither of us said anything.
I stepped out of the shower, steam still clinging to my skin, the air in the room cooler as I tied the satin robe at my waist and pushed damp hair back from my face. He was standing near the edge of the bed when I came in, working the buttons at his cuff, like he needed something to do with his hands, like he had been waiting without saying so.
I didn’t say anything. I crossed the room and wrapped my arms around him from behind, pressing in before he could turn. He did anyway, his hands coming back to find me before I could even think about stepping away, that easy grin just barely there before I kissed him. He answered immediatelym like this had been sitting between us long enough to feel inevitable.
“You smell like shea butter,” he said against my mouth.
“I know what I smell like.”
“I know you do,” he murmured, his nose brushing along my cheek, then lower, breathing me in slower this time. “You used to hug me and I’d have to act like I didn’t notice it. Like it didn’t stay with me after.”
