"Because I know everything," Julian answered pleasantly. He clapped him once on the shoulder. “How about you go do it for real.”
Micah dragged back down the hall muttering. I stared at Julian. "Howdidyou know that? You were so sure.”
“You forget Zhaire's the same age. Boys that age run the same con, Lyss."
The shower kicked on again, the singing resumed, and I went back to watching Julian move around my kitchen like it was his.
Something about him standing barefoot in my kitchen, handling my son with his easy, certain patience, that did something to me. I wanted to cross the kitchen and climb him right there. Lock my bedroom door and forget there was a third-grader scrubbing behind his ears down the hall.
Which was exactly why I'd set the rules I’d set. Because left to my own devices, with this man in my space looking likethatand being likethat, I had no self-control to speak of. And I had a child in the house. So I decided to draw lines early and hard. I’d made them, and Julian had accepted them without an ounce of argument.
The first one was simple: we did not have sex when Micah was in the house. Julian did not spend the night. He might stay late, but he’d always go back to his own place to sleep. Julian had agreed to it before I finished saying it and held it more strictly than I did, honestly. There were nights Micah was dead asleep behind his closed door, white-noise machine going, and we’d end up tangled up kissing like teenagers, Julian’s hands under my shirt and mine working at his belt, andI’dbe the one to keep going andhe’dbe the one to catch my wrist, and saynot here.He never made it about willpower. He just made it not a question, the same way I had, and somehow that made me want him more, which was its own cruel joke.
So when Micah was home, we lived on stolen minutes. But we weren’t sexless. Far from it. We’d just learned to manage a calendar.
We still ran a couple mornings a week, and those runs had a way of ending at whoever’s place was closer, with forty minutes before either of us had to be a professional and Micah already dropped at school. We still had our lunches downtown, sometimes eating takeout in bed at one of our condos blocks from our offices.
And then there was the one reliable thing: Micah’s nights atRaschad’s. He’d go to stay with Zhaire, the two of them more brothers than cousins now, and that night would becomethenight. I’d stay at Julian’s. Or he’d stay at mine. And we’d get to be loud and slow.
It was a whole operation, the way Jada put it when I broke it down. She’d laughed so hard she’d had to set the phone down.
“You waited years, found a perfect man, and now you’re rationing him out around a third-grader’s sleepover schedule?”
“It’s necessary, Jada.”
“It’s you overthinking, Alyssa. Your default setting making you feel bad for finally putting yourself first.”
She was kind of right.This was the part I hadn’t expected: guilt.
It caught me at the strangest times. Packing a small bag for a night at Julian's, folding new lingerie into it, and then standing there with this sneaky feeling crawling up my neck like I'd been caught. Caught at what, I couldn't have said. Micah had no idea. To him, Mommy stayed at Julian's sometimes the way he stayed at Zhaire's. A sleepover, grown-up edition. There was nothing in his world that made it a thing to think about.
But I'd lie in Julian's arms after, satisfied and stupidly happy, and some other part of me would be quietly doing math on whether any of it made me selfish. Whether, when Micah was old enough to do the arithmetic backward, he'd decide his mother had been something other than what he'd thought.
When I finally said it out loud one night, lying against his chest, he didn’t even pause. “I think Micah knows the things that are his to know,” he said. “That his mother is happy. That there’s a man in his life who shows up and doesn’t leave. He doesn’t need to know how his mother spends a Friday night any more than he needs to know what’s in your bank account or what you and your sisters talk about on the phone. Some things are yours. You’re allowed to have a life that’syours, Lyss. Being his mother is never supposed to cost you the whole rest of you.”
“It feels like sneaking.”
“It’s not sneaking. It’s privacy and prudence. Sneaking is when you’d be ashamed if he knew. Privacy is when there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just not his business.” He pressed his mouth to my shoulder. “You’re not doing anything to him. You’re doing something for you, somewhere he isn’t, with somebody who’d put a brick wall up before he let it touch that boy’s world. That’s not selfish.”
I let that settle, because it was the thing I hadn’t been able to say to myself. I’d spent so long being one thing — Micah’s mother — that wanting something strictly for myself felt like stealing hours from him. Micah wasn’towedthose hours. He was loved and more secure than he’d ever been, with steadier ground under him than before. None of that had been taken from him by what I had with Julian. If anything, it came with it.
It took me a few weeks to believe I was allowed to draw a careful line around my son's world and have a full, warm, ridiculous, eight-minutes-against-the-counter life on the other side of it. The guilt still rode along sometimes. It just didn't get to drive. After all this time, I stopped apologizing for being a whole person.
25/
safety protocols
alyssa
Saturdays had evolvedand settled into a rhythm of their own. Julian still ran five days a week at five a.m., but on Saturdays he ran in the evenings. We started from his place on Belmead, took the long loop through the neighborhood, and usually ended the run at Simone and Raschad’s. Where we’d scoop up Micah, the three of us walking the last half mile back to Julian’s, our cool-down, or sometimes a light jog if Micah felt like pushing it.
That became our routine. Run. Pick up Micah. End the day at Julian’s place. Micah had commandeered one of his spare bedrooms, with a PlayStation hooked up like it had been his room for years. We could hear him, down the hall, shouting at the game.
Meanwhile, Julian and I ended up stretched across his couch, withLaw & Order: SVUdroning on in the background. He sat at one end, half-watching the screen while his thumb worked over his phone, replying to whoever refused to leave him alone for a weekend. My head rested on his thigh, one leg dangling. His free hand brushed absently along my shoulder.
Suddenly, Julian set his phone down, sat forward, and gave me a look that meant business.
“There’s a matter between us I’d like to discuss.”
