Saturday morning. 7:14. My Brooklyn apartment, which is mostly still boxes because I been here ten months and the boxes don't unpack themselves and I have been pretending that's a personality choice.
I did not sleep. I want to be clear about that. I did not sleep. I went to bed at one. I lay in the dark until four. I got up. I made coffee. I did not drink the coffee. I made another coffee. I am drinking the second coffee. The first one is on the counter going cold, and I am pretending I did not make it.
She kissed me yesterday.
I want to be careful with how I say this because the difference between the right sentence and the wrong sentence matters today more than it usually matters. We kissed. She kissed me first. I kissed back. That is the order, and the order is one of the things I am going to think about for a long time, and I am going to think about it carefully because I have learned the hard way that getting the order wrong is how a man tell himself a story about a thing instead of remembering the thing.
The thing was that her hand came up first.
Her hand came up to the side of my face. We were in the conference room on thirty-two and the door was open four inches and there was no one in the hallway and she said something — I will not put it in writing — and her hand came up, and I had a half second to step back, and I did not step back, and her mouth was on mine, and the four years of voice was suddenly a body with hands, and the body had hands, and the hands were on my face.
I want to be on record about my half second.
In the half second I knew what was happening. I knew who she was married to. I knew what the engagement schedule was. I knew that we had not touched once before that minute, and that the touch was the line we had both been walking toward for years without naming it, because naming is what you do when you are ready, and we had been not ready for forty-eight months.
I did not step back.
I had known her voice for forty-eight months when I walked into that conference room on Monday.
I had imagined her — let me be careful — I had imagined what she looked like standing. The Zoom only show you the shoulders up. The standing part is a hypothesis. I had a hypothesis. The hypothesis was wrong in small ways and right in the way that mattered, which is that she takes up more room in person than the camera allow her to. She is small but she occupy. She walked in on Monday and the air in that room adjusted to her, and I noticed, and Damon noticed, and Harrison did not notice because Harrison never notice anything.
She did not know it was me yet. The voice. The contractor she been on calls with for forty-eight months. Sterling had not put two and two together in the intro emails — they said Williams, and she said good morning, Mr. Williams, and then I spoke, and her face did the thing I will not forget. The recalibration. The oh. Not a smile. Just a half second of her face rearranging around the voice she finally had a body for.
I had the same half second. I had her face for the first time, and the face was attached to the voice, and the voice was something my Atlanta apartment had taken in for two and a half years before I moved up here, and the geography of the voice from Atlanta is now a woman from Montclair in a navy suit standing in front of me was a geography my body did not have a map for.
I have spent the week building a map. Yesterday in the conference room she finished the map for me.
I do not know what this is.
I want to say that out loud. I do not know what this is. She is married. The engagement is mid-stream. I am the contractor she has been calling at 9 PM Eastern for two and a half years. I am the man who walked into the room on Monday and saw the body the voice belong to. I am the man whose face she put her hand on yesterday. I am the man who did not step back.
I am, also, the man who got played in LA five years ago by another sharp-witted Black woman he saw in a glass office at the wrong hour, and I learned a lesson on a LAX run with Marcus, and the lesson was don't fall fast.
This is fast.
This is also four years.
I do not know how to count it. I do not know whether the years on the phone count, or whether the years have to be in the room with her face in front of mine. I am asking myself the question carefully because the answer to the question is the answer to whether I am about to be a fool again.
I sit at the kitchen counter. I drink the cold coffee. I look out at Seventh Avenue. The neighborhood is doing its Saturday morning. A man with a dog. A woman with a stroller. The bakery is opening. The world is going on.
I will not tell Mama. Mama would suck her teeth the way she do when she think I am about to make trouble for myself, and the truth is I am about to make trouble for myself, and Mama know it the same way Mama know everything.
I will tell Marcus. Eventually. Not today.
I do not know what this is.
I know I did not step back.
I know that means something. I do not know what it means yet.
I will work on knowing.