Page 144 of IRL: In Real Life
. . .
By the next afternoon,I was angry enough to admit it had followed me into daylight.
That was how I knew it mattered.
Not because I woke up raging. I didn’t. Micah had still been warm when I left his bed. Still sleepy-voiced and fine and trying not to look too irritated that I was putting my earrings in instead of climbing back under him. He had kissed me soft at the door and texted me before I made it home.
Micah: You got in?
Then later:
Micah: Still thinking about your face when I pulled you back into bed.
That one had made me stop walking outside my building like somebody had physically tugged on my sleeve.
Because I remembered it too.
The weight of his arm around my waist. The rasp in his voice. The way I had laughed once before letting him drag me back under him like I had not been halfway dressed and pretending to have better sense.
So no, I wasn’t raging. Just mad. And mad in a way that was harder to shake because the rest of him kept being so damn good.
By the time I got to Mena’s, I was ready to hear something besides my own mind.
The salon was warm when I stepped in, bright at the front and honey-soft toward the back where the dryers hummed and women settled into being taken care of. It smelled like edge control, wrap lotion, flat iron heat, and somebody’s vanilla body mist. Music played low from a speaker near the stations, Ne-Yo singing about being sick of love songs while three women under dryers pretended they weren’t listening and absolutely were.
Mena looked up from the woman in her chair and grinned.
“Well,” she said, “if it isn’t Pretty Bothered.”
The whole shop laughed.
I shut the door behind me and rolled my eyes. “I knew I should’ve gone somewhere anonymous.”
“You don’t want anonymous hair,” Rochelle called from under the dryer. “You want answers.”
That got another round of laughter.
I pointed at her as I made my way back. “See, this is why I don’t tell y’all nothing.”
“You don’t have to,” Mena said, dusting loose hair from her client’s neck before unsnapping the cape. “Your face did all the talking when you walked in.”
Her client laughed, gathered her purse, and slid out of the chair with one last look at me that said she wished her appointment had run ten minutes longer.
Mena shook the cape once, wiped down the chair, and motioned me over. “Come on. Let me see what he did to my work.”
“I hate all of you.”
“No, you don’t.”
I sat and looked at myself in the mirror while Mena tied the cape at the back of my neck. My pixie had survived, but barely. The short layers were still close around my ears and nape, but the crown had gone soft, the roots lifting in a way they never did when I left Mena’s chair. A few pieces near my temple had separated, and the auburn-bronze highlights caught along the top when I turned my head, pretty enough to almost distract from the fact that my hair looked like somebody had been touching it with intention.
Mena saw me looking and smirked. “Yeah. He been in it.”
Crystal cackled from the next station, where she was braiding down a new client with her fingers moving fast and nosey.
I cut my eyes at Mena in the mirror. “Please be quiet.”
She combed gently through the short layers at my crown and hummed like she was assessing evidence. “No.”
