Page 2 of IRL: In Real Life
And beneath all of that, if I was honest, I was still a woman who wanted.
I wanted sex that felt like truth. Intimacy that lived the same way online and off. A man who did not arrive as a curated version of himself and then collapse under the weight of reality.
I wanted something that could survive contact with air.
I wanted love.
That was the part I did not say out loud.
Not because I was ashamed of it. Because wanting, when you had already been disappointed enough, could make you feel foolish if you handed it too openly to the light. So I kept that truth tucked behind my teeth and dressed myself beautifully around it. Let it live in my body instead of my mouth. In the way I still noticed a beautiful man when he entered a room. In the way my skin still woke under the right voice. In the way hope, though quieter now, had not died.
It had just become expensive—that was all. So I moved carefully.
I looked. I listened. I laughed when something was funny. I flirted when it felt harmless enough to enjoy.
I let the internet be what it was, a crowded room with better lighting and worse consequences. I told myself I knew the difference now between curiosity and connection, between attention and care, between a man being good in comments and being good where it counted.
Most days, I believed myself. Most days, that was enough.
And then there were the other days.
The quieter ones. The ones after the skincare and before sleep. The ones when my home was beautiful and still. The ones when I had already picked out tomorrow’s clothes, set my bag by the door, plugged in my phone, rubbed oil into my skin, and stood for one extra second at the bathroom mirror looking at my own face like maybe I was trying to read something there.
On those nights, I could admit the truth a little more honestly.
That I still wanted to be met. That I wanted to be chosen in a way that held up after the choosing. I wanted the kind of love that did not ask me to trade my discernment for softness or my softness for self-protection.
Wanted to stop feeling like romance had become a performance everybody knew how to imitate and nobody knew how to live.
I wanted something real.
Something warm. Something adult. Something that would not disappear the second it came into contact with ordinary life.
I would never have said it like that in public and probably not even to my friends. But there it was still alive in me.
And if I am telling the truth, maybe that is the most vulnerable thing of all. Not that I had been disappointed. Not that I had grown careful. Not even that I had learned how to move through the world with discernment and style and enoughwisdom to keep my own heart from being mishandled too casually.
It is this:
After everything, I still have not stopped wanting love.
one
. . .
By the timeMena turned my chair toward the mirror, I already knew I looked good.
It wasn’t that I was vain. I had just spent enough years inside this body to know when all the pieces had fallen where they were supposed to.
My pixie was laid close and glossy, the auburn in it catching when I tilted my head this way and that way, beneath the salon lights. My brows were freshly threaded. My skin had finally forgiven me for the week I’d had and glowed now. My nails were a bright, almost edible lavender that would look good wrapped around a wineglass, a steering wheel, a man’s dick if life ever got that simple again. My toes were white, of course. Theystayed white unless I was feeling reckless, and lately I hadn’t felt reckless enough for color.
Mena stepped back with her comb in one hand, dark brown waves of hair brushing her light brown shoulders as her mouth twisted in approval. “Yeah. Somebody need to see you tonight.”
I looked at her in the mirror. “Why every time I come in here, y’all act like I’m auditioning for a husband?”
“Because you do all this just to go sit in your nice house and ignore people.”
That made Renee laugh from under the dryer two stations over. She was pretty in that soft, easy way some women were, brown-skinned with honey-blond curls, lashes long enough to provide her cheeks some shade, and always either on her way to somewhere or just back from it.
