Page 54 of When Love Takes Root

“I heard.”

“Her salon has real electrical issues.”

“And you’re going to fix them.” Juice lifted one shoulder. “You can keep naming responsible facts. It still doesn’t change the way Celeste Coleman had your attention.”

He wasn’t wrong. I didn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing me admit it out loud, but he wasn’t wrong.

Some women pulled attention because they asked for it. Celeste hadn’t done that. She hadn’t flirted, posed, or tried to make the room revolve around her. She’d done the opposite. She’d tried to make herself smaller than the situation, tried to be calm enough for everybody else not to worry. That was what caught me first.

Not just her face, though her face was enough to make a man lose his train of thought if he wasn’t watching himself. Not just her long, red-and-brown locs, though I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t noticed them. And not just her shape, though Celeste was voluptuous in a way a man noticed before his good sense could catch up. Full hips. A grown woman’s waist. Curves sitting everywhere they were supposed to sit, making me tighten my hand around the wheel like the steering column had offended me.

Si, focus.

It was her mouth that almost got me.

Biggest, plumpest, juiciest lips I’d ever seen on a woman, and she kept pressing them together like she was trying to hold back every word she didn’t have room to say.

I made myself look at the road.

What stayed with me was the way she held herself while bad news moved through the room. She was scared. I saw that. But she didn’t unravel. She listened. Asked questions. Nodded when she needed to. Thanked me after I told her half her shop needed to stay shut down.

That wasn’t nothing.

I’d seen grown men fall apart over a tripped breaker.

Celeste had looked at those dark stations like they held more than equipment. Shutting them down cost her something I couldn’t see yet.

“She handled herself,” I said.

Juice got quiet, which meant he was taking me seriously now. “Yeah, she did.”

“She was worried, but she listened. Didn’t get defensive. Didn’t rush me. Didn’t pretend the problem was smaller because she wanted it to be.”

“You like how she thinks.”

“I respect it.”

“You like it too.”

I stopped at the light on Cullen Boulevard and looked through the windshield. The sun caught the street sign, and for a second, I thought about how many names we passed every day without paying attention. Langston. Cullen. Zora. Folks put history on street corners, and half the city still drove over it, trying to beat yellow lights.

Celeste had history in that shop. I didn’t know all of it, but I saw enough to know those walls had witnessed more than appointments. That place had been built with somebody’s hope, somebody’s money, somebody’s hands. Maybe Jamal’s hands. Maybe hers. Probably both.

“She looked tired,” I said.

Juice nodded once. “That woman looked like she been being strong so long it became unpaid labor.” I looked at him. He shrugged. “What? I read too.”

“Barely.”

“Don’t hate because I’m layered.”

The light turned green, and I drove.

For a few blocks, neither of us said anything. I kept my eyes on the road, but my mind kept putting me back inside that salon. Celeste standing near the front desk with her water bottle in her hand. Celeste trying not to react when I told her the repair might take a week. Celeste looking away when her sisters and Leilani started teasing her, embarrassed but not cold. Celeste saying my name near the end, careful with it.

I’d noticed women before. I was single, not buried. But I hadn’t felt my attention move like that in years. Domonique had done more damage than I cared to admit. Not because she broke my heart beyond repair. I wasn’t giving her that much power. It was more that the whole situation made me distrust my own judgment for a while. A man could survive betrayal and still hate that he hadn’t seen it sooner.

Celeste didn’t feel like a trap.