Page 61 of Buy Back My Love

I had brought Lee all the way to another country telling myself I was finally gonna tell her the truth. Instead, I fixed her smile, put Always around her wrist, told her I loved her, and brought her right back home believing the same lie she left with.

Lee

Colombia was a whole damn movie. Between getting my teeth fixed, all the shit we got into, and the time me and JB spent together, it was the perfect baecation. I drank so much guaro one night I ended up telling that man to put a baby in me, and of course his freaky ass obliged.

What happened in Colombia stayed in Colombia. At least, that was what I was telling myself.

Soon as we touched back down in Mobile, everything pretty much went back to normal. JB went back to running his trucking company and being gone more than he was home, and surprisingly, I didn’t mind it as much as I thought I would. As long as he called every morning and every night, I was good. I missed my man, of course, but I wasn’t sitting around miserable every time he left either. For the first time in a long time, I was starting to have a life of my own again.

Most mornings, I ended up at my kitchen table with one of them plastic mannequin hands in front of me and a nail tutorial playing on YouTube. Five years was a long time to be away from anything, but in the nail world it felt like fifty. Every other video had some new technique, product, or design I had never seen before. I’d pause the video, try it myself, cuss when mine looked nothing like theirs, then soak it off and start over.

I was getting better, though. Good enough that I’d started taking pictures of the sets I liked and saving them to a folder on my phone. I had another folder full of nail suites I’d found around Mobile.

I wasn’t ready to jump right back into owning another salon. Love-Lee had been my baby, but employees, booth rent, inventory, payroll, and everybody else’s problems weren’t what I wanted right now. A suite sounded good. Something small that belonged to me, where I could take my own clients, decorate how I wanted, make my money, lock the door at the end of the day, and go home.

When I wasn’t doing nails, I’d find something else to get into. Sometimes I went over to Maisie’s and sat on her porch until she got tired of me. Other days, Anika, Nina, Wren, and I would meet somewhere for dinner and end up sitting in the booth talking shit long after the waitress had cleared our plates. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Van had become part of my routine too.

Most evenings after he got off work, he’d either text me or show up at my door with Snoop, and the three of us would walk around the neighborhood. Some nights, we barely talked because Van was tired from work or I was lost in my own head. Other nights, we’d get to talking about some random shit and look up to realize we’d been gone for over an hour.

They weren’t dates. I ain’t think of them like that.

We were neighbors. He had a dog that needed walking, and after spending five years with somebody telling me when I could eat, sleep, shower, go outside, and damn near when I could breathe, I liked having somewhere to go just because I felt like going.

Tonight, I was sitting on the edge of my bed tying my shoe when JB’s name popped up on my phone.

“Hey, baby,” I answered, putting him on speaker so I could finish getting dressed.

“What you doing?”

“Getting dressed.”

“For what?”

The question came so fast I stopped fooling with my shoe and looked at the phone. “Damn. I can’t put clothes on?”

“I ain’t say all that. I asked where you going.”

“Nowhere. I’m about to walk around the neighborhood.”

“With who?”

I laughed under my breath. “Nigga, why is this an interrogation?”

JB started laughing too, like he hadn’t just hit me with three questions back-to-back. “Damn, Lee. I just asked a question.”

“Several, actually.” I tightened my shoelace and stood. “Where you at?”

“Just left Birmingham. I’m finna stop and get something to eat before I keep going.”

“Again?”

“What you mean, again?”

“Every time I talk to you, you eating.”

“Man, I ain’t ate since earlier.”

“Your earlier and everybody else’s earlier must be different.”