from The Red Velvet series

Harlem, 1928

By the time he walked into The Red Velvet Parlor, I’d already seen ten men, smoked two cloves, and told one preacher’s son to stop calling on Jesus unless he planned to tip.

But him?He seemed like a man who didn’t come looking for flesh, but found it anyway. He came in carrying a saxophone case and that kind of sadness you only see in musicians and mothers. Said he didn’t need the usual—just wanted “company.”

Hmph. Okay. Miss Geneva’s girls knew to keep our mouths and minds sharp and our legs optional. But something in me softened when he asked, “You got time?”

Like time was something I owned.

I had time. What I didn’t have was peace.

“You read?” he asked me the second time he came back. I still had one heel dangling off my ankle. I’d just whispered somebody else’s husband into sleep.

“I read. I also charge by the hour. Which one you paying for?”

He smiled. Didn’t answer. Just pulled a worn copy of The Crisis from his coat pocket and handed it to me like a flower.

The first time he touched me that night, he apologized.

“You just seem too thoughtful for this,” he said.

I didn’t flinch. I’ve heard worse from men who cried after.

“And you seem too tender for war,” I said. “But here we are.”

He started reserving the hours after midnight. Called it “our time,” like the walls were on payroll and understood the assignment, keeping secrets and fools outside of 7B.

We’d lie in that creaky bed, me in nothing but skin and sarcasm, him in uniform pants and a hangover.

We’d talk Garvey, lynchings, gin, and grief—skin tangled, fused like the pages of a book soaked with rain. He’d trace the curve of my thigh like it was a map back to himself.

He liked how I spoke. Said I used words like they owed me rent.

One night, he leaned in like a secret and said, “I could stay here forever.”

I said, “But you won’t.”

He kissed my shoulder anyway.

A week later he told me he had to go. Military orders. Some excuse wrapped in patriotism.

I said, “So this your goodbye?”

He said, “This is just the last time.”

I laughed.

“You got a woman?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. Which meant yes.

Two months later, I saw him walking past The Red Velvet like he’d never been inside. Like he’d never been inside me.

As a soldier should.

The woman on his arm had careful hair—glossy. I could practically smell the heating oil and hear the hot comb hiss in the wisp of the afternoon breeze. A string of pearls sat like punctuation on her collarbone. Her skin tone paper bag compliant. She looked like respectability.

I wondered if she liked jazz.

I wondered if the lies she believed were as pretty as the ones he offered me.

Sometimes I still read The Crisis in the quiet hours between “company”. Still keep that same torn copy under my pillow, creased like a broken promise.

Men come and go. They all think they’re special for asking me what I think. It was their way of trying to separate themselves from the last one and the one before that. I’d learned that their interest in my mind was as temporary as their presence.

But only one ever stayed long enough to hear my answer.

And he still left.

Let the piano play.

Let the velvet remember.