Nailah has certain rules. She only dates studs, gets her therapy from racing her Camaro, and always leaves exes in the past where they belong. But when one ex—her only femme mistake—comes back into her life bringing passion and an explosive secret, can Nailah throw out her rulebook to have a real chance at love?
* * *
As soon as I set foot inside the crowded seafood restaurant, I hear Pauline’s shout above the low roar of other voices. “Nailah! Hey!”
She’s short but I see her right away, flapping her hand at me from a window booth, the top half of her covered in her latest Hawaiian shirt, this one blue with bright red tropical flowers. I wave back, smiling, game face on.
I’m tired today, and it’s from more than just my mentally exhausting day job.
“It took you long enough to get here,” she says in her gravelly voice when I sit across from her, sliding my briefcase to the corner of the booth. I should’ve left the damn thing in the car, but my brain was too tired to make much sense of anything.
“Traffic.” I lean back in the chair and take what feels like my first deep breath all day. “When you said meet you at your favorite crab spot, I didn’t realize you meant one the next state over.”
A slight exaggeration, but really, why do all her favorite places to eat have to be forty miles outside the city limits?
“Glad you finally made it.” Pauline shoves a little plate of sliced lemons toward me. She knows I like a million of them in my iced tea. “I was about to get started without you.”
“You didn’t?”
She’s got a nearly empty basket of hush puppies in front of her along with a pitcher of iced tea, also half gone. “The crab legs, girl,” Pauline says with a shake of her head, like I’m slow. “That’s the whole point.”
“Right.”
The waitress must have been keeping her eye on Pauline’s table, because I’ve barely reached for the empty glass on the table to pour myself some of that iced tea when the young girl appears.
“Yay, you’re here! Pauline here was getting restless without you.” The waitress is young and pretty, with bouncy hair and a thick Atlanta drawl. She waggles her eyebrows at Pauline, who grins back wide enough to show the new gold over her canine teeth.
My friend is the waitress whisperer. Even when she’s not trying to seduce them, she still manages to make them like her.
“What can I get you?” The girl’s notebook appears, pencil poised just over it, her attentive smile on me.
After Pauline and I order, the girl bounces off with a sassy twist of her backside, which Pauline takes the time to thoroughly appreciate.
“You look like shit,” she says once we’re alone. “You sure you just don’t want to quit that job before they fire you?”
“It would be a layoff,” I say automatically, although I’m not fooling anybody but myself.
My company has been dragging out the pending layoff of my department for months. Nearly everybody else cracked under the pressure, quit to find other jobs, or just stopped showing up, eating up their vacation days at home instead of coming to work every day, where the tension was thick enough to make it hard to breathe.
“Anyway, it’s fine. I still need to figure out my next move.”
“Well, you better try to move a little quicker before that company just rolls right on over you. It’s a matter of time, and you know it.”
“Not all of us can have our own business, my girl.”
Pauline rolls her eyes. “Don’t give me that crap again. You can do whatever you want.”
“Tell that to my mortgage and car payment.”
Thick silver rings on her equally thick fingers glint as she waves a dismissive hand at the things I’ve been obsessing over for the last few months. “You know how to make money and you have a savings account most people would kill for. You’re just being a pussy about moving on.”
“Thanks, friend. Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?”
Our food arrives just a few minutes later, and we dive into the pile of crab legs, buttered potatoes, deviled eggs, and corn on the cob. It’s a good thing, because even though we go through the same verbal dance about my job every time we talk, I still don’t know quite where to take it from here.
The unemployment line? My boss’s office to beg her to keep my job? YouTube to start a channel for world-class procrastinators? My options all sound equally sad, equally impossible.
We’re both about three servings into the all-you-can-eat crab-legs buffet when Pauline jumps up. “Quick, switch places with me!” Faster than she normally moves, she drags me out of my side of a booth, her hand slick with butter on my wrist.
Because I know Pauline and the way she attracts drama like daytime TV, I go with it, quickly moving to her side of the table, a meaty crab claw dripping butter still clenched in my hand. Eyes darting from side to side like she’s searching for something she doesn’t want to find, Pauline drops down into my side of the booth, where a massive cutout of a smiling crab jumping into a pot of hot water hides her face from anyone passing by.
“Good. I don’t think she saw me.” She breathes an over-the-top sigh of relief.
“Who?” Then I remember again who I’m talking to. “You know what, don’t worry about it. I just hope some woman isn’t going to key my car just because she sees me with you.” A spike of worry in my gut for Earl, my beloved Camaro, makes me lean toward Pauline. “Right?”
“Right, right. Nothing like that’s going to happen. I just might have told this chick I was coming here tonight. I just didn’t feel like the drama”—I make a disbelieving sound at that—“so I asked for a rain check. Still wanted my crab legs, though.”
I laugh because this is just like Pauline.
Her stomach will always rule, even over the many women she usually ends up in strange situations with. Something simple and predictable I appreciate about her. You never have to wonder where she stands with certain things.
After another quick look around the cutout of the suicidal crab, she settles back into place, helping me switch our food to the proper side of the table.
“Anyway, back to what we were talking about before—”
***
Femme Like Her - available now.