Commitment (24 page)

“How was yoga?” he asked.

She raked her fingers over his scalp. “
Fine until
I fainted.”

Shawn sat u
p abruptly, his eyes concerned.
“What happened?”

Riley
shrugged.
“It was Bikram.”

“What the hell is Bikram?” Brendan asked idly as he flipped channels.

“They call it
fire yoga
,
”
Riley
explained.
“They keep the room really hot.
I wasn’t properly hydrated
, that’s all
.”

“But you’re okay now
.”

Shawn was still looking at her as though
checking for broken parts.
His gaze
st
opped at her hands, and s
o
mething flickered in his eyes, s
omething that could only be described as
elation
.
A
nd then
Riley
re
membered.

S
he was still wearing the ring.

Shawn’s
eyes rose to hers onc
e again, silently questioning.
She looked down and took a breath. He put a hand beneath her chin and tipped her head upward so they were eye to eye once again.
She could have said it was a misunde
rstanding. But it wasn’t.
Admittedly, she hadn’t thought it completely through yet, and for sure t
he timing was
n’t what she would have planned,
with Brendan sitting
sweaty and dirty, less than
ten feet away watching ESPN. B
ut the truth was, of
course she would marry Shawn.
Of course, if the alternative was
to lose him.

So she mouthed the word ‘yes’ and watched as his face opened
up into an unbelievable smile.

g

The darkness surprised him as he stepped out onto the sidewalk, and Shawn turned on his phone, disoriented for a moment
.
It was almost ten-thirty; he had been
in the studio for eleven hours.
Eleven hours and he’d accomplished absolut
ely nothing.
Brendan exited the building right behind him and looked
up
.

“What?”

“I didn’t realize it was this late,” Shawn said. His phone chimed as it powered on and a series of text messages flashed across the screen.

“This is how it starts,” Brendan laughed. “Not even your wife yet and blowing up your shit.”

Shawn ignored him and scanned the messages. Riley letting him know she was
leaving work, another letting him know she figured he was working and
so
was going to meet Tracy for drinks. A third, telling him they were at Harambe and she would be back around midnight.

“She’s out with her girl,” Shawn said, scrolling through the messages. “C’mon take me back to
the
hotel.”

“Which girl? Tracy?”Brendan asked, interested now.

“Yeah.” Shawn looked at him. “B, believe me when I tell you, you are most definitely not her type.”

Brendan laughed. “Don’t sleep on your boy. Tracy and I shared a moment in L.A., many moments in fact.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, when you and Riley were beefin’ I took her
shopping
that morning.”

“She was using you for the ride, B.”

Brendan shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Okay, you want to humiliate yourself, let’s go find them,” Shawn said.

“What time is it?” Brendan glanced at his wrist though he wasn’t wearing a watch. “I guarantee you I will be balls deep by one a.m., you watch.”

“Maybe we should put some money on that.”

Brendan shook his head. “N
o. B
ecause that would be crass.”

Shawn laughed. “Shut up, man. Let’s go.”

It took them only twenty minutes to find Harambe Café with the help of the GPS, but parking was a lot more challenging, so Brendan dropped Shawn off out front and went in search of the ever-elusive
free
downtown parking spot.
Inside the café, i
t was thankfully dark, so no one seemed to notice him other than the hostess, who smiled and nodded her recognition, asking whether he needed a table. Everyone else was focused on the stage where a brother with waist
-
long dreads was doing some
kind of spoken word performance, his mouth close to the mike, his voice a soothing, baritone hum.

“A spot at the bar would be good,” Shawn told her, keeping his voice low.

The bar was in the dimmest section of the café, and would give him a vantage point from which he might spot Riley. The hostess walked him toward the bar with a flashlight which she aimed downward, li
ke an usher in a movie theater.
Shawn chose a seat that was at the far end that looked to have just been vacated, if the abandoned beer glass in front of it was any indication. The hostess, a pretty sister who was rocking an Angela Davis ‘fro, signaled to the bartende
r
to clean it up, and nodded her confirmation that Shawn should take the seat.

“It
’
s open mike tonight,” she whispered. “You think you might want to get up there and give our customers a surprise performance?”

Shawn shook his head. “No thanks. I’m off the clock.”

“
Understandable. But
I think
you know
that
I had to ask,” she said squeezing his leg.

He
glanced
down at her hand, which had lingered just a moment too long to be casual.

“I’m Marnie,” she said. “If you need anything.”

“Thanks Marnie,” he said. He turned to face the stage so she would know she was being dismissed.

The
place
was jam-packed, with only a few empty seats in the whole house, and from what Shawn could
tell, those seats were only vacant
because so many people had chosen to sit on the floor, directly in front of the stage to be closer to the performers. He looked around, taking it all in. It was Hipster Central
in here
. Just about every woman was
rocking a natural of some kind:
dreads, braids, nappy and curly ‘fros. A
nd the brothers all looked like some variation of Maxwell, circa 1996.

So this was Riley’s tribe.

He recognized traces of her in the distressed clothing everyone seemed to be wearing,
and
the casual disregard for conventional standards of beauty.
No one in this crowd would be rocking Prada or Dolce and Gabbana, that was for damn sure. Even if they could afford, it, these were the folks who shunned labels on principle.
Daily, he was being oriented to that world bit by painful bit.
Just last week, Shawn had told Riley a bold-faced lie when she asked him whether her engagement ring was
made
of conflict-free diamonds.

He searched the tables for her with no luck and then completely unexpectedly, saw Tracy. She was
one of
only
a handful of
wom
e
n in the whole place with straightened hair and tailored clothes that looked like they actually fit. She was listening to the brother onstage with a
n
expression
of mild interest, but nothing
like the rapt attention that almost everyone else was displaying. So
clearly
this was
not her scene as much as it was Riley’s.

Moments later,
Shawn spotted
his fiancée
. Riley was about ten feet away from Tracy,
in
a corner of the
cafe
, not looking at the stage at all.
Instead, she was completely focused on
someone who
, though
their back
was Shawn
,
seemed familiar all the same. Her face betrayed signs of strain and she was shaking her head emphatically, as though denying something. And that was when he knew who it was. Brian.

His immediate impulse was to get over there
and
put some distance
between them, but Brian wasn’t actually
touching
Riley, so
Shawn forced himself to take a deep breath and bit down on his
lower lip. He took in every detail about her gestures, trying to read what was being talked about. But of course, he knew what was being talked about; most likely the fact that she was about to be married. And to the guy she’d cheated with, no less.

Shawn
was surprised that he felt absolutely no
sense of empathy for
his rival
.
Given that he knew what it felt like to almost lose Riley, he would have thought that he could muster up
something
. But no, all he thought looking at them across the room together was about how to get Riley as far away from
Brian
as possible.

Fuck
this
shit,
he thought.

She was with him now. No way was he going to sit here shadow
-boxing while Riley had a heart-to-
heart with
her
ex-boyfriend. He shoved himself up off his bar stool and
tried to make out the best path to
her
. He didn’t care
if
she was mad or not, he was putting an end to this little
tête-à-tête
.

Maybe it was his movement that caught her eye but the next thing he knew,
Tracy was
looking
directly at him,
squi
nting somewhat in the dim light. She
turned to look at Riley and inclined her head in the direction of the exit. Shawn narrowed his eyes, not comprehending for a moment until she did it again and turned on her heel to push her way through to crowd
and toward the exit
.

What the hell did
she
want? Chances were, she’d set the whole
reconciliation up
.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out
that Tracy did not approve of him,
but he’d
decided for the sake of peace in his future household not to address it.
For better or for worse, Riley came with an
extra, troublesome
appendage.

When Shawn got outside, she was already there, not wearing
her coat,
s
o clearly her plan was for this conversation to be a quick one. Ru
bbing her hands together to ward off the cold
, Tracy took a deep breath
and advanced a few steps to meet him
.

“Riley didn’t mention that you were coming,” she said.

“She didn’t know,” he said,
looking
in the direction of the café. “Obviously.”

Tracy rolled her eyes. “Look,” she said. “I’ve known Riley a lot longer than you have. So
a
word to the wise; don’t go in there and make some kind of
ghetto-ass
scene because she’s having a conversation with someone.”

“Wha . . . do you
know
me or something?” Shawn said.

“Believe me, I’ve heard
all about you
,” Tracy said. “And I was in L.A., remember? When you emotionally blackmailed her into . . .”

“Tracy, this is none of your business,” Shawn said, struggling for composure.

“I disagree,” she said, her voice clipped. “But in any event, I’m telling you that Riley is not the kind of woman you try to
hem
up. So if you go in there and
try to
get into some kind of dick-measuring contest with Brian, I can almost guarantee you there will be no wedding.”

That got his attention, as she
had to know
it would. Tracy blinked
and
her expression
changed
from confrontational to triumphant.

“And I should believe you because you
really
want there to be a wedding,” Shawn said.

“
You know I don’t. But she does.” Tracy shrugged.
“I don’t understand it, but there it is. She wants you.”