“It’s my mom. We’re supposed to Skype tonight. I should get going,” he said, giving me another smile, but this one was not at all inviting.

“It was good seeing you, Easton,” he said, as he hurried away without giving me a chance to say goodbye.

I stood there wondering if I really could read people as well as I thought. Because from the first moment with Patrice, I thought we’d shared something big, something worth exploring. I could lie to myself about how it had been the same for him when he was a few hundred miles away, but with him here maybe it was time for me to accept I was probably the only one who’d felt that way.

Patrice

“Well look who finally made it into town.”

I heard Nesto call out as I walked into his restaurant. It was 8:00 a.m. on Monday, and he’d run out the house at 7:00 a.m. so he could be here to receive an order. He’d left Jude, his partner, and me home to take our time before we each headed to work. But he’d forgotten his iPad, which he apparently needed. So I stopped by on my way up to campus to drop it off.

“Did you drive in, P?” Nesto asked, looking a little too amused at my expense. I was not fond of driving and had only bought the black Audi SUV I now owned after much prodding from my friends.

“Yes,” I said with a groan, making Nesto laugh with my very unenthusiastic answer.

“I assume you got my man to work in one piece.” His humorous tone almost, but not quite, masked the fact that he actually wanted to know if I’d safely delivered his lover to work.

I’d lived most of my life in New York City and never had a need for a car. It was a big milestone to now be someone who needed to drive everywhere. Only my friend Camilo was sympathetic to my dilemma, but even he told me to face the fact I would need one if I was living in Ithaca. Juan Pablo and Nesto just told me to get over it.

My mom, on the other hand, had been very reluctant about the car purchase. She was usually all for the flex, but me driving a car upstate was not sitting well with her. She kept saying it made her nervous. I tried to temper her uneasiness by reminding her that I wasn’t going to be driving in the city, and would most likely not get into a head-on collision with a yellow cab going eighty on the wrong side of a one-way street. As one would on any given day in Manhattan.

She acquiesced, begging me to be careful, but still not fully at ease. I usually joked around with her whenever she got overprotective—I was her only child and sometimes that meant she was a bit more in my business than necessary. But this time I didn’t push because I knew what she worried about was not me getting into a fender bender. She worried about what the mother of every black man who got behind the wheel of a car in this country worried about.