Page 123 of The Sweetest Return

“Thank you.”

Her fingers turned beneath mine and threaded through them.

A few students in the row below recognized me. Then alumni. One woman let her eyes move over me long enough to make her intention clear before looking away.

I barely noticed. Imani did. She looked at the woman, then smiled, sweet enough for church and possessive enough to make my chest tighten. The woman turned back around.

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.

“What?” Imani asked.

“Nothing.”

“Mmhmm.”

I lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles.

The softness that crossed her face nearly took me out.

Royal Sound struck its first full note, and the stadium rose around us.

For years, I had scored in this place and searched the stands until I found Imani. Two fingers to my mouth. A kiss toward her section. Every time.

Today, somebody else wore twenty-two.

Imani wasn't somewhere in the crowd waiting for me to find her.

She sat beside me with her hand in mine when AWU came running out of the tunnel and the stadium shook.

For the first time since football ended, I didn't miss being the man on the field.

I liked where I was.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Idon’t want our time to end yet.”

Dre said it after pulling beneath The Nocturne’s awning, one hand still on the wheel, his purple-and-gold AWU jacket open over the white T-shirt beneath it. His voice was calm. Almost too calm for what the sentence did to me.

I turned fully toward him.

Outside the windshield, people moved beneath the awning in clusters of purple, gold, laughter, and Saturday night plans. The valet stand was busy. A group of alumni lingered near the entrance, still talking about AWU’s win over Banneker State like their commentary had personally secured those last seven points. The day should have worn me out completely. My feet hurt, my throat felt a little raw from yelling, and I had eaten enough stadium food to need water, vegetables, prayer, and possibly a formal apology to my digestive system.

But Dre wanted more time.

So did I.

The realization settled without the panic I expected. Maybe because the day had already done something to me. I had watched him inside the place that made him, seen the way AWU still reached for him with both hands. Former coaches, current players, alumni, children in jerseys, older men who looked at him with pride, women who looked at him with recognition, people who knew what he had been and still cared about what he was becoming. He belonged to that school in a way fame had not erased.

And all day, he kept coming back to me.

After every handshake. Every picture. Every interruption. Every conversation that pulled him into the public version of himself, Dre’s eyes found mine again. In the stands, he leaned close to explain a defensive adjustment in my ear, his voice low enough that I suspected education had stopped being his only objective. When the interception nearly cost him his balance, I grabbed his arm before I thought about it, and he looked at my hand like the touch had gone somewhere deeper than his sleeve.

“You almost fell,” I’d said.

“I got excited.”

“You are too grown to be falling over football.”