Page 145 of The Sweetest Return

That sound had a sermon attached to it.

“Don’t start.”

“I did not say anything.”

“That’s how you start.”

Pops lifted his coffee. “Leave the boy alone, Ro.”

“I am not bothering him.”

“You looked over his shoulder like Imani might be hiding on the porch.”

Mama pointed a biscuit at him. “I was hoping she was with him.”

“So was I,” I said before I could stop myself.

The room changed.

Danielle’s expression softened, which somehow irritated me more than one of her jokes would have.

Mama set the biscuit basket down. “She had somewhere to be?”

“She left before I woke up.”

That was the easy version.

The real version was me waking with my hand moving across cool sheets, looking for warm skin. A hip. A thigh. Anything that proved the night before hadn’t been Crown Weekend playing in my face.

Instead, my palm landed in the big-ass wet spot she’d left across the sheet.

I stared at it for a second, dick hardening before the rest of me caught up. Her perfume was still in the bed. My shirt was on the floor. Imani was gone, but there was proof everywhere of exactly what we had done in that room.

And I knew what made that spot.

How wet she’d been beneath me. How many times I had pulled more out of her.

The night before had not left me either.

My left knee was stiff beneath the table, the quad above it carrying that deep, used-up soreness I knew well. I had spent enough years in this body to know the difference between pain that meant stop and a joint reminding me I had put it to work. Last night I had spent hours bracing, changing angles, holding my weight over Imani while she wrapped herself around me. I straightened my leg beneath the table until the tightness eased and almost smiled.

Worth it.

I had told her the truth with my face close enough to hers to feel her breathing change. The confession came out before I had enough sense to stop it.

She had my favorite pussy.

Nobody had ever come close.

A better man might not have compared.

I wasn’t better in that moment.

I was honest.

I had tried to find it. Spent years touching other women and telling myself good was good, wet was wet, sex was sex, and a grown man did not let one woman’s body become the measure for everybody who came after her. But there were some things a man could not talk himself out of remembering.

A man did not forget pussy that could wet his dick, his balls, and the crease of his ass without effort. Did not forget being snapped around like his dick was her favorite toy and she planned to claim ownership from the inside out.