Page 244 of The Sweetest Return

She took my hand before I could reach for her face.

“I used to be afraid being with you meant losing myself,” she said.

I held still.

“Not because you asked me to disappear. You didn’t. But everything around you was so loud, and I was young. I didn’t know how to stand beside the life coming for you without becoming part of the scenery.”

A tear slipped down her cheek.

My thumb moved against it.

“But I don’t feel that way now,” she said. “Now I think being with you is helping me find parts of myself I left behind too. The soft parts. The brave parts. The part that can want a man this much and still want my work. My name. My life.” Her voice trembled. “Loving you doesn’t make me less mine.”

My throat got tight as hell.

“Mani.”

“We’re going to be too busy sometimes,” she said. “You’ll have road games. I’ll have fittings and previews. There will be weekends where we’re not in the same city and nights when one of us falls asleep before the other can call.”

“That sounds terrible.”

She laughed through the tears. “It does. But we spent eight years apart and still found our way here. Andre, we can manage a weekend or two.”

I looked at her, and my shoulders dropped before I told them to. Damn, I had been braced for the old answer without even knowing it.

“We can’t keep treating distance like proof that love is failing,” she said. “Sometimes distance is work. A flight. A game. A meeting that runs late. We have to stop letting twenty-two-year-old fear explain grown-people circumstances.”

I closed my eyes for a second.

“I don’t want to make you small.”

“You don’t.”

“I don’t want football to swallow us.”

“Then we don’t let it.”

“I don’t want to wake up one day and realize we’ve been missing each other politely for months.”

“Then we get impolite about missing each other.”

A laugh broke out of me, low and rough.

“That your plan?”

“That’s my first draft.”

I slid my hand around the back of her neck and brought her forehead to mine.

“We talk,” she whispered. “We plan. We tell the truth before resentment gets dressed. And when it gets hard, we remember we already know what silence costs.”

The truth settled in me slowly, deep enough to move with. I kissed her.

Soft at first. My mouth on hers, my hand against her cheek, the fire warming the room while football moved without sound on the screen. Then deeper, because relief had heat under it and Imani was in my shirt, on my couch, telling me love did not have to shrink either one of us.

She climbed into my lap, knees on either side of my hips, and I held her like something in me had finally been answered.

“I love you,” I said.