Page 24 of The Sweetest Return

I still had my Story & Place interview due Friday, which meant finding a Pittsburgh elder willing to let a freshman record an hour of their life for AWU’s Black Pittsburgh Archive. Every first-year Royal complained about the requirement until the stories started coming in. Then somebody’s grandmother, barber, old coach, choir director, or block captain would say one thing no textbook had bothered to keep, and suddenly everybody understood why the school made us listen.

Still, I had claimed my little table like optimism could change architecture.

My tote sat open at my feet. My notebook was full of color-coded ambition. Two highlighters, three pens, sticky notes, a half-eaten granola bar, and my copy of Consumer Behavior took up most of the space in front of me. I was tired, behind on reading, and due at a student-business association meeting in less than an hour, but younger Imani believed studying in public meant I had my life together.

I did not.

Dr. Yates had handed back my first paper in that class with enough notes in the margins to feel personal. I had written about Black consumers like I was studying people from across a room instead of writing about people I knew, people I came from, people whose choices made perfect sense if you bothered to understand what mattered to them.

Near the bottom of the last page, she had written: You are not outside this audience, Ms. Bennett. Stop writing like somebody else has to approve what we value before it counts.

I had been irritated for two days. Then I rewrote the whole paper.

I was halfway through fixing a sentence when the energy around me changed.

You always knew when the football team was coming.

They traveled in packs and took up entirely too much sidewalk. Big men in AWU sweats and backpacks, laughing loud enough for everybody around them to hear whatever foolishness had started before they arrived. A few girls moved with them too, pretty and practiced, smelling like body spray and lip gloss, laughing at everything like laughter was the price of admission.

I glanced up once and immediately went back to my notes.

A handsome man surrounded by women was rarely an emergency I needed to involve myself in.

Then somebody clipped the edge of my table.

My book slid straight off and hit the ground with a flat, disrespectful smack.

“Oh, come on.”

I bent down at the same time a large hand reached for it.

Mine landed over his.

Warm skin. Long fingers. A little roughness at the knuckles.

I looked up.

Andre Fine Ass Jones.

Everybody knew him, even people like me who did not organize their week around football. AWU’s running back. Number twenty-two. The one students were already talking about like college might only be the beginning of something much bigger. I had heard his name enough to know it and seen his face on enough flyers and game-day posts to recognize him.

None of that prepared me for him up close.

Dark skin. Broad shoulders. Low cut. A serious mouth that changed completely when he smiled. He was fine in the kind of way that made a woman irritated with herself for noticing too quickly.

And he was looking at me.

At me.

“My fault,” he said.

His voice was lower than I expected. Smooth too, which felt unnecessary.

“It wasn’t you.”

“I was with them.” He picked up my book and handed it to me, his fingers brushing mine again. “Shared responsibility.”

A laugh surprised me before I could stop it.