Page 33 of The Sweetest Return

He had gotten on my nerves since approximately nine minutes after I was born. But my brother loved me.

And something in my face now must have reminded him of the girl who had cried into his chest eight years ago, because he did not tease me again.

Daddy watched me for another moment.

“You scared to see him?”

I looked down at the sandwich in my hand. “Yes.”

Saying it aloud loosened something I had been holding too tightly all week.

Mama’s face softened, but it was Bari I glanced at first.

His did too.

“I’m not scared of Dre,” I said.

“I know,” Daddy answered.

I had never been afraid of Andre Jones.

I was afraid that seeing him would make eight years feel negotiable.

Dre had been the only man I had ever truly loved. I had cared about men after him. Wanted them. Slept beside them. Built relationships that were real because they were real.

But nobody had ever reached the same place.

Not in my heart.

Not in my pussy.

Sometimes I wondered if I had made Dre bigger in memory because we lost each other young. Then a picture would catch him laughing instead of posing, or an interview would play somewhere before I could escape his voice, and my body would recognize him before my logic got involved.

That frightened me.

So did wanting to see him anyway.

Badly.

“Homecoming was always going to be hard,” Mama said softly.

I looked at her. She remembered. Of course she did.

The last Crown Weekend Dre and I spent together, AWU had put crowns on our heads and called it tradition. Homecoming King and Queen. Purple sash across his chest, red roses in my hands, both of us smiling beneath stadium lights while the crowd cheered like they were looking at a promise instead of two twenty-two-year-olds who had no idea what life was about to ask of them.

I still had pictures somewhere.

Dre in a suit. Me in a gown. His hand at my waist. My smile too wide to hide how happy I was. We looked beautiful together in a way that made people comfortable imagining us forever.

A few weeks later, I got the offer from Tiffany. By that night, everything between us had broken.

After we ended, Crown Weekend stopped feeling like nostalgia. It felt like walking back into a photograph where everyone still expected me to stand beside him.

“I left the first time for a reason,” I said, voice quieter than before.

Mama came closer and smoothed one hand over my braids. “You had a life you needed to build.”

I looked toward the windows. “I don’t know what he thinks about me now.”