Page 63 of The Sweetest Return

My businesses could run without me standing over them every second.

They were supposed to. That was the point of hiring good people and letting them do what I paid them to do. Still, for a man who had spent most of his life knowing exactly where he was supposed to be every hour of the day, letting other people hold things down did not always come easy.

Today, I was grateful for it.

My mind had been useless for anything that was not Imani Bennett.

The gala should have had more of me by now.

The award.

Apex.

Sunday Prime wanted an answer soon and had made the kind of offer most retired players would have accepted before the agent finished saying the number. Good money. Big platform. Smart transition. Sit in a studio, talk football, smile when somebody yelled a bad take loud enough to go viral, and let everybody call it the next phase of my life.

Yesterday, it had felt important. After lunch with Imani, it felt farther away.

Not gone. Just less loud.

Everything felt less loud after sitting beside her in those folding chairs, eating sandwiches and fries like eight years had not put whole lives between us.

That should have bothered me. It did a little. Mostly, it made me want to see her again.

I leaned back on my hands and looked toward the window while the compression unit tightened around my knee. All afternoon, pieces of her kept coming back without asking permission.

Her legs close to mine beneath that alumni tent. Her shoulder brushing my arm because the chairs were too close and neither one of us moved them. Her perfume coming off her skin every time the breeze shifted. Those deep-brown eyes catching sunlight when she laughed, then going soft and cautious when I said something that reached her.

That mouth.

The way it pouted a little when she was pretending not to be irritated. The way it broke open into that smile when she forgot to protect herself from joy.

Her skin had glowed on the Yard, brown and warm beneath the October sun, with that little shimmer women put on and acted like men weren’t supposed to notice. I noticed. The braids that slipped loose near her cheek. The gold at her ears. The jeans that fit her like they had been made by somebody with a personal problem against my peace.

Lord.

My dick had been hard in too many public places for a man who knew better.

The donor tent. The photo area. Standing beside her while Taylor barked orders like Crown Weekend would fall apart if she blinked. Sitting with her while she picked fries from the tray and acted like she didn’t know I remembered what she liked. I spent half the afternoon trying not to stare too long and the other half trying not to let people see what staring was doing to me.

The wanting was easy to understand.

Imani had always been fine enough to make a nigga stupid.

The problem was everything else.

She had moved toward chairs without saying one word about my knee. Let me sit without turning it into care. Asked questions that made room without pushing. Laughed at old mess like we had not once loved each other hard enough to leave bruises under the skin.

I had liked listening to her.

That was the part I had not expected to hit so hard.

At twenty-two, I loved her.

No question.

At thirty, I liked the woman sitting beside me too.

The compression unit released with a low hiss, and I unwrapped my knee before standing. The shower was already warming by the time I crossed the suite, but I stopped at the mirror over the sink and looked at myself for a second.