She reached over and pressed her hand against my heart. “Something tells me you’re still the same here. The core doesn’t change.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
She stared at me, and I found myself mesmerized by her sun-kissed bronze skin, the way that she looked at me from underneath the curve of her upturned, russet-brown eyes, and how she batted her long, curly eyelashes at me.
I reached out and tweaked her small, button nose, which made her lips turn up into an infectious smile. She jumped up from her spot as though our locked gazes were becoming more than she could withstand. Her large breasts, which were incongruous with her petite body, jiggled.
“What?” she asked, staring at me as she pulled long fingers through her dark, mahogany brown hair. The sun accented the red highlights in her hair. It dawned on me for the second time since my arrival that she looked like the singer Rihanna.
“Nothing,” I replied, forcing my thoughts away from kissing her lips and touching her skin. “Last one back has to cook!” I shouted, taking off, running and laughing when she was hot on my tail.
I inhaledthe salty smell of the water and the natural outdoor scent. I closed my eyes as the breeze kissed my face, and I hugged my chest to my knees.
“There’s nothing like it, is there?” Reighvyn asked, joining me.
“Nothing like it. I don’t know why I stayed away for so long.”
“Life. We all get caught up in life at times.”
“Yeah, I guess. Still, this place holds the fondest memories. I never should have allowed ‘life’ to come between me and it. It’s always peaceful out here.”
Reighvyn wrapped his muscular arms around his long legs and hugged his knees to his chest as well. He rested his head onhis knees and turned to stare at me. “Has it been elusive for you? Peace?”
“Only in this last year. When things went haywire in my life, I questioned everything. It seemed that everywhere I turned, people were gawking at me. Life was not what I had become accustomed to, and I wondered if anything would return to normal."
“That’s when we have to return to our past sometimes, or home, or anything that’s most familiar to us, to find our way back. That’s what I’m doing here.”
“I wish we hadn’t lost touch, Reigh.”
“Everything happens for a reason, li’l bit.”
“What happened?”
He sighed. “I got caught up in training, the hard work, chasing what I believed I was supposed to be doing. After a while, it was best to keep you away, because shit only got darker for me the more that I got into that world.”
“What do you mean?”
“Memories of Mama, the dark times. I became angrier and stopped trusting anyone except those that I saw all the time.”
“Not even me?”
“You got caught up in that college life. It wasn’t about not trusting you. It was about keeping you pure and in the light.”
“I did get caught up, but there were the holidays.”
“I wasn’t returning home for them. Shit. Most times, I was traveling or having a bout. Wasn’t a reason for me to return home anymore. What was home? That’s what I started asking myself. Lo and Wryn weren’t celebrating the holidays. They were off living their lives independently. Lo was falling in and out of love, and Wryn was going through a divorce, finding another love, and then another divorce. The last thing that I wanted was to bring my darkness into their lives.”
“And then you met your girlfriend.”
“Yeah. Yeah,” he repeated, dragging his hand over his face.
“That should’ve been a happy time.”
“Should’ve been, but the further into my life that I got, the easier it was to shove the old one aside. I guess that’s when the darkness crept in.”
“Darkness?”
