Page 12 of The Sweetest Return

That should have made the choice easier.

It didn’t.

We stayed that way for a while because neither one of us seemed ready to admit the conversation had reached the place where there were no more words worth saying.

Eventually, I pulled away.

“I should get dressed.”

“Yeah.”

Neither of us moved immediately.

Then Dre picked my dress up from the floor and handed it to me.

“I’ll take you home.”

We dressed quietly, moving around each other with a familiarity that made everything ache. He knew where I would step before I took it. I knew where he had dropped his shoes. My dress slipped back over skin that still felt like his hands, my bra was near the foot of his bed, and my toothbrush still sat in his bathroom drawer like ordinary things did not know everything had changed.

When I reached for my things, my hand paused on his AWU letterman jacket.

Purple and gold. Heavy. His name stitched across it. The number twenty-two on the sleeve. He had given it to me after a cold game sophomore year when I swore I wasn’t freezing and my teeth had started telling on me. It had swallowed me then and still swallowed me now, broad through the shoulders, sleeves too long, hem falling low on my thighs.

Dre looked at it.

Then at me.

For a second, I thought he might say something.

He didn’t.

I put it on because I couldn’t make myself leave it there.

The drive to my quad took less than ten minutes.

December had settled over AWU, bare branches cutting through the dark while students hurried between buildings with coats pulled tight. Dre drove with one hand on the wheel of his Hellcat, the other resting beside the gearshift.

Normally mine would have been there.

I reached for it.

His fingers opened immediately.

That almost broke me all over again.

He held my hand the rest of the way, and we didn’t talk because there was nothing left to explain. I was taking Tiffany. He didn’t know where football would take him. We loved each other. None of those truths knew how to make room for the others yet.

When he parked outside my building, I kept holding on.

“Don’t turn it down tomorrow because tonight hurts,” he said quietly.

I looked at him.

“What if I lose you?”

The sadness that crossed his face answered before he did.

“I don’t know.”