Page 87 of The Sweetest Return

Neither did the grown-man lecture I tried giving myself about patience, timing, and eight years not disappearing because she looked at me like she still knew me.

I shut off the water.

For most of Crown Weekend, I had let myself stand in questions. Did I still want her? Did she still feel something? Was this real, or was AWU putting old perfume on old feelings and making both of us breathe it in?

Enough.

The only question left was what I planned to do now that she was here.

I grabbed a towel and stepped onto the bath mat.

Before Mama and Pops left the hotel earlier, Pops had caught me near the elevators while Mama finished saying goodbye to somebody she had apparently known since the beginning of time.

He studied me for a moment. “You happy?”

“Yeah.”

His eyebrows lifted.

“What?”

He clasped the back of my neck, the same way he had since I was too young to pull away without getting myself in trouble.

“I know you.”

I laughed. “Everybody know me this weekend.”

“Nah. I know you.”

I already knew where he was going.

“I saw you with Imani.”

“Pops.”

“I ain’t asking your business.”

“You currently in it.”

He ignored me.

“You looked happy.”

I didn’t answer because there wasn’t much use lying to a man who had known my face my whole life.

Mama called his name from farther down the hall.

Pops squeezed the back of my neck once before letting me go.

“Get your girl back, son.”

Then he walked away like he hadn’t just dropped something heavy in my hands and left me standing there with it.

An hour ago, I had taken that like advice.

Standing in the bathroom now with a towel around my waist, I understood it as a challenge.

Getting Imani back could not mean dragging her toward the past. I did not want the girl I loved at twenty-two to shrink herself into a version of us that no longer existed. I wanted the woman who had sat beside me tonight in black silk with tears in her eyes. The woman building something at Saint Aurelia. The woman who still knew when I was lying about my knee and still made room for me without turning it into a wound.