Page 158 of The Sweetest Return

The thought was ugly, human, and honest enough that I could not pretend it hadn't crossed my mind. I had woken beside a man I still loved and opened my phone to strangers comparing me with another Black woman before I had even brushed my teeth. Some corner of my pride lifted its chin with Dre's words still warm in my body.

He had wanted me. Missed me. Compared what we’d had to everything that came after and come back with an answer that made me feel powerful in a way I would never admit out loud.

So I gave myself that quiet victory. I let it feel good too. For a minute.

Then the grown woman in me entered the room.

Aubrey had not done anything to me.

She had loved a man who couldn't love her the way she deserved, and if what Dre told me was true, she had spent too long trying to earn a version of him that was never fully available to her.

That did not make her less than me. It meant Dre had hurt her.

There was a difference.

I could privately enjoy knowing nobody had replaced what existed between us without pretending another woman deserved to be embarrassed for failing at something that had never been hers to win.

And honestly, that was the part strangers never understood.

Aubrey and I were not competing. Dre had already answered the question everybody online seemed desperate to ask. What frightened me was what happened after the answer.

My name reduced to a place in Andre Jones’s timeline.

The college sweetheart.

The woman he came back to.

The original.

The upgrade.

A body beside his in a photograph.

I had spent years making sure Imani Elise Bennett belonged to herself.

Woman. Executive. Daughter. Sister. Friend. A whole person with her own work, choices, mistakes, desires, and history.

I was not prepared to wake beside Andre Jones and feel strangers reaching for ownership of me again.

So I moved quietly.

Unfastened his diamonds and placed them on his nightstand.

Found my clothes.

Dressed.

Before leaving, I stood beside the bed.

Dre slept deeply, one arm stretched across the space where I had been. His mouth was slightly open. The sheet sat low at his waist, and one hand rested palm-up against the mattress like even asleep he expected me to still be there.

I wanted to touch him.

Wake him.

Ask what came next.

I wanted to climb back beneath his arm and let him answer every question my fear had started asking without permission.