Page 17 of The Sweetest Return

For months, the public got resistance bands, pool sessions, the anti-gravity treadmill, and the first video of me jogging again. That clip got close to five million views before somebody sent me the link.

22 COMING BACK DIFFERENT.

They weren’t wrong.

They just didn’t know what kind of different.

Nobody filmed Pops helping me into the shower the first week because I couldn’t lift my own fucking leg over the side of the tub. Nobody saw the nights medication stopped doing enough, or the morning I dropped my phone beside the bed and stared at it on the floor because bending far enough to pick it up hurt more than I wanted anything on that screen.

Aubrey saw more of the ugly than most people.

I met Aubrey Carter through Nate’s wife, Sydnee, about six months before the injury. She came late to Sydnee’s birthday dinner in a little green dress, blaming Pittsburgh traffic while two deep dimples made everybody forgive her for something we all knew was probably her own fault.

She worked in fashion, though that covered a lot. Instagram, TikTok, styling videos, brand partnerships, travel content, the occasional campaign. She knew clothes for real too. Could explain for twenty minutes why two handbags that looked exactly the fucking same were different enough to justify another thousand dollars.

I used to tell her she made a living convincing women they needed shit they already owned.

She said football was grown men fighting over a ball, so neither of us had room to judge.

I liked her.

Eventually, I loved her.

And when my life got hard, Aubrey showed up. She came after surgery with food and clean clothes, learned my medication schedule when I was too angry to care, sat through appointments, and helped my mother change the sheets one afternoon after I sweated through them.

I wasn’t going to turn her into somebody she hadn’t been just because we ended.

Still, there were nights when Aubrey slept beside me and somebody else showed up in my head.

Imani.

That shit used to make me mad enough to ruin my own mood.

The night after surgery, I woke around three with my leg burning and pictured Mani in the chair beside my hospital bed. During physical therapy, I heard her telling me I was being stubborn. When Pops helped me into the shower and I was as humiliated as I had ever been in my grown life, some messed-up part of me wondered what she would’ve done if she’d been there.

I already knew.

She would’ve stepped closer. Probably cussed me out for trying to do too much while she did it.

She just hadn’t been there.

She left me.

At twenty-two, that was the part I understood. Imani could’ve used all the words in the world about ambition, New York, Tiffany & Co., and needing a future that belonged to her. What young Dre heard was that the woman he loved had been given a choice and didn’t choose him.

I was too arrogant to understand why she should’ve had to.

I wanted her with me. Wherever the league sent me, whatever came next, I assumed we would figure the rest out because that was what loving me was supposed to mean.

When she didn’t, I took it personally.

Then I spent a long time pretending I hadn’t.

For months, every woman got compared to something. Her laugh wasn’t Mani’s. Her mouth wasn’t Mani’s. She didn’t smell right, argue right, or touch me right. Pussy didn’t soak my dick the way Mani’s had either, and apparently my body was petty enough to keep track.

Eventually, I got tired of measuring women against a woman who was gone.

Women got easier when I stopped asking them to be anything.