Page 205 of The Sweetest Return

So when she came to me above the middle of the country, I took her slow and kept her close, my mouth at her neck, her hands in my shirt, the low sound of the engines wrapped around the softer sounds she tried not to make.

She still tried.

She still failed.

I loved that too.

After, I fixed her clothes before mine because my mother had raised me with manners, even if Imani Bennett had a gift for testing them at thirty thousand feet.

She watched me with those pretty eyes half-lidded, hair a little mussed, mouth swollen from kissing, the kind of satisfied softness on her face that made me want to start all over again.

“You look proud of yourself,” she said.

“I am.”

“You should be ashamed.”

“I’m not.”

“I know. It’s part of your problem.”

I sat beside her and pulled her legs across my lap. She let me, leaning into the corner of the sofa while the plane carried us back toward Pittsburgh and real life.

My thumb moved along her ankle.

She looked down at my hand, then out the window.

Neither of us said much for a while.

We didn’t need to.

The quiet felt different than it used to. Easier. Fuller. Like something was sitting in the space with us now, breathing steady, not asking to be named before it was ready.

My phone rang twenty minutes before landing.

When I saw the name, my body went still.

Coach Price.

Imani noticed immediately. Her gaze dropped to the screen, then came back to mine.

Darius’s text came back to me.

Answer Price’s call when it comes.

Imani squeezed my hand once.

“Answer it,” she said.

I accepted the call.

“Coach.”

“Andre Jones,” Coach Price said, voice warm and rough with age, weather, and too many years yelling over football fields. “You got a minute?”

“For you, yeah.”

“You somewhere loud?”