Page 61 of The Sweetest Return

The answer moved through me like another touch.

“Then don’t ask me questions you don’t want answered.”

For half a second, he looked like he might forget where we were.

Then Taylor’s voice cut through the air.

“Imani, Dre, if y’all are finished having a private moment in public, I need eyes this way.”

Heat rushed into my face.

Dre let me go slowly, like he wanted me to feel every inch of his hand leaving my body.

A few photographs later, Taylor released everyone except the people she had voluntold into donor duty. Dre lasted about thirty seconds before two board members stopped him. He gave them a smile, a handshake, and enough attention to make them feel seen without making the rest of us disappear around him.

That was new.

Or maybe it was simply a part of his life I had never seen up close.

The Royal Sound saved everybody a few minutes later.

The drumline came first, hard enough to vibrate through the ground. Brass followed, loud and bright beneath the October sky. Students screamed. Alumni screamed louder. Somebody near the student center yelled, “Aight now!” like the band had personally come to heal something in his spirit.

For the next half hour, I let myself disappear into the part of Crown Weekend that had nothing to do with unresolved relationships.

Then Royal Sound slid into The Hill, the old brass-and-blues arrangement every Royal knew by the first four notes. The alumni hollered before the students did. They changed pieces of the middle every few years, which gave every graduating class something to argue about, but that opening belonged to all of us. Somebody from sophomore year grabbed my hand, and suddenly six of us were laughing and dancing because none of us remembered all the steps we once swore were permanently embedded in our bodies.

For a while, I forgot about Damien, work, and even looking for Dre.

That might have been why I felt him before I saw him.

The band finished, leaving everybody slightly deaf and talking too loudly. I was still laughing when Dre’s voice came from beside me.

“I always loved the way you move.”

I turned.

He had shrugged out of the Jeff Hamilton leather and carried it over one shoulder. The white T-shirt underneath fit him in a way I did my best not to reward with prolonged eye contact, but my eyes had never been especially obedient where Andre Jones was concerned.

“You should have joined me,” I said.

His mouth curved. “On the Yard?”

“We danced good together.”

“We did,” he said.

The noise around us kept moving. Alumni laughing. The band packing up. Taylor somewhere giving instructions with her whole chest. But for a second, I felt the old pull of him so strongly I forgot to worry about who might notice.

Then I remembered because my sense had not abandoned me completely.

“Do you still have a woman?”

Dre’s expression changed, but he did not look away.

“No.”

My heart moved before the rest of me could decide whether that answer was a relief or a problem.