Page 11 of Buy Back My Love

“Lee, I wasn’t...”

“Yes, you were.” I turned my face away. “You been looking at me all morning like you trying to count everything prison changed.”

JB reached toward me but stopped before touching me. “I ain’t looking at you because something wrong with you. I’m looking because I missed your face.”

I pressed my lips together because I wasn’t about to let that sweet shit distract me from why I was mad.

“I know I can’t give you them years back,” he said.

“No, you can’t.”

“I know saying I’m sorry ain’t enough either.”

“It sholl ain’t.”

He nodded. “Then let me try.”

I laughed, but nothing about this shit was funny. “You can’t just throw money at our problems like you always do and expect everything to be okay, Jabari.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.” I shook my head. “You can’t buy back five years.”

JB looked at me for a long second. “I know I can’t.” He glanced toward the truck before looking back at me. “But I’ll spend the rest of my life trying.”

He opened the passenger door, then stepped back and waited. “Just get in the truck.”

I looked at him for another long second.

“I got something I want you to see,” JB said.

I climbed into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut myself. He stood outside for a second before rounding the hood and getting behind the wheel.

I wiped my face with the sleeve of my sweater and stared through the windshield while he started the truck and backed out of the parking lot. Neither one of us said anything.

I’d spent five years convincing myself I’d forgiven him, but forgiveness had been a whole lot easier behind prison walls than it was sitting beside the man who’d put me there.

That was the problem with loving JB. No matter how angry I got, some part of me still wanted to see what he had planned next.

Lee

JB didn’t tell me where we were going. He just drove while I sat in the passenger seat with my arms folded across my chest, watching Mobile pass outside the window.

Some parts looked exactly the same. Other parts had changed enough to make me feel like I’d been gone longer than five years. Stores I remembered were gone. New apartment complexes sat where empty lots used to be, and every few miles there was something else reminding me that the world had kept moving without me.

JB kept one hand on the steering wheel and the other near the center console. A few times, I caught him looking over at me, but after what happened in the restaurant, he had enough sense not to stare.

“Where we going?” I finally asked.

“You gone see.”

I cut my eyes at him. “I’m not in the mood for games, JB.”

“I know.” He turned onto Schillinger Road. “We almost there.”

The farther we drove, the more I tried to figure out what he had planned. Maybe he’d rented a hotel suite. Maybe he was taking me shopping. Whatever it was, I already knew money was involved because that was how JB handled damn near everything.

When my mama put me out, he paid the deposit on our first apartment. When I got pregnant, he’d bought so much baby stuff before I even hit my second trimester you would’ve thought the child was coming the next week. After we lost our son and I barely knew what to do with myself, he bought me the nail kit that eventually turned into Love-Lee.