Sweetest Homecoming Return

Prologue

IMANI

The streetlamp outside Dre’s bedroom cut through the blinds in pale-gold lines, touching the wall, his dresser, the AWU Kings helmet beside a stack of playbooks, and the broad slope of his back as he moved over me.

“Best Part” played low from the speaker near his bed. His room smelled like warm skin, soap, and the last of his cologne lingering at his neck. I knew that scent. I had worn it home on my clothes, slept with it in my sheets, caught it on hoodies I stole from him and had no intention of returning.

Dre kissed me with his dick buried deep inside me.

Slow. Wet. His tongue moving against mine while his hips pulled back and pushed forward again, giving me enough time to feel every inch before he filled me all over.

My fingers tightened at the back of his neck.

“Dre.”

He smiled against my mouth. “What?”

“You know what.”

“Nah.” His hand slid beneath one leg and lifted it higher around his waist. The next stroke went deeper, and my mouth fell open. “Tell me.”

“I hate you.”

“You currently don’t.”

I laughed, breathless, and he kissed the sound right out of my mouth.

This was us too.

Dre could have me naked beneath him, wet enough that I could hear it when he moved, and still say something stupid enough to make me laugh. Then his eyes would change, and the laughter disappeared.

Like now.

He watched my face while his hips slowed, dark eyes focused on every response I tried and failed to hide. His thumb brushed my bottom lip.

“You feel good?”

I nodded.

“Don’t nod at me, Mani.”

“Yes,” I whispered.

His mouth lowered toward mine. “Look at me when you say it.”

I did, even though holding his stare with him that deep inside me felt like too much truth at one time.

I squeezed around him on purpose and watched his jaw tighten.

His eyes narrowed. “Keep playing.”

“What you gonna do?”

He pulled almost all the way out and pushed back in hard enough to make my breasts bounce against his chest. My cry broke somewhere between his mouth and mine.

“That,” he said.

I grabbed his shoulders. “You’re so full of yourself.”

“And you full of me.”

My pussy clenched around him.

Dre’s smile came slowly.

“Don’t,” I warned.

“I ain’t said nothing.”

“You were about to.”

“Wasn’t no need.” His mouth moved toward my ear. “Your pussy already told me.”

“Dre.”

“Wet as hell too.”

Heat climbed my face even though there was nothing this man had not seen, touched, tasted, or heard from me by then.

That only encouraged him. His lips dragged along my jaw before he kissed me again, and the playfulness thinned beneath the heat.

His strokes became more focused, his hips rolling into me with a pressure that made my breath come apart.

I tried to say his name again, but it left me strangled.

He liked that. I felt it in the way his body pressed heavier against mine, in the rough sound that moved through his chest before his mouth went to my neck.

“That’s what I wanted,” he said against my throat. “That pretty little cry.”

I should have had something smart to say.

I had nothing.

His hand slipped between us, and the first slow circle over my clit stole whatever pride I had left. My legs tightened around him. His dick stroked deeper while his thumb moved with the kind of patience that made my whole body tremble.

“Eyes on me.”

I gave them to him.

Dre wanted my pleasure and my attention at the same time. Having my body was not enough if I hid from him while he took it apart.

The mattress shifted beneath us. His chest brushed my nipples every time his body came down over mine, his skin hot and damp against mine. I knew the break in his breathing when he was trying not to cum. The tension in his stomach. The way his hips got heavier and his mouth rougher.

He knew me too.

When I needed to talk. When I needed another twenty minutes to be mad first. How I hated pickles, loved expensive perfume, studied until I forgot to eat, and needed people to let me solve my own problems before they swooped in with answers.

I knew the real Dre beneath the number twenty-two everybody screamed.

The son who wanted his father’s approval even though it had always been freely given.

The boy who called his mother after games.

The man who sometimes lay beside me after everybody went home and admitted the attention scared him a little because everyone seemed so certain about his future when he wasn’t.

His fingers circled my clit again.

“Don’t stop.”

“I ain’t stopping.”

His voice was rough now, his control slipping. He fucked me harder, still careful with me but no longer careful with himself, and the orgasm that had been building beneath the jokes, his mouth, and his thumb rose fast.

Dre saw it.

Of course he did.

“That’s it,” he said. “Give it to me.”

My breathing broke.

“Dre—”

“I got you.”

He kept fucking me through the first hard contractions, his thumb moving over my clit while my pussy tightened around his dick. The orgasm hit hard enough to make my thighs shake.

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah,” he said, voice low and strained. “Let me feel it.”

I came around him with my nails digging into his shoulders, every pulse making his face tighten a little more. Then his mouth buried against my neck, and his hips lost their careful rhythm, strokes deeper and harder as he chased his own release.

I wrapped my legs tighter around him.

“Cum for me.”

He groaned like the words had gone straight through him.

His whole body tightened over mine, his face pressed into my neck while he came, and I held him there because I loved having him heavy over me afterward.

Loved the heat of his skin and the way his breathing gradually settled against my throat.

Loved the little kisses he gave me when he came back to himself, soft apologies for how hard he had needed me.

For a minute, neither of us said anything.

Then Dre lifted his head.

“You good?”

“Yes.”

His eyes searched mine anyway.

I touched his face. “I’m good.”

His smile came slowly. “Thought so.”

“Don’t start again.”

“You the one told me to cum.”

“Good night, Andre.”

He laughed and kissed me, and the teasing eased us down without pulling us away from what had just happened.

When he pulled out, I felt the loss of him immediately.

Dre dealt with the condom, then stood beside the bed for a second, naked and beautiful and still breathing hard.

The low light found the sweat on his chest, the tight cut of his stomach, the thick thighs that had powered him through entire defenses and held him above me while he gave me pleasure I did not know how to make ordinary.

My gaze dropped before I could stop it.

He caught me staring.

“Why you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you thinking about starting trouble again.”

“I’m thinking about minding my business.”

“Bad lie.”

He came back with a warm cloth without me asking. I opened my thighs for him, and he cleaned me gently, his touch soft enough to make my chest tighten.

“You sore?”

“A little tender. That’s it.”

His mouth curved. “I knew it.”

“You ask too many questions.”

“You talk too much.”

“And yet here you are.”

“Yeah.”

The way he said it made me look at him. The joke and grin were gone. It was just Dre.

He tossed the cloth toward the hamper, climbed back into bed, and pulled me onto his chest. I went willingly. My cheek settled over his heart while one of his hands moved along my back. My leg slid between his, and he shifted automatically to make room for me.

This might have been my favorite part.

After all the filthy things we could say to each other, after his mouth had been everywhere and his dick had just been inside me, there was still this. His warm body beneath mine. The quiet. The easy way we fit when nobody else was around to expect anything from us.

I could lie right here forever.

That scared me because with Dre, forever never sounded ridiculous.

I could picture his shoes beside mine. Sunday dinners with both our families. Him stealing food off my plate after ordering more than enough for himself. Me sitting in stadiums pretending my stomach did not turn every time somebody hit him too hard.

I wanted that life.

I just did not know if I wanted the one everyone had already started building around it.

Lately, every conversation about our future began with Dre, even when people did not mean for it to.

Where would he be drafted? Which teams needed a running back? Would he go first round? What city might we end up in?

We.

His mother talked about visiting wherever we landed. My friends joked about good seats when I became an NFL girlfriend. Even my parents had started asking questions about which cities had strong marketing opportunities, like where I began my career depended on where somebody sent Dre.

Nobody meant harm.

That almost made it harder.

For months, whenever anyone asked what I planned to do after graduation, I gave answers that sounded practical but left room for Dre’s future to become the deciding factor. I said I was keeping my options open. I said I could do marketing anywhere. I said we would figure it out after the draft.

Before Dre, I knew how to talk about what I wanted. Luxury branding. Campaign strategy. Rooms where the right story could change what people believed they were allowed to desire. New York, because New York felt like proof that my life could get bigger if I was brave enough to take up space in it.

Then I loved him, and somehow love started softening my answers before he ever asked me to.

That was the part I hated most.

He had not asked me to reduce myself.

Then Tiffany came.

Manhattan.

A door that belonged completely to me.

The offer had come through that afternoon, forwarded by my mother’s friend who knew someone in recruiting and had promised to pass my name along months earlier.

I had almost forgotten the connection had been made until the email landed in my inbox with Tiffany & Co.

in the sender line and my whole future sitting beneath it.

I read it three times.

Then I cried in the bathroom of the student center like a fool.

Dre’s fingers drifted along my spine.