Chapter 2 #4
“Because I’m not driving downtown at midnight to get you out of holding over Andre Jones.”
“I can handle Milan.”
“Milan been trying too hard for that man since junior year. She don’t know how to act around him, and you don’t know how to act around her.”
“That is not true.”
Bari looked at me.
I looked away first.
Milan had always been a bugaboo in good shoes. Pretty, loud with her eyes, and convinced proximity could become opportunity if she stood close enough to Dre for long enough. Dre never gave her much, which somehow made her try harder.
“I am grown now,” I said.
“Great. Be grown enough to call me before you commit a felony.”
“Goodbye, Jabari.”
“Love you too.”
His laugh followed him toward the elevator.
When the door closed, the condo seemed to exhale with me.
I stood there for a minute, listening to the quiet. A half-open box sat beside the couch, my heels were still near the bedroom door, and the room smelled faintly like lemon cleaner, french fries, and new furniture.
Four days.
I picked up my phone.
Damien’s message was still there.
So was a notification I had ignored earlier from AWU.
I opened that one first.
A Crown Weekend graphic filled the screen, all purple and gold, announcing Friday night’s Distinguished Alumni honorees.
Andre Malik Jones was first.
Of course he was.
The photograph they chose looked recent. Black suit. White shirt open at the throat. Full beard. Low cut. Older than the Dre who used to lie across my dorm bed pretending he understood marketing terminology because he wanted me to keep talking.
But close enough that my thumb went still against the screen.
Eight years had been generous to that man.
Extremely.
I enlarged the picture before I could talk myself into acting like I had sense.
“Girl.”
My own voice sounded foolish in the empty condo.
Distance had never made Andre Jones hard to find.
His career happened in public, so pieces of his life had reached me whether I went looking or not.
Championships. Interviews. Endorsements.
Children in number twenty-two jerseys waiting behind ropes for his autograph.
Women near him in photographs with captions designed to make strangers argue.
I saw enough to know when he played hurt.
I knew when the Forge won the championship.
I knew when the injury happened.
For two days, I refused to watch the footage. Then I did once and wished I hadn’t.
After that, his recovery became public too.
Crutches. Training tables. Pool work. Controlled smiles that looked nothing like comfort.
One photo stayed with me longer than the others.
Dre outside a rehab facility, jaw tight, weight shifted carefully, a woman beside him with one hand near his arm and the other holding the car door open.
Aubrey.
At least, that was what the comments said.
I had stared at that picture until jealousy made me feel foolish enough to close the app. I had no claim to him. No right to wonder whether he leaned on her, whether she knew when pain made him quiet, whether she heard his voice first thing in the morning.
I wondered anyway.
Then the comeback talk faded, and his name started appearing beside businesses instead.
Jones Motor Group.
North & Vine.
Jones Outdoor.
He took the money and attention football gave him and built something that could stand after football took itself away.
I had been proud of him. Proud and heartsick and annoyed that pride could survive without permission.
I looked at the award graphic again.
Friday night.
My phone vibrated.
Damien: I’m beginning to feel like you moved just to end things.
I read it twice before setting the phone back down.
I owed Damien some kind of response. He had been good to me, and dragging this out because I did not want to hurt him was not making me kinder. Saying we could figure long distance out would be a lie.
Mama’s sigh earlier had only reminded me how easy it was to look at a man like Damien and see a future that made sense.
The problem was, seeing Dre’s face on my screen made another truth impossible to avoid.
Damien made sense.
Dre reached places in me sense had never been able to touch.
I locked my phone and left it on the island.
Thursday was four days away.
I should have gone back to unpacking.
Instead, I walked to my bedroom and opened the closet.
Most of my clothes were still in garment bags and half-unpacked bins, waiting for the version of me who had promised to organize by color, season, and mood. But one thing had been handled the day I moved in.
Dre’s AWU letterman jacket.
Purple and gold. Heavy wool. Leather sleeves. Twenty-two on the arm.
I had hung it at the very back of the closet, behind coats I wore now and dresses I had not found a reason to wear yet. Out of view, but not forgotten. Never forgotten.
No matter where I went, that jacket came with me.
New York. Smaller apartments. Bigger closets.
The first grown-woman place I paid for by myself.
The apartment where I packed my life after accepting the YSL offer.
The condo Damien helped me choose furniture for before either one of us admitted we were decorating around a relationship already thinning.
Every time I moved, I told myself I should finally let it go.
Every time, I packed it carefully.
Some nights, when the ache got too honest and no one was around to judge me for it, I slipped into that jacket and let it swallow me whole.
Imani Bennett, size eight on a good day and several inches shorter than the man it had belonged to, standing in some city that was not Pittsburgh, wearing Andre Jones around my shoulders like memory had weight.
The leather still held him if I let myself imagine hard enough.
Cold air after a game. Grass and sweat. That cologne I used to pretend I was not addicted to.
His arms around me, chin near the top of my head, laughing because I swore I wasn’t freezing while my teeth told the truth.
I touched the sleeve.
I had left his apartment with this jacket on because I couldn’t make myself take it off.
Later, I told myself I would mail it back when my throat stopped closing every time I thought about his face.
When my eyes stopped filling before I made it across a room.
When I could fold the purple wool and gold leather without remembering how special I felt the night he gave it to me.
That day never came.
So I kept it.
Protected it.
Hid it.
Loved it in private like it was one more part of him I did not know how to return.
My phone buzzed again from the kitchen.
I did not move.
I stood there with my fingers on Dre’s sleeve and admitted the thing I had been trying to avoid all afternoon.
No matter how carefully I named it, I was already moving toward him.