Chapter 1 #2
For months, every woman got compared to something. Her laugh wasn’t Mani’s. Her mouth wasn’t Mani’s. She didn’t smell right, argue right, or touch me right. Pussy didn’t soak my dick the way Mani’s had either, and apparently my body was petty enough to keep track.
Eventually, I got tired of measuring women against a woman who was gone.
Women got easier when I stopped asking them to be anything.
I could fuck without finding out what somebody wanted out of life. Didn’t matter who left before morning as long as nobody stayed long enough to get close to something I still hadn’t admitted was broken.
It took close to a year before another woman became more than that to me. Longer before thinking about Imani stopped hurting.
I called that moving on.
Most of it was staying busy and staying untouched.
Time did what I wouldn’t. Football helped. So did watching the women around it.
I had teammates whose wives packed houses every time a trade went through. Girlfriends who changed jobs because training camp started in another city. Women who built entire businesses around being able to work from wherever the league decided their men belonged.
Some of them loved that life.
Some of them didn’t.
The player’s career became the fixed point, and whatever the woman wanted had to move around it.
Nobody had to force anything. Everybody simply treated adjustment like love.
Aubrey helped me understand that.
When we got serious, she started moving her own work around mine without me asking. Turned down brand trips if they fell on important football weekends. Talked about slowing down her social platforms eventually because she could always do something behind the scenes once we settled down.
At first, I liked that shit.
Probably because some bruised piece of twenty-two-year-old me still wanted proof that a woman who really loved you would choose you without making it complicated.
Aubrey made choosing me look easy.
Then football disappeared.
As rehab stretched out and doctors stopped sounding confident, she slowly put more attention back into her own work. More trips. More content. More of the life she’d had when I met her.
I wasn’t mad about that.
Eventually, I realized I wished she had never stopped.
What bothered me was how much brighter she got whenever somebody suggested the public version of Andre Jones might still survive.
ESPN called about a guest appearance, and she lit up. A shoe company still wanted a campaign. Apex started calling, and suddenly Aubrey was talking about New York, studio wardrobes, playoff travel, audience numbers, and whether the network might eventually want us to do something together.
I never thought she was sitting there counting my money. Aubrey wasn’t built like that. When she loved somebody, she meant it.
The problem was she had fallen in love with a version of me that filled rooms, and I wasn’t sure she knew what to do with the man who might be satisfied owning dealerships, running a restaurant, building something with Pops, and going home at night without anybody knowing where the fuck he was.
Three days ago, I finally admitted it out loud.
The breakup took longer than I wanted and less time than Aubrey deserved.
She had been beautiful that night, hair pulled into a high ponytail, one of those fitted lounge sets she swore cost more because the fabric was better. Her dimples showed when she opened the door and called me handsome.
I hated what I came there to do.
I told her I didn’t think we should keep doing this.
She wanted a reason.
I gave her the closest thing I had.
“We been holding onto what this was supposed to be longer than what it actually is.”
Aubrey reminded me that the last year had been terrible. Career-ending injury. Rehab. Three new businesses. No normal version of us to judge anything against.
“So we put in more effort,” she said.
I looked at her and realized the saddest part was that I didn’t want to.
Then Apex came up.
“What if I don’t take it?” I asked.
Aubrey looked genuinely confused.
“Why wouldn’t you?”
There it was.
She couldn’t imagine Andre Jones choosing not to be Andre Jones in public.
When I told her maybe I wanted the dealerships, the restaurant, working with Pops, and a life where nobody watched me eat dinner, she said, “You don’t really believe that’s all you’re going to do.”
The second the words left her mouth, I think we both understood.
Aubrey believed in me. She just believed in a version of me that needed an audience.
Then she did what she always did when she loved somebody.
She started offering to adjust.
She could come to New York. Turn down trips. Change her content schedule. Make whatever Apex became work around us.
A year earlier, I probably would’ve heard devotion.
That night, I heard the thing I had not understood when I was young.
Aubrey was moving pieces of herself before I had even asked, and for the first time, I could see what I might’ve expected Imani to become if she had followed me.
“No,” I told Aubrey. “I don’t want to be the one you slow down for. Not anymore.”
She cried after that. One tear slipped down her cheek before she wiped it away and asked if I was really done.
I was.
That did not mean she meant nothing. I knew I would miss the dimples, her laugh, the fashion lectures I pretended not to listen to, the way she could turn a Target run into an event because she made a new friend in every aisle.
I had loved her.
I just couldn’t stay and keep calling it honest.
The first sign had come before we said a word about breaking up.
I hadn’t invited her to Crown Weekend.
I told myself it was because I had meetings, panels, and the Friday gala. My parents were already coming because AWU was giving me the award, and adding another person to the logistics sounded like one more thing to manage.
Bullshit.
Aubrey would’ve made the weekend easier, not harder.
AWU felt too intimate. That campus held a version of me from before the league, before contracts, before strangers knew my name. My boys were there. My coaches. My parents screaming from the stands.
And Imani.
She was the only woman I had ever loved at that school.
Some part of me hadn’t been willing to bring another woman back there and pretend I didn’t know why.
I leaned my head against the seat and looked toward the clouds.
I owed Imani an apology.
She had broken my heart, and I wasn’t rewriting that. But I had spent years angry at her for understanding something before I did.
She hadn’t left because she didn’t love me enough. She had chosen not to build her entire future around mine before either one of us even knew what mine would be.
At twenty-two, I thought that was selfish.
At thirty, after watching women pack themselves into whatever space football left them, after watching Aubrey start doing the same without me asking, I respected the hell out of Imani for knowing herself that young.
I wanted to tell her that. Had wanted to for a while.
The problem was I had never figured out what came after I’m sorry.
Maybe she said thank you and walked away.
Maybe she told me I hurt her too.
Maybe I found out seeing her did nothing to me anymore.
Or maybe I opened a door I had spent eight years learning how to keep closed.
That last one had kept me quiet more than pride lately.
I knew what losing Imani had done to me once.
I wasn’t interested in finding out what hope could do.
My phone vibrated on the table.
Pops: Call me when you land.
A second notification came before I could answer.
Omar: Tasting moved to 6:30. Chef still mad you missed the last one
I smiled. Omar was the manager at North & Vine.
Me: Tell Chef I was securing my television future.
The dots appeared immediately.
Omar: You taking it?
I looked at the Apex contract still waiting in my inbox.
Me: Ain’t say all that.
His laughing emoji came back before I set the phone down.
Television wasn’t a bad opportunity. That was what made the decision irritating.
The money didn’t matter much, but they wanted my football brain and not just my face.
I liked breaking down film. Liked talking ball with people who understood why an offensive lineman turning his hips two inches too soon could fuck up an entire play.
But sitting under studio lights every Sunday while twenty-two-year-old backs did what my body no longer could?
I still couldn’t decide whether that sounded like healing or punishment.
My businesses had given me somewhere to put all the energy football left behind. The guaranteed money helped. So did Pops.
Jones Landscaping started with one truck, three lawn mowers, and my mother doing invoices at the kitchen table after work.
By the time I got drafted, Pops had crews across Allegheny County and enough contracts that I finally understood why he had spent my childhood leaving before sunrise and coming home after dark.
He never acted like money impressed him by itself.
Owning something did. Building it did. Creating enough from it that somebody besides you could eat did.
When football ended, I followed the model I knew.