Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
By the time we were in the air out of Van Nuys, Imani had already opened her laptop.
I let her.
The morning had moved slow. Breakfast on the balcony.
Ocean below us. Imani in one of my shirts because packing for two nights had not stopped her from stealing my clothes.
The Saint Aurelia necklace tucked safely in her carry-on after she checked the box twice and gave me a look like I was not supposed to notice.
I noticed anyway.
Now she sat across from me in the quiet cabin, soft cream set, bare ankles, sunglasses pushed into her hair, and a face that looked rested, satisfied, and already halfway back at work.
She sent emails, approved language, answered Cleo, praised Nina, corrected Operations without using the words I knew she wanted to use, and somehow made all of it look beautiful enough to be annoying.
I watched her for longer than I meant to.
There was something about seeing Imani work that got under me.
The confidence, yes. The brain. The way she could soften her voice without surrendering a single inch of authority.
But it was more than that. She belonged to herself in those moments, and every time she let me sit close without needing me to take over, it felt like trust.
She finally closed her laptop somewhere over the middle of the country.
Then she turned her head and found me watching her.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You are lying.”
“I like watching you work.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That is a suspicious sentence.”
“It’s true.”
“You like watching me do a lot of things.”
“Also true.”
Her mouth curved.
I kissed that curve before it got too smart.
The plane, the work, the sky beyond the windows all slipped into the background after that. We did not need to make it complicated. Desire had never been the hard part with us. Tenderness had. Staying had. Letting the quiet after mean something had.
So when she came to me above the middle of the country, I took her slow and kept her close, my mouth at her neck, her hands in my shirt, the low sound of the engines wrapped around the softer sounds she tried not to make.
She still tried.
She still failed.
I loved that too.
After, I fixed her clothes before mine because my mother had raised me with manners, even if Imani Bennett had a gift for testing them at thirty thousand feet.
She watched me with those pretty eyes half-lidded, hair a little mussed, mouth swollen from kissing, the kind of satisfied softness on her face that made me want to start all over again.
“You look proud of yourself,” she said.
“I am.”
“You should be ashamed.”
“I’m not.”
“I know. It’s part of your problem.”
I sat beside her and pulled her legs across my lap. She let me, leaning into the corner of the sofa while the plane carried us back toward Pittsburgh and real life.
My thumb moved along her ankle.
She looked down at my hand, then out the window.
Neither of us said much for a while.
We didn’t need to.
The quiet felt different than it used to. Easier. Fuller. Like something was sitting in the space with us now, breathing steady, not asking to be named before it was ready.
My phone rang twenty minutes before landing.
When I saw the name, my body went still.
Coach Price.
Imani noticed immediately. Her gaze dropped to the screen, then came back to mine.
Darius’s text came back to me.
Answer Price’s call when it comes.
Imani squeezed my hand once.
“Answer it,” she said.
I accepted the call.
“Coach.”
“Andre Jones,” Coach Price said, voice warm and rough with age, weather, and too many years yelling over football fields. “You got a minute?”
“For you, yeah.”
“You somewhere loud?”
I looked at Imani, at her bare feet tucked near my thigh, at the quiet cabin, at the night pressing against the windows.
“No. I can talk.”
“How’s the knee?”
“Same as last week. Better than last year.”
“I’ll take that.”
“How you doing?”
“Mad as hell after Sunday.”
“That makes two of us.”
He grunted. “You watched?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“You want my honest answer?”
“I didn’t call for your pretty one.”
“The backs don’t trust what they’re seeing,” I said. “The line ain’t giving them much, but they’re making it worse. Too much bouncing. Bad landmarks. Protection’s late. They look like they’re thinking instead of playing.”
Coach Price went quiet.
“That’s what Darius said you’d say.”
“Darius talks too much.”
“He’s the quarterback. Unfortunately, that’s part of the job.”
Imani smiled faintly and looked away, giving me the privacy of pretending not to listen.
Coach Price cleared his throat. “Vic and I had a long conversation this morning.”
Vic Hamlin was the running backs coach.
Good man. Wrong fit. He loved the room, but sometimes love turned into speeches when players needed tools.
“About?”
“Moving him into a different role.”
I said nothing.
“The guys have been saying it for a year,” Coach continued. “They felt the difference when you were around. They said you were the reason that room held together after your injury.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
“I was just helping.”
“No,” Coach said. “You were coaching. You just didn’t want to call it that.”
The plane dipped slightly, beginning its slow descent toward Pittsburgh.
“I need a running backs coach,” he said. “Somebody those men respect. Somebody who understands the room, the pressure, the body, the fear, the ego, all of it. Somebody who can tell a young back the truth without breaking him.”
I looked at Imani.
She was watching me now. Face soft. Thoughtful. Not pushing. The same woman who had rubbed my back while I watched the Forge lose. The same woman who had listened when I said it hurt like hell because I wanted to help.
The same woman who had seen me in the quiet and stayed.
“What would it look like?” I asked.
Coach exhaled like he had been waiting for the question.
“We talk when you’re back. Facility. Private. You, me, front office. No media. No announcements. We see if it fits.”
If it fits.
Football had fit my body once until it didn’t. Maybe this could fit the man left after.
“I’ll come in,” I said.
Imani’s eyes warmed.
“When?”
“Tomorrow afternoon.”
“That fast?”
“You called.”
Coach laughed low. “Yeah, I did.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Good. And Andre?”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t have to prove you still belong around the game. You do.”
The line went quiet before I could answer that.
Pittsburgh appeared beneath us, lights scattered against the dark, the rivers catching gold in broken lines.
For a minute, I only held the phone.
Imani reached for me. Her fingers slid through mine, and I held on while the plane lowered toward home.
For the first time since my body left the game before my heart was ready, football did not feel like something calling me backward.
It felt like it might be asking what I could build next.