Page 74 of The Virgin Playboy

They’d just come from a grocery run and had their hands full doing so. “Now that you're here, how about you help put this stuff up?” My dad teased.

“Might as well,” I swayed back and forth in a happy dance. “This is about to be a week where I'm gonna eat up all y'all food. Use up all y'all toilet paper and toothpaste. I'm gonna be using up all y'all electricity, turning om all these lights⁠—”

“Girl, you're not gonna be running our light bill,” my mother scolded.

“I mean, I might not turn on all the lights. But best believe this about to be my staycation,” I corrected.

“What brings our darling daughter over, when she could be sitting pretty in the city,” my father teased, his island cadence in tow.

“Hearing you both might be gone for the summer, I wanted to make sure I actually saw you before you left. Anything could happen.”

“She's just trying to get good to ensure she makes the will,” Mom joked.

“You ready for my famous pepper pot stew?” Dad announced, a little bit too excited for my response.

“Actually, if y'all got any cheese. Or oatmeal. Even yogurt, I don't have much of an appetite for much else. Maybe later, but something about it is too aromatic for me right now,” I confessed.

“You all right, baby?”

“All right enough to kick your butt at Candyland,” I taunted with a karate chop gesture.

“All right, now,” Mom warned, holding the carrot toward me like a weapon. “You ain't too old.”

“Yeah, well, I'm gonna go unpack since most of the exploitation child labor you got outta me has been performed. I'll take this,” scooping up a single serve container of cottage cheese.

Lugging my modest suitcase up the single stairway, I hoisted the weight of it on the last step, hightailing to my old room and sunk into the mattress. After what felt like a hard day's work, my parents must have recently cleaned in here, because the smell of cleaning products still lingered.

To save on electricity, I opened a window to give me much needed air circulation. Devouring the cottage cheese in one go, once I had the energy to, I emptied out my suitcase to figure out how I'd spend this week.

I packed pajamas more than anything else, because a bitch was about to be a summer bum, but there was more than enough outdoorsy, gym wear, and day wear, just in case I needed to leave the house. Without a child in the home my parents definitely didn't go all out, which was fine because they did so much during holidays.

By the time we met back up, my parents were on a rewatch of Greenleaf, a show I took to be one of their modern-day stories, and sandwiched between them to join. It wasn’t normally my kind of show but who could turn down Keith David, Lynn Whitfield, and all Black cast?

It was so dramatic, it wasn't hard to go from instantly annoyed to straight up invested, as the days that passed followed that similar formula. Only some would consist of childhood favorites, us switching between board game nights to themed movie nights.

I by no means had the perfect childhood, but I know I’d had the best one. I was always eternally grateful I’d been raised by parents who actually wanted kids.

Realizing why I had come here made me step in Graham's shoes. If someone had asked me for space when I was losing or had already lost one of my parents, I can’t say I wouldn’t be consumed by hurt and resentment, too.

Halfway into my trip, I found myself rummaging through the old room's closet, wondering why it’d been so easy to organize this closet, over the one in my own home.

I came across old photo albums, as my parents captured milestones no matter how old I was. My first concert had been in here, me graduating for college, at every college I attended. My first year as a news anchor. There were so many memories in here. Some amazing. Some not so much. I held my breath a little, flipping through the pages with Hudson.

It was hard to tell what type of man he would be now. With help, he could have been his best self. Sometimes I wondered if we hadn’t dated, if he would have been willing to live if he had had no one to siphon from. What I confused for love at the time had just been anxiety, intensity, and codependency.

Sometimes I question whether we were actually in love, because for as much as I could remember about him, I doubt if he were here today, he'd remember anything about me.

Not being able to handle much more, I put it down for my mental health, but couldn't help but feed my curiosity when an album that hadn't existed before, held the current year and beyond.

A lot were of me when I'd first gotten back to New York, as I sent my parents pictures all the time for their phone albums, but they were old school and corny enough to get prints made from them.

There were pictures of my unofficial housewarming with Carly and Yenory. Pictures of me at Noir Noise. But what really brought me conflicting feelings of joy and sadness were pictures of my friends and family at my book launch. I didn't realize how many pictures they had taken from it, or how many they had captured of my reaction to Graham surprising me. Or even how Graham's presence had shifted the entire aura of the night, at least for me.

Graham’s smile lit up every picture he was in. Even if he hadn't been handsome, I knew in every lifetime he would be photogenic.

Flipping through some of the pages, there were some of family that didn't include me, which was okay. I couldn't make everything. But Graham experiencing his first Thanksgiving? It was like the memories spoke off the page.

There were ones when my aunts and uncles were trying to teach him to play dominoes. Others where my cousins underestimated his singing abilities, as you could literally hear the picture as he was belting. Ones with my parent’s dog. Marshmallow Cocoa and her puppies hadn’t had enough of him from when we first got there.