Page 218 of The Sweetest Return

“It’s not.” His mouth brushed my temple. “But it ain’t impossible either.”

I let that sit.

His heartbeat was steady beneath my cheek. The office was quiet around us now, all that proof of who he had been surrounding the man he was trying to become.

“What if I’m gone too much?” I asked.

“Then I miss you too much.”

“That’s your solution?”

“That’s my first draft.”

A laugh broke through the tightness in my chest.

He kissed the top of my head.

“We’ll figure out the rest.”

I lifted my face. “You should take the job.”

He went still.

“I’m not saying that because it doesn’t scare me,” I said. “It does. But I watched you Sunday. I heard you. The game still speaks to you, Dre. And those men need what you know.”

His throat moved.

“You need somewhere to put what you know too.”

He looked away, but not before I saw it.

The impact.

The want.

The grief that came with wanting something from a place that had already taken so much.

“I need a few days,” he said.

“I know.”

His eyes returned to mine.

“But you think I should take it.”

“I think you should listen to the part of you that already leaned forward when they called.”

His mouth curved, barely. “You sound like Camille.”

“Insulting but accurate.”

This time his smile stayed a little longer.

Then he pulled me tighter, and I let myself rest against him.

The fear had not disappeared.

Tomorrow might bring contracts, flights, meetings, team calls, road games, press questions, and calendars trying to swallow us whole. The lives we had built separately were not going to shrink just because we had found our way back to each other.