Page 19 of Overdue Feelings
“Shut up and play your card.”
He mugged me and then pulled from the deck. “You mad, huh?”
“Yep.”
We cracked up, the kids joining in like they were in on the joke. Just for a second, it felt like Ares and I were whole again.
“I missed this,” he whispered, and I froze. My smile faded.
“Don’t,” I said under my breath as I stood up, needing to grab some fresh air. The air around us was suddenly thin. “I’m gonna go see if we got any more water bottles.” I scurried out of the reading nook and over to the supply cabinet.
“I’ll help.” He made his way next to me. “You okay?”
“You shouldn’t say stuff like that.”
“Why not?” he asked softly. “It’s the truth, Creek. I do miss you.”
I turned to him, and in that moment, everything I’d been holding in spilled out.
“Because you left, Ares!” I whispered loudly through tight lips. “You left and didn’t say a word to me for twelve years! I needed you, and you vanished, and now you’re back without warning. In my space, acting like you miss me, like everything’s fine.”
He didn’t respond right away. He stared at me like he was bracing for impact.
“You didn’t just leave town, Ares,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “You left me and Zae like we didn’t matter.”
“I thought I was protecting y’all,” he said finally. “Protecting what we had by walking away before I could mess it up. It took damn near twelve years for me to realize I wasn’t protecting anything. I was a coward. I wasn’t man enough to stand up to my parents.”
He exhaled hard, eyes dropping for a second before meeting mine again.
“I lost myself up there, Creek. I had the job, the expensive high rise, the money. Everything I thought I wanted. But I looked up one day and felt nothing because you weren’t there, and neither was Zae. I had it all and I still felt empty. That’s why I’m back, because Harvest was the only place I ever felt like myself.”
My arms dropped to my sides, and I just stared at him.
“I thought leaving would make it easier,” he added. “But all it did was make me realize who I was without y’all, and I didn’t like that person at all.”
The lights flickered back on before I could respond, and a moment later, Zae walked through the door. He paused when he saw the two of us talking.
“You good?” he asked. Ares stepped back, and I nodded slowly, eyes darting between them.
“We’re okay,” I whispered.
“Not right now,” Zae said gently, putting his hand on my back already knowing what we were discussing. “Let’s just get back to the kids.”
We reentered the reading nook. Ares sat, I sat, and Zae joined the circle again. The tension between us could be cut with a knife.
“Can we finish the game now?” Raylin asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do that.”
As we played, laughter slowly filled the room again. The tornado warning passed, and the kids eventually went home, but inside, I was still spinning. Because somewhere between all of this, I’d realized something I hadn’t been ready to admit to myself. I wasn’t just still in love with Ares Knight, but I was starting to forgive him too.
I toldmyself I wasn’t going to say shit to him. I was just going to walk the bottle of water across the yard for Gigi and carry myself back home. That was it, but when I saw him out there sweating, shirt clinging to his back about to pass out cutting the grass in his grandmother’s yard, I paused.
Out of the two of us, Ares was the one that hated manual labor. He didn’t do outdoor work. He used to pay me in hot fries and Skittles to do his chores. I smirked watching him move across the lawn. He was bent low, shoulders tight, trying to make the lines straight. It wasn’t pretty, but he was out here doing it when he could have just paid someone. It wasn’t the Ares I knew, and it made me start thinking.
Maybe he was trying to be better; show up in a way he never had before; become somebody worthy of being let back in, and I didn’t know how to feel about that. Because for the first time in a long time… I wasn’t mad at him anymore. It didn’t mean I had forgotten, but maybe it was time to dap him up, call it even, and move on.
“Yo,” I said as I entered the yard. Ares turned, and I tossed him the water. He caught it.
