Page 11 of Grown Folks Confessions: Black Lush

The summer I met Bryan had been amazing, but in a way, I had wanted my time with him to stay in Chicago. Leave it to me to end up having a summer fling with a guy in another state who ends up going to the same high school as me. Out of all our talks that summer, I hadn’t even known he was the coach’s nephew until the very end of my internship. He said he swore he’d mentioned it when I told him my high school, but I hadn’t recalled us ever talking about it before.

I had planned on coming home and talking to Ares before the start of school to see if he felt one iota of what I felt for him and wanted to make a go at dating. Yet, Bryan had fucked those plans up. He was such a nice guy, and he didn’t know that when I’d agreed to be his girlfriend that summer, I’d had every intention on us ending it before school started. I mean, no one did long distance in high school, right?

By the time he moved to Michigan, I didn’t know how to get out of the situation. Then Ares ended up with Audrea, who was head cheerleader, and in our school, the dance team and the cheerleaders were always at odds about something.

The timing had been so off, and given that Ares and Bryan got super closer, I found myself avoiding any of the double dates Bryan was always asking me to go on, making up an excuse about Audrea working my last nerve. Which wasn’t that far from the truth since I couldn’t stand that girl.

“You ready for today?” Ivy asked, squealing as we made our way to Lake St. Clair where almost the entire senior class was gathering for our annual, off-record, senior competition.

“You already know I am,” I told her.

Every year, the senior class kicked off the school year with a not-so-friendly competition that included a series of games in order to find which ten students would be the ten to set the tone for our final year in high school. If your team won, best believe you’d get the best seats at every game. The best table at lunch. The first invited to all the parties. A guaranteed spot on any school club. It wasn’t so much what you got, but bragging rights for the year was why students fought so hard to get it.

In a way, I always thought Ivy and I would be on a team with Ares and Midas. But Ares was still dating Audrea and there was no way Audrea and I could be on the same team. Hell, I was shocked Midas’ ass didn’t jump ship to our team since he couldn’t stand Audrea either, but blood was thicker than water and Midas was loyal to Ares.

“Our team is stacked!” Ivy said in a giddy voice as we approached our team. She was right. While Ares was with a few basketball players and cheerleaders, ours was comprised of football players and Hip Hop Beauties from my dance squad. There were plenty of other teams participating, but we knew their team was our competition.

It took another hour before everyone was in place for the first part of the competition that was a triathlon of sorts that started in the water and ended in a marathon race to the finish line. The top six teams in part one would continue to the second part of the competition that was a scavenger hunt and required lots of teamwork.

At the sound of the blow horn, one of my girls, Sheena, raced into the water since she was one of the best swimmers on our team. At each station, it seemed that slowly, many teams were losing steam, yet my team and Ares’ team were neck to neck.

I wanted to run in the marathon, but our guy Shaun was a running back, so he battled Ares instead.

“I noticed you were trying not to cheer too hard for me,” Ares teased, coming to stand beside me as I prepped for the second half of the competition. “Guess it’s pretty hard not to given how sexy I looked out there.”

I smirked, trying not to get lost in his playful, brown eyes. “Um, not only did you lose, but you think too much of yourself to assume I was cheering for you and not Shaun.”

He leaned a little closer, pretending to look at something on the ground, his voice giving me shivers when he whispered, “When it comes to you, I always know when your eyes are on me.”

My breath hitched.

“Same,” I muttered, kicking my shoe on the gravel to distract me.

“Why do you think I lost my footing at the end, which put me a second behind Shaun?” he asked. “You shouldn’t have been standing so close to the finish line looking at me the way you were. Almost made me wonder if seeing me sweaty was giving you flashbacks to last summer.”

My mouth slightly parted, but I didn’t dare look up at him. I couldn’t. He walked away a second later, allowing me to finally release the breath I was holding. With both of us in relationships last year and over the summer, we’d rarely flirted, neither of us wanting that drama. Him doing so now caught me off guard and begged me to wonder why he was chancing it with all our classmates around.

A few minutes later, the series of challenges in part two kicked off until we reached the final stage—a complicated puzzle that I was sure was created by the math team since they loved to make shit extra complicated.

I had to move fast though. During the other four challenges, my team was behind Ares’ team, and by the time I got to the puzzle, Audrea was already there. I moved as fast as I could, especially when the other teams joined in on the action. I was literally seconds away from putting the last piece in place when boom, Audrea yelled for a check from the judges who confirmed she was the winner.

Shit.Audrea was apparently great at puzzles.

Who knew.

“It’s okay, Layla,” Ivy comforted, rubbing me on my back. “You almost had her, but if it weren’t for me and Gary getting stuck on our obstacles, you would have had more time on the puzzle.”

“No, you both did amazing,” I told her, giving her a hug. “I lost that for us and I’ll own it.” Looking out at my entire team, I apologized to them for losing the competition.

“We play as a team and lose as a team,” Gary stated. “We started off strong, but we were behind them for a while in this second half, so don’t sweat it.”

In hindsight, I knew they were right, but all I could do was focus on how much praise Audrea was getting, not just from her team and our other classmates, but from Ares.

What do you expect, Layla? He’s dating her, not you!

“I’m so proud of you, baby,” he told her, kissing the nape of her neck. “You killed your competition.”

I frowned.Killed “your” competition and not “the” competition?I shook off his words, thinking I was being too sensitive.

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