I was happy for her brother and all, but we had our own business to take care of. I didn’t want to get too far off track with talk about baseball. So I went back to my pictures.

“Okay, so, how many of my spreads have you collected?” I asked her.

She said, “Oh, well, I did it for my daughter.”

“So she’s seen me in a bunch of pictures?”

I panicked for a second. How long had Michelle been mapping this all out? But Briana didn’t say anything about it. A kid would talk about seeing someone in pictures, especially over and over again. She would have already been familiar with my face.

“No, not yet. I just wanted to save them until everything came out,” Michelle explained.

I settled down and said, “Oh, okay.” Then I thought about it and started smiling. I was imagining what Briana would do. “She’s gonna look at me like a hero,” I predicted.

“Mmm hmm,” Michelle agreed. “She already looks at her uncle Sean that way. But is there a problem with that? At least she’ll never be starstruck. She’s already around it.”

I stopped and thought again about my own sister. I could be the big uncle and hero to her child. And once Michelle reminded me of her brother’s connection to them, I figured he had helped her out financially just like I would with Juanita. It wasn’t definite, but I strongly assumed it. It would have been only natural for him to help out. More important, I began to wonder what he would think about me.

“So, are you gonna ask me what you want?” Michelle questioned.

“Huh?” My mind was in another place and on another subject.

“I said, are you gonna ask me what you want?” she repeated. “You were saying something about not liking the hotel room. I tried to get you the best room I could get you.”

“Oh, yeah, I, ah, wanted to see how you and, umm, Briana lived.”

I had to get back on track to what we started off talking about. I guess Michelle was paying a lot more attention to the subjects than I was.

“Well, ask me then,” she pressed me.

I didn’t expect her to be that assertive about rekindling a relationship with me. Up to that point, she was just being Briana’s mom. I didn’t know what she felt toward me anymore. So I got ready to ask and got stuck. I just wanted it to sound right.

“You want me to stay over at the house with you and Briana tomorrow night?” I asked her.

She said, “I thought you would never ask. Yes, I would like for you to stay over. Now tell me what you want.”

I hesitated again. Did she really want to know what I wanted?

Hell, I went for broke again. I said, “I want you to make love to me like you haven’t had it in four years.”

I just couldn’t get past that. Her four years of nothing was turning me the hell on.