The Cookout Confrontation
"The annual neighborhood cookout brings everyone together. When Denise finally confronts the man who ghosted her twenty years ago, the reunion turns into something neither expected."
The Lee Road Block Party has been running since 1985.
Every August, the whole street shuts down. Grills smoking, Spades tournaments raging, kids running wild. I've been coming since I was born.
This year, Marcus Jackson is back.
And I have words for him.
Marcus and I were everything in 1998.
High school sweethearts. Prom king and queen. Planning to conquer the world together.
Then he got the scholarship to Morehouse and vanished. No calls, no letters, no explanation. Just gone.
Twenty-five years of silence.
And now he's standing by the grill, looking like time forgot to touch him.
"Denise?"
He sees me before I can compose myself. That smile—the same smile that made me fall in love at sixteen—spreads across his face.
"My God, look at you."
"Don't." I hold up my hand. "Don't 'look at you' me."
"Denise—"
"Twenty-five years, Marcus. Twenty-five years of nothing, and you show up at a cookout like nothing happened?"
The neighbors are watching.
Of course they are—this is Lee Road, where everyone knows everyone's business. But I don't care.
"You owe me an explanation."
His smile fades. "You're right. I do."
"So explain."
"Not here." He sets down his tongs. "Walk with me?"
We end up in Mrs. Patterson's backyard.
The old woman is dead now, but her children still maintain the garden. Private. Quiet. The scene of our first kiss in 1996.
"You remember this place," he says.
"Don't change the subject."
"I'm not." He sits on the same bench we sat on as teenagers. "I'm setting the scene."
"I left because I was a coward."
He says it simply, like it's fact.
"I got that scholarship and I panicked. I thought—" He pauses. "I thought you'd be better off without me. That you'd find someone who could stay, who wasn't chasing dreams across the country."
"That wasn't your decision to make."
"I know. I've known it for twenty-five years."
"I waited for you."
My voice cracks. I hate that it cracks.
"Three years, Marcus. Three years of checking the mail, checking my email, thinking maybe today. Finally got the hint at twenty-one."
"I'm sorry."
"Sorry doesn't cover it."
"I know." He stands, moves closer. "But I'm going to spend the rest of this cookout trying."
"Why now?"
"Because I'm fifty-three years old. Divorced. Retired early. And the only thing I've thought about for twenty-five years is the woman I left behind."
"That's supposed to make me feel better?"
"No." He takes my hand. "But maybe this will."
He kisses me.
Right there in Mrs. Patterson's garden, with the block party roaring in the distance. His mouth finds mine like no time has passed, like we're still seventeen and stupid with love.
"I never stopped loving you," he whispers.
"I tried to stop. Couldn't."
"Then stop trying."
This is insane.
I'm fifty-one years old. I have a career, a life, a perfectly good bitterness that's kept me warm for decades.
But his hands are on my waist, and his mouth is on my neck, and I'm not thinking about any of that.
"Not here," I gasp.
"My mom's house is two streets over. Empty—she's at the cookout."
"This is a terrible idea."
"The worst." He pulls back, meets my eyes. "Say no and I'll stop."
I can't say no.
His mother's house is exactly the same.
Same furniture, same pictures, same bedroom where we explored each other in high school. We barely make it up the stairs.
"God, you're even more beautiful," he says, pulling at my sundress.
"I'm not the skinny girl you remember—"
"Thank God." He palms my hips, my ass, my belly. "Wanted more of you since 1998."
He lays me on his childhood bed.
The irony isn't lost on me—but I stop caring when his mouth starts traveling down my body.
"Twenty-five years," he murmurs against my skin. "I've got a lot to make up for."
"You can try."
"Oh, I'm going to do more than try."
He spreads my thighs and devours me.
Hungry, desperate, like a man who's been starving. His tongue works me with decades of built-up want, and I come embarrassingly fast.
"One," he says. "Twenty-four more to go."
"You're going to kill me."
"Death by orgasm? There are worse ways to go."
He brings me four more before I beg for him inside me.
"Please—Marcus—I need—"
"I know." He positions himself. "I've needed this for twenty-five years."
He slides inside, and the past and present collapse into one.
Making love to Marcus at fifty-one is nothing like fooling around at seventeen.
He's learned patience. Learned how to read a body. Learned that slow and deep is worth more than fast and frantic.
"So good," he groans. "Better than memory—"
"Don't—don't stop—"
"Never again. Never leaving you again."
We come together, crying out into the empty house.
Afterward, lying tangled in sheets that probably haven't been changed since the Clinton administration, he holds me close.
"Come to Chicago with me."
"What?"
"I'm selling my condo, buying something here. But until it's ready—come with me. See my life. Let me show you who I became."
"This is crazy."
"We've always been crazy, Denise. Why stop now?"
We miss the rest of the cookout.
His mother comes home around nine and finds us on her couch, clothed but obviously caught.
"About time," she says simply. "I've been praying for this since you left her, fool."
"Mama—"
"Don't 'Mama' me. Fix her something to eat. You've kept her waiting long enough."
I don't go to Chicago.
He comes home instead—three weeks later, boxes packed, ready to rebuild.
The Lee Road neighbors talk, of course. Denise and Marcus, back together after all these years.
I let them talk.
Some stories take twenty-five years to write their second act.
Some cookouts lead to more than food.
And some loves are worth the wait.
Even when you have to curse the man out first.