The Best Thing

by Zapata, Mariana

  This wasn’t about me.

  Asshole. Fucking dickface.

  I didn’t even look away because fuck that. This was my place, and I hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d been the one who had lied when he’d kissed me seventeen months ago and promised to see me after his match.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  The Asshole stood there, the fingers at his sides wiggling, fidgeting as he watched me. A moment went by, then another with us just staring at each other. Why the hell was he finally here? Why now?

  I waited for a response but got nothing. Like always. Why would I expect differently?

  All right. He didn’t want to answer my question? He didn’t want to own up to his actions? Fine. This was on him. I wasn’t taking the lead anymore. I had promised myself I wouldn’t. I could play dumb all day long too if that’s what he wanted.

  “If you’re looking for Peter, he’s in the building next door,” I told him, keeping all my fingers tucked in and every curse word I knew in my mouth. Acting like it was no big deal he was here. No big deal that he had called Peter.

  Goddamn it, I really wish I had my stress ball in my hand.

  The Fucker’s forehead scrunched; it was lined from years in the sun. Then that pink mouth formed an expression that wasn’t a smile or a grimace but something in between. The next words that came out of his mouth—in the same quiet, soft voice that had cast some kind of voodoo magic on me once upon a time—tried their best to woo me over, again.

  “I didn’t come for Peter,” Jonah Collins said, staring straight at me with that grimace slash smile on his face… like he couldn’t be sure how he felt. Happy or nervous.

  It took everything inside of me not to make a face at his bullshit.

  What I did instead was sit there quietly and watch both of his dimples flash for one split second. Because of course he had a dimple in each tan cheek.

  He didn’t come for Peter.

  Yeah right. Yeah, fucking right. God. I had to get through this as quickly as possible. Now, now, now.

  I didn’t break eye contact with those honey-colored irises as I looked at him. I could play this game. “I don’t know what you know about Peter,” I said, making sure to keep my features schooled, “but he isn’t a personal trainer. If you want a tour of the gym, I can have the assistant manager show you around.” He knew what Peter did at the gym. I had told him. He was a fucker, but he’d listened. I was sure of it. There was no way he had gotten that mixed up in his head.

  But Jonah didn’t say a word as he kept on standing there, so still it didn’t even look like he was breathing.

  What a prick.

  If he wanted to talk about… things, it was on him. I’d wasted my last phone call and email on him eight months ago. I wasn’t searching out shit in regard to him anymore.

  “If you’re looking for a trainer, I can get you in contact with someone who focuses on athletes like you,” I said, hearing myself offering to find him a personal trainer and cringing inside. Really? That’s what I’m doing? I was better than that. I could stand in front of him. I could speak to him. Of course, I could do this. Why had I thought I couldn’t? I could look into his eyes and listen to his voice and ignore those memories of how much I had enjoyed those two things at one point. My mouth kept on going. “No one with any rugby experience, probably, but with football.”

  When I had first seen him, I had assumed he was a football player initially. Then, I’d really paid attention and noticed the differences. For his height, his body fat percentage had been too low for any positions he might have been able to play since he was so tall. The cauliflowering of his ears—a deformity, some called it, that made a person’s ear lumpy—was more typical for boxers and the people who trained at Maio House than football players; they wore helmets, their ears were never directly impacted. Then, he’d opened his mouth and confirmed my suspicions.

  “Lenny,” Jonah Hema Collins—I had found out his whole name after he’d disappeared—said my name the same way he had before: all soft and nearly cheery and wrapped in his New Zealand accent.

  But I wasn’t falling for it. Not ever again. Nah.

  “Have a heart,” Jonah continued on like I wasn’t sporting my I-don’t-give-a-fuck face at him. That chest on his six-foot-five-inch body expanded as he pulled in a breath and held it. Those light eyes focused right on me, wide and nervous, and if he had been anyone else, I would have thought there was a trace of hope in them too. “Tell me how you’ve been.”

  I could feel my nostrils flare the entire time he spoke. Tell him how I’d been after so long? Was that what he wanted to hear?

  Worried. Pissed off. Furious. Scared. Terrified. Moody. Tired. Exhausted. Angry. Resigned. Even more exhausted. Determined. All those things in every combination.

  Tension blossomed in my shoulders and neck, like it was telling me to get my shit together before I did something I’d regret.

  “Do you want me to get you a number for a trainer or not?” A trainer, I reasoned, he could have easily gotten back in France or New Zealand or South Africa, any other country in the world other than this one, my brain reasoned. Fucking Antarctica based on how his phone and email hadn’t worked for so long.

  He wasn’t able to hide the way those big, tanned and scarred hands of his opened and closed at his sides. But Jonah Collins decided he had selective listening by the way he barreled over my question and asked another one. “Can’t you tell me how you’ve been?”

  He really wanted to know?

  I smiled at him.

  “I’ve been great. Is that what you want to hear? How I’ve been doesn’t matter though, does it?” I even flashed my teeth at him with my next smile. “I need to get back to work. I’ll write down phone numbers for two trainers, if that’s why you’re here”—doing God knows what, halfway across the world—“or if you still want a tour, I can get someone to give you one.”

  The brown-haired man, with hair just as closely cropped as it had been back in the day, watched me. His Adam’s apple bobbed. His nostrils flared with a breath.

  And I didn’t like it.

  I didn’t like it either when one of his feet, which I remembered as being huge, brought him a step closer toward the desk. Toward me. Not hesitating exactly but wary.

  Did he know that a massive part of me—a part I was trying to ignore—suddenly wanted to beat the shit out of him, and that’s why he was trying to be all cautious and shit?

  “Talk to me,” he insisted, even if I had a feeling he was well aware of what I would do to him if I could. “Are you all right?”

  The now you want to talk was there, in my throat, on my tongue. Just… there. And I didn’t let it move. I didn’t let it go anywhere.

  Those golden honey-colored eyes searched and moved over me as I sat behind my desk, tension clenching everything between my chin down to my butt cheeks, and I wondered for just one split second what he saw. If I looked older. More tired. If he could see how much sleep I had missed out on for a giant chunk of the time we had been… apart. I wondered what he thought about the weight I hadn’t totally lost over the last few months but was still working on.

  Then I reminded myself that I didn’t care what he thought or what he saw.

  “I’m fantastic.” Hating the way my fingertips started tingling out of nowhere, I grabbed a pen from the cup on my desk and pulled one of my notepads over. I picked up my cell and started going through the contacts as I said sarcastically, “If you don’t want a tour, and you want to keep on ignoring shit, I need to get back to work. I don’t have time for this BS, but here are two numbers for trainers in case you need them while you’re here. If you want a tour of the gym, just let Bianca at the front desk know, and she’ll get you the manager. There’s a really nice gym about twenty minutes away too if this one is too far.”

  Fucking fuckface.

  I ripped the sheet off the pad and held it out to the man who was honestly just as tall
and built as my memories tried to remind me. It was seriously unfair that he was better looking than I remembered. His skin was a richer shade from being out in the sun during the season, a gift from a dad he’d told me was a mixture of Samoan, Māori, and European. Yeh, got my size from him, he had told me once with a bashful smile, like he hadn’t been able to help growing into that frame and it embarrassed him.

  Asshole.

  Jonah Hema Collins didn’t say anything or take the paper, so I held it up even higher, giving it a shake. He wanted to stall? Fine. I could stall.

  I met his gaze with hopefully the blankest expression I could muster. “Take it. And so you know, Peter knows about us.”

  That seemed like common sense, but… here was the last man I would ever expect to roll up to my family’s gym and ask how I was doing and look at me like… like I didn’t fucking know. Like he genuinely wanted to talk to me. Like he really cared about how I was and how I’d been.

  Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

  We both knew he didn’t. His actions for so long had confirmed all that. I knew how nonexistent my place in his life was.

  And if he was here for the reason I thought he was, he needed to take the next step forth. He just needed to know right now that whatever he was planning, I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t thousands of miles away from home anymore.

  “I haven’t said anything to anyone. Like I told you the last time I emailed you, I don’t need or want anything from you. I don’t know why you’re here, but you don’t need to pretend anything.” I almost bit my lip but barely managed not to. “We don’t need to pretend anything. But this place is my family—my home—and if you’re an asshole, it won’t end well, all right?”

  It was on the second sentence that he flinched. This great, big frown came over that good-looking face that I couldn’t ignore as much as I wanted to. He had been so fucking beautiful to me once, even though he had more in common with a villain than he did a hero, this man who could steamroll over other men like they were bowling pins, which was the last thing I would have expected with his soft voice, those eyes that I’d thought—wrongly—were kind, those freckles over his nose, and those damn dimples.

  But he wasn’t anymore though. Beautiful, I meant. He was just a reminder that appearances were only skin deep.

  Beautiful people were good. They didn’t do the kinds of things that he had. They didn’t show up to rub salt on a wound that had healed, hoping to reopen it.

  Because that’s what his presence here was, regardless of what his reasons were.

  Bullshit. It was all straight-up bullshit.

  The nostrils on that nearly perfect nose flared, and those tiny, thin valleys across his forehead formed at the same time his frown did. “You think I would be an asshole to you?” he asked in that damn voice that had made me believe once that it was incapable of doing anything wrong.

  He really didn’t want me to answer that.

  This man who had once made me smile and laugh said nothing. That broad chest rose and fell under his hoodie, and the lines across his forehead got even deeper. His jaw moved from side to side. For a moment, I watched him struggle with something, and then he stood up even straighter, like that was somehow fucking possible.

  “Lenny… I never meant to hurt you,” Jonah “Piece of Shit” Collins claimed, so carefully, I might have thought he was genuine if I hadn’t known any better. “You have to believe me.”

  I couldn’t help it then. I raised my eyebrows. The nerve of this asshole.

  It only took a quick glance at the picture frame on my desk again to help me reel my shit in, reel in the ugly words and the sudden urge to throw my computer screen at him like it was a ninja star. My hand wanted to go up to my eyelid and hold it down to keep it from twitching, but I kept that sucker down. Making a fist, I stared at him, squinting while I did.

  “How did you expect not to hurt me? When you didn’t answer your phone once after I called you over and over again? Or when you didn’t respond to a single one of the emails I sent you either? Because there were a lot of them.“

  I could see the tendons in his neck flex as he stood there, staring back at me with that grimace/frown/smile, and I was sure he was thinking of whatever excuse he’d made up in his head to justify what he’d done. But I only let him get out a single sentence. “I can explain.“

  The smile I gave him didn’t feel as brittle as I figured it should have. And when I reached toward my mouse to prepare to get back to work, I didn’t feel bad for how cold I knew my expression—my entire body language—was toward him. He deserved it. He deserved it and fucking more, and he had no idea how lucky he was that I didn’t toss his ass out and tell him to fuck off until the end of time. He was so lucky I was over him and his shit and was more mature than I had been before.

  “I don’t care anymore, Jonah. Decide what you want and let me know. I don’t care one way or the other. That’s all that matters to me, and we can go from there,” I said to him carefully, so fucking carefully, I would have high-fived myself for being so damn good at shooting him one last—fake—smile and then focusing back on my computer screen, ignoring him standing there in my office, in silence.

  Because that was what he did. Stand there, looking at me. Whether he was cursing himself out or not, I had no idea. Whether he was cursing me out in his head, I had no clue either. All I knew was that he took his time there, totally still, facing me in his massive asshole glory, as I ignored him.

  Two minutes later—minutes that I counted perfectly in my head as I randomly clicked around on the screen from time to time to make it seem like I really was working instead of trying to be cool—he exhaled deeply, stared some more, and before turning around, called out quietly, “I want to talk to you, Len. That’s what I want.” He paused, his gaze heavy. “I’m sorry.”

  He left then.

  Because that was what he did: leave.

  Then and only then did I grab my stress ball from my drawer, wishing I had another for my free hand because only one wasn’t enough right then, and squeezed the fuck out of it, switching hands when the first one started to cramp. I was real grateful right then that I hadn’t set myself up to be disappointed with how easily he left.

  But it was right after I traded hands that my cell rang with Grandpa Gus’s ringtone. I swore to God he was a witch. Only he could time this so perfectly.

  We were going to need to talk. A lot sooner than I had hoped for.

  I hit the answer button and didn’t bother trying to hide the tension in my voice. “Grandpa.”

  “How’s my favorite demon?” he answered like he always did when he was in a really good mood, and like always, it made me smile even though I didn’t feel like it. I squeezed my eyes closed as I did it, feeling this knot swell up in my throat all of a sudden.

  “Everybody is getting on my nerves today,” I told him honestly, struggling to even get those words out as a mental picture of Jonah’s face filled my head with those damn freckles and that grimace/frown/smile.

  “Everybody is always getting on your nerves,” he replied. “Want to get out of there and get some lunch?”

  We needed to talk. Now, apparently. Shit. I knew I should have done this months ago… even a year ago… but…

  I hadn’t. I thought I’d have more time. My fault again.

  “Are you in the mood for Pho Palace?” I asked. “I can meet you there in fifteen.”

  “Meet you there in thirty,” he agreed a second before hanging up, not waiting for me to confirm thirty was good and not bothering to say bye. He never did. He said the b-word sounded too final.

  That and I think he just liked hanging up on people.

  Lowering my hand to the desk, I squeezed my eyes shut for another moment, shoved my chair back, and got to my feet. Fuck it. I had put myself in this mess, I was going to have to get myself out of it.

  Chapter 4

  “Jonah, it’s Lenny again. I’m worried about you. Where the hell are you hiding?”

&
nbsp; My best friend hadn’t said anything in two whole minutes.

  In the first sixty seconds, she had narrowed her eyes, looked up at the ceiling, made a thoughtful face, looked back at me, narrowed her eyes some more, and then pressed her lips together, squinting so much that she probably couldn’t see anything.

  In that same amount of time, I had crossed my arms over my chest and waited for her to make a comment.

  Over the course of the next minute, she had pulled her phone out of her purse, which had been sitting on top of my desk since she was in the chair across from me, and started pecking away at the screen. Luna didn’t let me down as she finally loosened her lips, sat back in the chair, and took a deep breath. Her eyes went wide a moment before those green eyes flicked back in my direction as we sat there in my office the following morning.

  Her index finger came up a second before she held up her phone with her other hand and aimed the screen at me. “This is him?”

  The image on the screen was of a deeply olive-skinned man with shorts halfway up his thighs, a green short-sleeved jersey stretched so tight across his chest it made you wonder how the hell he got it on and off, standing on a field with his arms loose at his sides. The man had biceps so big it looked like someone had shoved a ball under his skin, thighs wide and tight and lined with muscles that overlapped each other. The ultra-serious expression on his face, brows furrowed, mouth slightly parted, irritated the fuck out of me.

  “Yeah, that’s Jonah,” I confirmed, looking back at Luna’s face because I didn’t want to look at his anymore than I needed to.

  My best friend gaped, literally gaped, as she looked back at the screen. Her finger started pecking away at her phone again, and it didn’t take a genius to guess she was scrolling through more pictures of him.

  I sighed. “You’re about to say something stupid, aren’t you?”

  Fucking Luna nodded before she made yet another face—still at her screen—and asked, in total fucking disbelief, “You slept with him?”