The Best Thing

by Zapata, Mariana

  Double bitch. He was lucky I knew it was possible to delete all of your messages without actually listening to them. Even if that possibility was pretty far-fetched.

  “Or wasn’t a professional athlete with endorsements and under contract and try to claim he didn’t check his email. Or maybe it was just my emails he didn’t want to read,” I finished, thinking fucking bitch again. “So I don’t know what to believe.”

  Grandpa’s fingers had already been pinching the bridge of his nose before he started talking. “He can believe I’m going to—”

  All Peter had to do was glance at him, and that had Grandpa instantly pressing his mouth together and literally hunching over, hand still in place between his eyes.

  That had me raising my eyebrows, and when Peter glanced at me, the slightest hint of a smile crossed his mouth. Oh yeah, I was going to have to ask him what he’d said to get him to chill out. It was impressive.

  “I don’t need you going back to your coven of vampires or your Grandpas Gone Wild clique and getting them all riled up—” I started to say before the sound of a phone vibrating on the counter had all of us looking around. It was Peter who frowned down at his cell, which I guess had been resting on his thigh or something, because he got up and walked out of the room before answering it.

  Grandpa slid a look toward the door my other dad had just walked out of before saying, in a strangled voice that said how much self-control he was using, “I made a couple of calls and got Big Mike to give me the number to the lawyer he used to get custody of his girls.”

  It was no wonder I loved the shit out of this man.

  “I started looking some up online today, but I couldn’t really find any information on what would happen since he’s not a U.S. citizen or even a resident, so that was a good idea,” I said, sensing the heaviness coming back into my stomach and chest. “I’ve tried not to worry about it too much because I know that I haven’t done anything wrong. I have proof I tried to reach out to him, and that there’s no way I would lose Mo if he tries to… be active in her life. Between all of us, I know that we’ve got this. And I know that I should be happy that, if he was going to come back, it’s now, before she gets older or starts asking questions I don’t know how to answer.”

  I watched Grandpa’s eyes drift toward Mo again, who was busy chewing on her teething ring. I saw love soften his features for a moment and couldn’t miss the way the edge fell off his voice as he asked, like he didn’t want to but was forcing himself to, “You want him to be part of her life then?”

  It wasn’t until right then that it hit me how my gramps might feel about some random man coming in and taking over the duties he had taken over effortlessly with Mo. The same duties he’d had with me… even though there were less. With me, it had only been him until Peter had shown up when I was three. Mo had three of us from the start.

  But the point was, I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t want some guy coming in to usurp his duties as one of the men in Mo’s life. Then again, he’d been totally fine with the relationship I’d always had with Peter. So maybe I was just overthinking it.

  “If he wants to be, yeah. As long as he’s dedicated to being in it,” I answered, watching him closely to see if anything spelled out him being worried or if he was just angry in our honor for being dumped. “I know I had a couple of dreams here and there that I had a mom that came looking for me, Grandpa, and at one point, I would have been excited for that to happen. So I’m not going to take that away from her. But I’m not going to let him disappear later on if he thinks it’s too hard to be around, or if he isn’t planning on giving it his best, either. He needs to know I’ll hunt him down if he doesn’t commit to her.”

  Grandpa leaned back in his seat, seeming to think over what I’d just said.

  Jonah Collins lived in a different country. A different continent. But I wasn’t going to make that a deal breaker. When you wanted something to work, you made it work.

  This wasn’t about me anymore.

  This was about the baby chewing away at a toy in a way that made my nipples have PTSD from when I had breastfed her before she’d decided she was done with my boobs.

  If he wasn’t lying, then he’d just found out he had a daughter, and that wasn’t like… he’d found a twenty-dollar bill in his pocket. It was the biggest kind of news possible. It was a fucking daughter. The best one ever, I thought. Or at least she was tied with Luna’s too.

  I heard Peter before I saw him pushing open the door into the kitchen holding his hand out. He looked tense. That was never a good thing.

  “It’s him. He wants to speak to you.”

  Chapter 7

  “It’s me. Lenny. I really need to talk to you, so stop being a prick. I’m going back to Houston soon, and we need to talk. We don’t have to see each other. Just a call. Text. Whatever. I don’t give a shit. Please.”

  I wasn’t even a little surprised that when the doorbell rang, everyone was in the living room, watching television. Or at least pretending to.

  But it wasn’t like I would have expected any different. And it wasn’t like I wanted them to be any different than the way they were: nosey and loyal. If anything, the only thing I was surprised by was that Grandpa hadn’t called Luna to invite her in on the action.

  It almost let me down.

  I’d have to text her tomorrow to give her an update.

  Rolling onto my feet from where I’d been lying on the floor with Mo as she shook the toys in her hands from side to side pretty violently, I headed toward the front door and unlocked it, swinging it wide, not even bothering to look through the peephole.

  I stared at the Fucker. The Still an Asshole who was in the same clothes he’d been in earlier: a long-sleeved shirt that was almost a size too big and dark jeans. The only thing different were his eyes. They looked suspiciously puffy and tired instead of stricken and surprised. Mostly hidden in his big hand was a small stuffed bear he seemed to be holding onto tightly.

  Whatever.

  I still didn’t even bother with a “hi.” I settled for waving him and that enormous body in. “Come on, we can talk in the kitchen.” Which was just far enough away and had a nice swinging door, where the rest of the house couldn’t easily eavesdrop. Not that I honestly thought that would stop my gramps.

  He didn’t say a word as I closed the door behind us and waved him again to follow me down the long hallway. I didn’t glance over my shoulder to see if he looked into the living room, where my two favorite men and my favorite girl were still hanging out, like the nosey asses they were. And if he slowed down to look at the baby playing with her toys on the floor, I had no idea either.

  It wasn’t like it mattered.

  He was here, trying to talk to me, and that’s what we needed to do.

  Only seventeen months late.

  I waited until the swinging door shut before I gestured toward the stools around the island. Then I went for it. “You said you had questions. Ask.”

  I could have said that a little nicer, but… I didn’t feel like it. Not when this uncomfortable feeling settled in my chest as I confirmed that his eyes were puffy. I still couldn’t stand him.

  The Prick straightened in the stool he’d taken, his chest expanding with a deep breath before he set the stuffed animal down on the counter, laced those long, solid fingers together and set them on the island in front of him. The damn bear had on a tiny T-shirt that said HOUSTON on it, and I had to force myself to stop looking at it. Those eyes, which were beautiful regardless of how hard I’d punch him in the kidneys if our lives weren’t so entwined, met mine and he asked, very, very calmly, very, very quietly in that way I had liked when I had first met him, “Who did you reach out to? To tell me.”

  We had already covered this, I thought. But okay. Here we went again.

  “I reached out to your brothers and your sisters to get in contact with you. None of them responded to me, even though I sent them each a couple of the pictures I had with you.” I
kept going. “I can pull up phone records if you want. I got a new phone six months ago, but I can still turn on my old one if you want to see the messages I sent. I didn’t delete them. I tried contacting you. Maybe not as hard as I could have, but I did try. I reached out to Arnie and Akira, and they promised to pass my message along to you but....” I tipped my head to the side.

  Jonah visibly winced, and I sure as hell didn’t imagine the way he swallowed hard before saying, “Akira played for Japan this past season, and Arnie went back to Dunedin. They boxed my things and left them at the team’s office. I haven’t seen either of them since.”

  Since his Achilles shit? I pressed my lips together and raised my eyebrows. “That’s convenient. But you can ask them if you want. I’m not lying about any of it. Maybe your brothers and sisters remember my passive-aggressive private messages on Picturegram.”

  “Yeah, nah,” he replied quietly, his palm already centering over the middle of his forehead. “I believe you.”

  That’s why he’d asked again? Okay.

  “How old is she?” he asked after a minute.

  “Eight months old.” She’d been conceived toward the end of when we’d known each other.

  He must have had his questions ready in his head because he shot one out right after the other with only a bob of his throat. “What day was she born?”

  “May 2nd.”

  If he was trying to figure out the dates in his head, I wasn’t going to overthink it. I mean, I would ask too if our roles were reversed. I already thought he was a dickhead.

  “Her full name?”

  “Madeline Hema DeMaio.”

  That he reacted to. I could see it by the way his fingers flexed and by the way those round, wide eyes flicked to me in surprise. “Hema?”

  If he hadn’t come here, and the day came that she asked whom her dad was, I would have told her. I wouldn’t have hidden his name from her, or the fact she shared it. It was just everyone else that I was keeping that secret from. “She’s yours,” I explained, only barely managed not to add “dipshit” to my answer.

  The hand he’d had on his forehead fell away. “Not Collins?”

  “You weren’t around. If you decide you want to be part of her life, I’m not opposed to changing it. She’s a DeMaio regardless of what’s on her birth certificate,” I told him, hearing the gruffness in my voice, the question: but are you staying or are you going?

  Jonah eyed me seriously… cautiously, and I kind of liked it. “You’d consider it?”

  “Yeah. You are her dad,” I answered. “All I wanted was for her to know she’s loved. That she belongs. I didn’t want her to feel any different just in case we were all she ever knew. And if you wouldn’t have shown up, I never would have told anyone you were her dad, at least until she asked.” I swallowed around the lump in my throat and the ball of anger that was there too. “Like I said, nobody knew about you, not even my grandpa or Peter. Not Luna. Well, no one but my roommate back in Paris, but she wouldn’t say anything to anyone. We’ve barely even talked since then.”

  He watched me. The problem was, I wasn’t sure what his silence meant. What I did realize though was that it didn’t matter what it meant; what mattered was what was going to happen from here on out.

  “I don’t know why you’re here,” I told him. “You said you didn’t know about Mo, and I don’t know why else you would have come, but I need you to make a decision at some point, sooner or later. If you’re right and you did up and disappear because of whatever reasons”—you’re still an asshole, I thought but didn’t say—“then I’m sure this is a shock to you. You can’t make a decision about whether you want to be a dad or not in just a couple hours, and I don’t expect you to.“

  Even though he should since this was involving a child’s life. His child’s life. Anyone who wasn’t a deadbeat would already know what they were going to do, but maybe I was being unfair. Hadn’t I had to do some serious thinking in the weeks after I’d taken those tests? Yeah, I had, and I wasn’t enough of a hypocrite to claim otherwise.

  I kept going. “But she needs you to make a choice. If you want to be a part of her life, then do it. I know we don’t live down the street from each other, and this is going to be complicated, but I’m not worried about that. I just need to know if you even want to make the effort in the first place.” Or if you’re a piece of shit and don’t.

  I made sure to pin him down with a look, but it was totally unnecessary. He was 1000 percent focused on me. Everything about him was. Jonah was thinking big time.

  So I didn’t stop.

  “If you don’t think you can make her a priority in your life, every day until you die, then we’re going to need you to go. She’s little now, but she isn’t going to stay little, so you have to decide because it’s going to be a lifetime commitment. I don’t want her to ever feel like she’s not important. She’s going to have enough people who try to make her feel that way when she’s older. But I’m not going to let a father figure do that too.”

  I held my breath and met his eyes, giving him what my old coach had called my Michael Myers face. Because that’s what I would turn into if he fucked with my chunky monkey. She wasn’t ours yet. He didn’t have the protection of being family to me or Grandpa until he made a choice, and we would both do some sketchy shit without question if we had to. “If you break her heart, I will make you regret ever thinking about playing rugby. So I want you to understand that before you make a decision because there aren’t any takebacks or refunds.

  “I will never, ever ask you for a cent if you don’t want to be a part of her life. I won’t ask anything of you. I don’t need anything from you. You’re free to go if you want to go, but you have to make that choice, and it’s a final one unless she decides she wants you around when she’s older,” I finished telling him, fisting my hands at my sides because I could feel them start to get tingly. “You have to go in ready for this, living in another hemisphere and all.” I raised my eyebrows at him. “When you want something to work, you make it work. You’re in or you’re out, Jonah. I just need to know sooner than later. Once you’ve had a chance to think about it.”

  You’re in or you’re out. Bam.

  We stared at each other. Eye to eye. My dark gray ones trying to burn into his honey-colored browns. Like we were having a competition. A competition that I sure as hell wasn’t going to lose at. Not when Mo was at stake.

  Grandpa Gus had been a great white shark for me. Peter a fucking hippo that killed more people on the down-low than a lion. And they had raised me to believe in myself. To defend myself. I’d been called Lenny the Lion for half my life for a reason. I’d turn into Freddy Kruger if I had to. I had no problem being someone’s worst nightmare.

  So when his gaze didn’t stray for even a second… I had to narrow my eyes.

  And shit got even more real when he kept on looking at me as he let out a deep exhale and spoke in a voice I had never heard from him before. A voice that didn’t belong to the smiling, soft-spoken man I had met who hadn’t known any French and had basically blushed when I had translated for him.

  Jonah Collins said, gaze unflinching, “There’s no choice, sweetheart.”

  It was my turn to swallow, and it had nothing to do with that dumbass term of endearment he’d used.

  “If you say she’s my daughter, she’s my daughter.”

  Something hard thumped inside my chest. Something I didn’t want to look at too closely.

  “I’m sorry, Lenny,” Jonah said. “I’m sorry I didn’t know.”

  My ears started to buzz like they were debating whether or not to believe what he was saying.

  As if he knew what I was thinking, he continued on. “I’m sorry I’m just now getting here, but I know now. There’s nothing for me to consider. I’ll be a part of her life, if you’ll let me,” he ended in a voice that had, word by word, started to sound more like him… the intensity in his eyes didn’t waver for a moment. Like we were back at this game,
and he was intent on not losing either.

  If he was trying to get on my good side… it wasn’t working.

  I knew why he was here, and that was the last bond left between us. So I wasn’t going to think about that. Nope.

  “There’s quite a bit we need to talk about, I know, but I’d like to start with seeing....” Jonah swallowed, and those nearly almond-shaped eyes widened again. “Seeing my daughter.” He took a breath. “My Mo… if that’s all right.”

  Seeing his Mo. His daughter.

  I hated his accent. I really did. Him too. More than ever especially when my heart went whack with the way he said those words.

  His voice had definitely wobbled, and I told my chest it better not be a bitch and wuss out on me. So he was getting emotional. He wouldn’t be getting emotional if he had just called me back.

  If he hadn’t been such an ass.

  What I wouldn’t have given to hear those words out of him while I’d been pregnant, even if he didn’t want to be together. I would have settled for that. I would have been okay with just knowing he would be there, instead of leaving this weight around my shoulders that had made me angry and rejected. It wasn’t like we had actually been boyfriend and girlfriend… officially… back in France. We had been together, but I’d never thrown around a title, and neither had he. I would have understood if we’d drifted apart eventually. But at least he wouldn’t have been cut cold turkey from my life.

  I wasn’t going to think about that.

  “Of course you can see her, but I’m not joking. I need you to be committed to her if you’re planning on being a part of her life. You’re not buying a car you can trade in later on,” I repeated, needing him to understand.

  I would kill him myself, and if I didn’t, I knew people who knew people.

  And Grandpa Gus was a straight thug sometimes, and I didn’t want to know the people he knew.

  But Jonah didn’t hesitate. “I am,” he confirmed with a tip of his chin.

  Well….