The Best Thing

by Zapata, Mariana

  He didn’t keep his chin down, and Peter didn’t argue with me. Instead, Sven backed off, and Carlos rocked back on his heels as the other man landed a few more punches that I could tell were lighter than they had been before. Sven knew without a doubt he was winning… and had been the whole time.

  The buzzing on my phone had me elbowing Peter who blew the buzzer we had to call time, and the two men in the cage separated.

  I met Peter’s eyes, and we both made a face. Again.

  He pressed his fingertip between his eyebrows.

  I knew what he was going to ask me to do, and I was going to make him ask for it.

  He still had his finger between his eyebrows as he aimed a dark brown iris at me. “Help him, please.”

  It would be my pleasure and he knew it, so I just nodded at him and kicked my flip-flops off. I made my way up the steps and into the cage, watching Carlos as he crouched, trying to catch his breath. He looked exhausted.

  But mostly, he looked pissed.

  He’d lost his last fight a few days ago, and he was doing even shittier now. I’d be pissed too if I were him.

  “Yoo-hoo,” I said quietly, ignoring the Sven guy sitting a few feet away, trying to catch his breath too.

  Carlos glanced up immediately and panted out, “Yeah?”

  I motioned for him to get up, and thankfully, he did, breathing hard the whole time. “What’s going on? What’s got you so distracted?” I asked as I crept forward.

  He didn’t look even a little wary at my approach; he just looked irritated. I didn’t enjoy embarrassing people, but being hard was sometimes the only way to get across to someone. Especially when that someone had an ego and needed to see that they weren’t listening.

  “Your technique has been shit, but being fast and aggressive usually makes up for it. But you know it isn’t always going to,” I told him bluntly.

  The younger guy frowned. “My technique is shit now?”

  “Your listening skills are shit. Your technique isn’t much better. There were at least three opportunities, that if you would have listened, you could have easily gotten him into a rear-naked choke or an armbar, but you didn’t listen when Peter and I were yelling. You were too focused on forcing the offensive instead of doing a little defense and then sneaking in there to get him.” I motioned toward the fence just behind him. “Back up real quick. Let me show you.”

  He listened, fortunately, and went to stand so his back was to it. I stopped right in front of him and then took it even closer so that we were literally pressed completely together with one of my knees wedged in between both of his. I wasn’t wearing the stretchiest pants I owned, but I could still move in them. I always did a few squats before I bought bottoms to make sure they weren’t too constricting. I never knew when someone might ask me for help, or when I’d feel up for it.

  “Right here,” I told him. “I’m you. You had him against the fence, you could have lifted your knee”—I showed him—“swiveled your hip”—I showed him that too—“and then….”

  And then I threw him. Over my hip, quick as lightning, I threw him when he least expected it and scrambled back onto the floor before he realized what was happening. I grabbed his arm while he was still confused, wrapped my feet and legs around it like I had done it a thousand times before—because I had done it at least ten thousand times—and then pulled.

  He tapped out so fast I’d swear I heard Peter snicker. And just as quickly as he slammed his palm across the surface of the cage, I let him go. I wasn’t there to hurt him.

  Even though I had pulled more than a handful of shoulders out of sockets in my day.

  Hurting people because they didn’t want to tap out wasn’t something I got a fucking kick out of, unlike some people I had known. Feeling ligaments and tendons being torn, especially with my history, was just… not for me. I liked to win but not by genuinely causing someone pain.

  So I’d give it to Carlos for tapping as fast as he did.

  Somewhere deep down inside, he still was thinking at least.

  I squeezed his shoulder before getting up, taking in his wide-eyed stare at the rafters of the ceiling. “You know better. That shouldn’t have been so easy. Clear your head. Focus. Listen. You can do this. Just think.” And with that, I squeezed his shoulder one more time then walked back out, raising my eyebrows at Peter as playfully as possible once I was totally out. “I’m going to get water while you talk to your boy. Do you want some?” I asked Peter as I slid my flip-flops back on.

  Peter was trying to hide a grin, but I knew it was there as his mouth pinched together and he shook his head and started over toward the steps I had just come down. Just as he was beside me on his way into the cage, he grinned and patted me on the shoulder. “You still got it, Len.”

  Damn right, I did.

  It was hard not to smile at his comment, because… it did make me feel good. Maybe I didn’t regret giving up judo for Mo—and for my fucking self—but it was nice to know I could still hang in there if I wanted to risk it. Not that what I’d done had been a risk because I had been in control, and I’d used my good shoulder.

  I was still trying not to smile when I lifted my head and spotted the figure standing at the far end of the room closest to the entrance. I knew that haircut, but it was the height and that damn body that really struck me.

  It was Jonah.

  I had seen him every single day over the last four. At the gym either during or after his workout. He would come by my office if I didn’t see him on a trip to the main building. Just yesterday he had gone with me to Mo’s daycare again to pick her up and drop her off with Mr. Cooper, a family friend who babysat his granddaughter just like my own gramps did. And every single night, he would get to the house right around six—when I got home—and stay until Mo passed out.

  I wanted to dislike him, I really did. Every single day we were together, I would look at him and some asshole part of me yearned to be mad, to tell him that I didn’t need or want him in my life. I wanted to tell him that he’d hurt me by disappearing, regardless of the fact I now understood why he had. I wanted to ask him if he hadn’t liked me enough once we had time and distance apart, and that’s why the postcards had stopped. Then again, he’d come here without knowing about Mo, so that didn’t make sense.

  But…

  He had already made his reasons clear. That was all I should have needed or wanted. There was no point in finding out more details. He smiled so fucking much and was so damn polite to my grandpa who was still treating him worse than people treated those with leprosy.

  Fuck me, I couldn’t hate him even a little bit, and that was the truth. It was probably the single most annoying thing to ever happen in my life: not being able to hate his ass.

  Most importantly, Jonah was so into Mo, how could I?

  He never took a night off from seeing her. I’d seen how thoughtful his face became when I told him things: how to dress her, bathe her, tricks that worked about 50 percent of the time for feeding her. And Jonah listened.

  All that patience and commitment and how good-natured he was….

  It was so bad that Grandpa had whispered to me over dinner one night, sounding bitter as fuck, “You couldn’t have picked a shithead?”

  I shot him a look that had him rolling his eyes like he blamed me for him not being a total dumbass we could hate on.

  So far, that had been all of our stories where it came to Jonah Collins.

  Annoying.

  And the annoyingly-not-annoying man was over in the fake turf area that morning, hands on his hips, a belt around his waist, facing the cage. I headed over to him, taking in his shorts and the bulge of muscle directly above his knees, branching out to the stacked muscles that made up his upper thighs. The belt around his waist, I saw, was connected to four forty-five-pound weights stacked on top of each other. Sweat covered the cutoff T-shirt that showed off those massive arms.

  I didn’t have to look at footage to know he’d been running from
one end of the turf to the other with one hundred and eighty pounds trailing behind him.

  “Hey, Lenny,” he greeted me.

  “Morning,” I replied, standing just off to the side of his workout area. “How’s it going?”

  “All right. Getting started with my warm-ups.”

  Warm-ups?

  “Got a bit of conditioning left, I’m thinking. Eventful morning?” he asked with a cock of his eyebrow.

  “It’s more of a pain in the ass morning.”

  His hand went to the side of his head, and his smile was slow as he squinted an eye and asked, “D’ya really throw him or did I imagine that?”

  I couldn’t help but smile finally, just a little. “You saw that?”

  Those white teeth flashed. “Yeah, I reckon everyone did.”

  My smile grew a little, and I shrugged. “He’s distracted, and Peter wanted me to show him he was.”

  He fucking beamed at me, following it up with a chuckle, surprised and, I was pretty sure, impressed. “It was awesome.”

  My half-dead heart thumped once at his compliment.

  But before I could process it more, he went on. “You picked him up like he weighed nothing and….” He did this thing where he leaned forward a little and then angled his body to the side like he was showing me a stunted version of what I’d done.

  Awesome.

  Well, fuck me.

  “He’s about a hundred and fifty,” I told him, feeling even nicer with this bonus on top of Peter’s compliment. “I can still pick him up, and it doesn’t bother me too much.”

  That wiped the smile off him, replacing it with a frown. “Because of the shoulder you’re always pretending doesn’t hurt?”

  What? It was my turn to frown. “I’m not always pretending like it doesn’t hurt.”

  His face was a little too smug and knowing.

  “I’m not.”

  One honey-colored eye squinted at me. “You sure?”

  I scoffed. “Yeah, maybe sometimes, but not all the time. And it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to since I don’t use it the way I did before. Thank you.” I wasn’t over here watching how he ran to see if his Achilles was as good as it used to be, was I? Which reminded me I hadn’t once asked him how it was doing. He didn’t seem to favor it at all, but you never knew. I’d known players with genuinely fucked-up knees—knees they could barely stand on—who still competed, adjusting their fights to not leave themselves too defenseless by staying on their feet.

  “Sure,” he agreed way too fucking easily, still looking smug, but his eyes were curious. “Been like that for a bit, hasn’t it?”

  So he had noticed. Before. “I guess we never did talk about that?” I asked him, earning a shake of his head. “But yeah, my shoulder has been shot for a long time. One more injury and I might never be able to lift my arm up over my head, is what the doctors said the last time.” It still hurt to say that sentence out loud. Less, but the ache was still there. “It’s why I don’t do judo anymore.”

  Jonah froze, the lines across his forehead deepening again. “Not at all?”

  I shook my head.

  His already soft voice got even quieter. “Why?”

  “I’ve had five surgeries on just one of my shoulders. Each time they said I was done, and I didn’t listen or give a shit. But now I’ve got someone who needs me, and I’m not going to risk doing something irreparable to it anymore.” I shot him a smile that was still tighter than I would have wanted. I was okay with my decision. Mostly. I had gotten used to the idea. It wasn’t like I hadn’t known the day would come eventually.

  I just hadn’t known it would be so soon. Judo was brutal on a person’s body. At the international level, everything was harder. It required more power, more strength, and at some point, your body just couldn’t handle taking the beating or even inflicting it. We all wanted to win, and that meant doing what you had to do to ensure you were the winner.

  But…

  Well, it still sucked. Eighteen years were gone.

  But my life wasn’t over.

  “It was my choice, and I would make the same one if I had to,” I told him honestly. It hadn’t been easy, but it had been right. That was fucking life sometimes, wasn’t it?

  He watched me with those honey-colored eyes and nodded, but I could see the tightness at his jaw. It made me wonder if he thought he had lost everything, but he hadn’t actually. He just hadn’t known it from the start.

  I’d had my dream ended too, and maybe I had been in the literal dumps, but here I was. These people I loved wouldn’t let me mourn and wade in my heartbreak and pity for too long. They would never let me forget what really mattered.

  When life throws bad shit at you, you dodge it and throw whatever you can right back.

  At least that was how Grandpa Gus had tried to raise me.

  “Why? You want me to show you how to do the same so you can start doing that to other players if they tackle you too hard?”

  That got me one of those deep laughs that made his face light up even more than his smiles did. “That wouldn’t be a bad idea.” He grinned. “Could you do it to me?”

  I felt my eyebrows go up, felt my brain tell the rest of me to go back into the office. To leave right now and quit playing around. We weren’t enemies, but we weren’t friends either.

  We were a team. In a way. Because a team worked toward a greater good, and our greater good was eighteen pounds and six ounces.

  My subconscious tried to remind me I’d never really been a big fan of team sports. I didn’t like the idea of leaving my future in the hands of someone else who might not give as much of a fuck as I did. It’s why I’d been a good swimmer, a pretty good gymnast, and I hadn’t been a big fan of cross-country running, but I’d been all right at that too. The one and only time Grandpa had enrolled me in a season of basketball when I’d been ten, I’d been asked to leave the team because I hadn’t been a good team player.

  And yet knowing all that…

  I ignored those instincts that asked me to walk away. “You?” I asked him, to be sure he was suggesting what I thought he was suggesting.

  Jonah dipped his chin.

  I knew what the answer was going to be, but I didn’t want to kill his sketchy dreams so quickly. “How much do you think you weigh right now?”

  “One-hundred and thirteen kilos, usually. Might be a bit more or a bit less,” he answered.

  Yeah, that settled it. “That’s going to be a negative then. Five years ago, I would have tried, but even then I could only lift Mount Denali, not”—I waved my hand toward his body—“Everest. I could get you on the ground without throwing you though.”

  For once, I didn’t like his laugh.

  “You don’t think I can?”

  Those cheeks tipped up, and he had the nerve to tip his head to the side like he was trying to be adorable. “I was joking when I asked, I mean.”

  I slipped out of my flip-flops and walked over to him.

  “I’m sure you could easily have taken a Denali before your last surgery...” He trailed off, watching me too carefully. “I’m an Everest though, eh? Sweet as.”

  I ignored his NZ slang that I had started getting the hang of and grinned, actually feeling a little excited. “Are you going to be upset if you get the breath knocked out of you?”

  He tipped his head to the other side a little, narrowing those honey-colored eyes. “No…?”

  “Are you sure?”

  Jonah’s face got warily cheerful again. “Lenny, love, I’ve been getting tackled since I was—”

  All right. He’d said it.

  I stopped directly in front of him, reached out as quickly as I could, grabbed him by the collar and swept his legs out from under him.

  He fell like a beautiful, ancient Redwood tree. The sound of him hitting the turf loud. I mean, literally, it was a boom. The floor wasn’t padded and wasn’t built to cushion falling bodies.

  I pressed my lips together as I looked do
wn at him slightly, half expecting him to be pissed, maybe a little shocked even if he was used to being tackled by men bigger than me. But all I got were wide, shocked eyes. He sucked in a breath and then gasped.

  Maybe that hadn’t been my best idea ever. He was worth a lot of money when he was healthy. Shit.

  “Jonah, I’m sorry—”

  This fool fucking burst out laughing. “Bloody hell, Lenny, how’d you do that?”

  I’d had a lot of guys react in different ways to getting thrown around, but never, ever had one of them fucking laughed. Never. Not even close.

  And as Jonah cracked up from his spot on the floor, knees up, feet flat on the floor, arms loose, looking shocked… something inside of me kind of… cracked.

  More than it already had, it felt, and I didn’t know what the hell to do with it.

  “You aren’t the first big guy I’ve foot-swept before,” I answered him, smiling back and not able to help it, or regret it either. “But you’re probably the heaviest, and now everything from my knee down is probably going to hurt because I’m a show-off, so don’t get butthurt I got you.”

  This idiot just went on laughing.

  And I couldn’t help but keep smiling down at him.

  The rest of my life.

  I thrust my hand out at him, and he met mine halfway, wrapping those fingers around me, before I kind-of sort-of helped heft him back onto his feet, even though his own muscles did most of the job.

  I huffed, practically sitting down on the ground to get enough leverage. “If we were hiking in the woods and you broke a leg, you would die. You’d be left there, for real,” I joked, knowing damn well I shouldn’t but unable to stop when I was feeling in this good of a mood.

  “You wouldn’t try to help me hike out?” He chuckled as he slipped his thumbs into the waistband of his shorts and adjusted them.

  “So the bear could get us both when it smells your blood and comes looking for you? I don’t think so.”

  Another big, booming laugh came out of him, and that shit went straight to my spine. “I thought it was sharks that will hunt down something bleeding.”