And I couldn’t remember the last time something had touched me so deeply.
Or made me want to protect him that much more.
How hard must it be for him to play this sport he loved, be so good at it and popular, and get so much negative shit for it at the same time? It made sense now more than ever why he had fallen into such a black hole after his injury. Because of how other people had made him feel. Because they had made him think the only special thing about him was rugby. Hadn’t his own mom brought that up during lunch multiple times? His career and success?
This fucking man.
I didn’t know how someone I still wanted to hate could slip so deeply under my ribs. I really didn’t.
“You said it,” Jonah quietly teased back after a moment. “You grew up around professional athletes. You know what it’s like for us.”
I scowled at him.
He smiled. “But I don’t want to talk about that anymore, eh. My mum was awful to you, and that’s what’s important. It’s my fault, Len. All I told her was that I was off to holiday once the season ended. All I was expecting was to come and talk to you and see if you could forgive me.”
I swallowed his words and tried to process what they meant.
“Then you told me about Mo and….” His plans had changed. His life had. I got it. “She was upset when I mentioned I was spending the rest of my time here instead of going back to En Zed. I was going to explain, but… I just wanted to enjoy this as much as I could. She must have known something was going on because she called every day. Most I’ve talked to her since I was a boy.” The hand he had on the crib slid a few inches to the side. Closer to my own hand. “She came without warning me. I finally posted on Picturegram while working out and didn’t realize the location had been tagged. That’s how she found out where I was. She had no idea about Mo. No idea about you. Until now.”
About me?
I rocked on my feet. “So she’s usually really nice when she hasn’t just found out randomly that she’s a grandma?”
His laugh was awkward and said everything. “Eh… I don’t know if I’d say that. She’s always wanted the best for us. Always pushed us and supported us in her way. But only my second oldest brother has lived up to her hopes. The rest of us… not so much all the time. It’s all good. It’s easier to let her say what she wants and do what we want.” He laughed again, still rusty and tense, his fingers moving even closer to the ones I had almost beside his. “But she’ll be better with you. She promised. I told her everything. About the phone calls and the emails and the messages…. About why I came.” He gave me a pointed look that I wasn’t totally sure what to make of. Did he want her to know that he’d come… to see me?
“I reckon she understands now, and I’m sorry for that,” he said. “You shouldn’t have had to defend yourself or think you aren’t good enough.”
“I know I’m good enough,” I said, earning a quick glance and a quicker, slighter smile. “But I get it. I’m not winning any beauty competitions or charm awards.”
Those big brown eyes widened. “What’s a charm award?”
“The same thing you aren’t winning either, stupid,” I muttered, getting a big grin and laugh that he tried his best to muffle when Mo’s eyes instantly opened in response. “Look, I get it. I’m not what any mom would want for her precious baby.”
His laugh cut off immediately and so did the smile on his face. “Yeah, nah, Len. Why do you say things like that?”
I felt my lips drop out of the smile they’d been in.
“You’re smart, and you’re so damn funny.” I’d swear his eyes twinkled. “I could look at you all day, if it was possible.”
I shut the hell up.
“And I’d tell you what I think about all the rest of you if I didn’t think you’d knock me to the ground again,” Jonah admitted quietly, the smile he gave me afterward, small.
This big, massive man was smiling shyly.
God help me.
Even the hand I had on Mo’s foot stopped moving at what he’d just said.
I’d had more than a handful of—mostly drunk—guys tell me that they thought I was hot or goddamn, that fucking body, but I took it with a grain of salt. Beer goggles were real. I’d seen them in action. And I didn’t give a fuck what those guys thought. Or what most people thought. I saw myself in the mirror clearly.
But this man saying those words…? About me? To me?
Jonah kept on smiling—and fucking stealing my heart straight out of my chest even though I was trying to cling onto it for dear life—and then he did it some more with the “Heh” that came out of his throat.
All I could do was look at him, so that’s what I did even as I swallowed again and said the words I should probably regret in the future but probably wouldn’t. “If you’re trying to get me to want to sleep with you again, it’s working.”
He blinked. “I….” He closed his mouth. Opened it again, said, “Sometimes I can’t tell if you’re joking with me or not.”
I wasn’t.
But I also wasn’t sure I wanted to repeat that sentence either.
Instead, I smiled at him and looked back down at Mo like that would win me a break to get my own thoughts together.
Well, it wasn’t news to me that I didn’t look like Freddy Krueger.
And even though I knew it wasn’t cool or mysterious or flirty or smooth, I found the words, and even though they made me uncomfortable, I still threw them back out into the world. Into Jonah’s direction. “I had started to think that I’d forced you to talk to me.” My lips moved to the side, and I had to fight the urge to grimace-smile at him. “I know I’m not soft or even that nice or sweet or girly. Not that there’s anything wrong with being that way or not being that way, but I know not everybody is into… that.” Me. And my sometimes bad attitude. And my bluntness. And a bunch of other aspects of my personality that I wasn’t going to apologize for.
The lines across his forehead and at the corners of his eyes grew deeper as those eyes moved across my face, and it was right then that big, warm fingers covered in calluses covered mine. And Jonah’s voice was a low, husky thing I didn’t know what to do with. “You didn’t force me to do anything, love.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he shook his head. “And you are all those things, they’re just mixed in with all those other traits I like even more.”
His fingertips slid from my knuckles to my fingertips and back, and his smile grew a little wider, a little more brilliant, as he said, “You’ve got the sweetest face, even when you’re throwing out every insult in the English language.” Jonah’s eyes bounced from one of mine to the other, and he asked quietly, “Do you know why I could talk to you when we met?”
I didn’t.
“You were sitting on a bench at the architectural museum while we waited for the tour organizer to come around to sign everyone in.”
I faintly remembered waiting around and sitting on a bench next to these two teenage boys who were trying to stay as far away from their parents as possible.
“An elderly couple arrived—do you remember them? The Canadians celebrating their sixtieth wedding anniversary?” he asked but didn’t wait for me to answer. “You got up the moment you saw them, said a thing or two to those boys sitting with you, and they got up as well. You invited them to sit down. You went and sat on the ground right next to them and talked to them the whole time. Well, until the sammies.”
I remembered all that. Or, at least, I remember talking to the older couple on and off all day. Frederick and Basil had been their names, from Toronto. But a question lingered in my head over what Jonah said. “I got under your shy shield because I talked to them?”
“No.” If anyone else had given me the smile he did, I would have thought they were mocking me, but his was too sweet. “Because you were nice to them and the way you smiled at them made you look so much more beautiful. It made me forget all about how good you looked in those shorts. You know Akira gave me such a hard time
afterward for talking to you. He was so disappointed it wasn’t him you helped. He talked about you in those shorts all the way back to the flat until I told him to stop.”
Why did I feel embarrassed? “I just like older people,” I explained, knowing that probably lost me points. “They’re honest and easy to talk to. It’s why I liked working at the retirement home.”
Those long fingers curled over mine, covering my entire hand, his thumb sweeping up the side of my hand directly below my pinky finger. “Lucky for me my French is awful, eh?”
My whole heart soared a little bit.
Okay, alotta bit.
And I’d be embarrassed to think that my fingers almost twitched under his, because I had touched hands with a lot of people before. Men and women. His. But never… never like… this. With someone looking at me the way he was, so openly.
Jonah held my hand. With his rough thumb sweeping up and down the bones under my pinky finger, being all honest and Jonah and heartfelt.
And fuck me.
At some point, Jonah looked over so sharply, I almost lost my train of thought. “How could you think I didn’t care about you enough? I wrote you… so many times. I couldn’t bear to look at my own face in the mirror, but I wrote you because I wanted you to know I didn’t forget about you.”
My stomach soured a little bit as I frowned. “You mean four times?”
He frowned. “I sent you thirty-two postcards, Len,” he claimed. “One every other week just about. I missed a few right after… and before I came, but I sent them. My nan bought them and put them in the mail for me while I was with her. I bought the rest. I sent half to the box on your website.” His gaze was bright. “I didn’t know what to say in them at first, but I meant what I wrote about missing you.”
Missing me? Something thick and sneaky went down the center of my chest and into my stomach. “I only got two to my address in France, and my friend who was staying with me forwarded another two. There wasn’t anything on those.” I squeezed my hand into a fist, thinking about what he’d said. “And the… the PO Box? On my website? I let it close a long time ago. More than a year. Maybe even closer to two years ago.”
Jonah’s face went soft, his forehead scrunching.
He’d kept sending me postcards? I did the math in my head even as my heart pumped and pumped like I was doing something strenuous. Thirty-two, one every two weeks, would be… the whole time we’d been apart. He’d kept on sending them to me?
And he’d still come?
If he would have just tried a little harder to give me a smoke signal or something….
Thirty-two?
“Jonah….”
His hand gave mine another squeeze.
“What are you doing?” Grandpa Gus whisper-hissed out of fucking nowhere, honestly scaring the living shit out of me so bad that I jumped.
The hand on mine didn’t go anywhere—mine didn’t either—but I felt Jonah’s fingers tighten in surprise for a second just as we both looked over our shoulders to find the man I had seen a million times in my life standing at the doorway with his hands on his hips.
“What are you doing?” I fought the urge to take my hand from under Jonah’s.
I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I had been the first one to slip my hand into his about two weeks after we’d met. After that he’d been the one to initiate it. He’d been the first man to ever hold my hand like that. In public. Other than my gramps and Peter. But I’d think about all that later.
Even with only the side lamp on, I could see Grandpa Gus frowning from where he stood, his beady little eyes narrowing as he glanced from Jonah to me and back again, like he’d caught us having sex right on the floor.
“I came to check on my pal,” Grandpa whispered, still looking like he was trying to figure out what the hell was happening, not knowing and still disapproving.
“We were putting her to sleep,” I replied, glancing back inside the crib to see that the little body under my hand had stopped squirming. Maybe as soon as she’d felt the evil presence coming up the stairs.
Grandpa’s mouth went flat as he hummed under his breath.
“I’m not giving him a hand job or anything,” I whispered, feeling Jonah’s fingers jerk on top of mine at the same time he hissed out, “Len!”
But what did the man at the doorway do?
He snorted. “If you get pregnant one more time—”
That had Jonah choking.
“—I get to name the baby,” Grandpa Gus finished. “And the fight is starting if you’re still planning on watching it and not standing there making kissy faces at each other.”
All I managed to do was shake my head as he turned around and disappeared down the hall, having fired his shots and done his damage, aka ruining one of the most intimate moments of my entire life.
God.
Was I that easy? I’d never been deprived of attention or affection. I didn’t regret for a second not having a steady romantic relationship at any point. I wasn’t used to relying on people who weren’t Grandpa Gus or Peter or even Luna.
But now all of a sudden, I wondered…
I wondered what it would be like to have someone hold my hand and smile at me and for me to be there to do the same for them in return. To have an… extra special friend that was only mine. To have a… partner.
Not just anybody, but this one right here, with his biceps touching mine. His bare skin over my own. A person who claimed he’d sent me thirty-two postcards over the last seventeen months.
This one whose smiles made me feel better, whose playfulness seemed so attuned to me, who I could look at all day every day.
“I wonder how long it will take me to get used to the way you two are with each other,” the softly voiced man noted a few seconds after my grandpa disappeared down the hall.
“A few years at least, I bet,” I told him, still holding on a little to that piece of me that was suddenly way too curious.
I didn’t move my hand and neither did he.
“Lenny,” he said quietly.
I looked away as I pulled a blanket over Mo with my free hand and swallowed up every inch of that sweet, sweet face. “What?”
“I meant to tell you before my mum arrived….”
My stomach churned. Why did I always have to expect the worst?
“I want to start sharing Mo’s existence.”
Oh. I had a feeling I knew what he meant, but…. “What does that mean?”
“I know my mum. She would have already called my dad and told him. Word will get out sooner than later. There will be questions, there’s no stopping that, but I don’t want to make it seem like I’m hiding her. She’s no secret, and I’m thinking we should front foot, that way we can control it so the journos don’t.”
I wanted to wonder why the hell people would care if he had a child or not, but I knew better than that. I had been on his social media accounts. His Picturegram account alone had four hundred thousand followers. I’d read some of the comments, his followers even got into arguments over his hair when he got it cut.
Of course some people would care about him having a daughter. He still sold papers. Magazines. Ads on websites.
“I’d like to keep the details as vague as possible, and I’m sure there will be criticism—on me—but this is between us. The whole story, at least. People will ask questions and look you up. I’ve got nothing to hide, but I don’t want to put you into a situation you wouldn’t want to be in either. I’ll try to protect you from the media as much as I can.”
Drawing my hands back toward me, I turned to Jonah and took in his face, tossing and turning his words over in my head. He didn’t want to hide Mo’s existence, and that made me happy. I understood why he hadn’t told anyone else about her until now. But how did we handle the rest of it?
I hadn’t taken into consideration what it would be like for him to suddenly show the world this adorable baby and say, “She is mine,” out of the blue and there not be any questions. Of co
urse there were going to be questions. He was one of the most high-profile and highest paid players in a sport that was played in dozens of countries. He couldn’t just say “Surprise!” and have people roll with it.
And he couldn’t have a child without a mom. Well, he could, but I wasn’t about to hide that Mo was mine. Especially not because I was afraid of people talking shit. Ooh. Let me shake in my flip-flops. What were they going to do? Look me up? What would people say about me? He could have done better? That I could be prettier?
Fuck ’em.
And, when I really thought about it, I wasn’t about to let people drag Jonah through the mud because of whatever they might think.
Fuck that.
But…
There was the part that had nothing to do with me and what I wanted. This was his career. His lifetime of hard work.
And even though my chest suddenly ached at the idea that he would prefer to keep me hidden…. “I’m fine with you letting people know you’re a dad and that you have Mo, but I don’t know what you want to do about me in the equation. I know you keep a lot private”—I knew this from my brief period as a hormonal stalker, whatever—“and I get it, you know I do. So, I guess it’s up to you what you want to do about me.”
He blinked.
“If you don’t want people to know I’m in the picture. For the future.” I swallowed and then added hastily, “But I’m not going to lie if somebody asks. I’d just tell them it’s none of their business with maybe a cuss word or two thrown in there. Just warning you.”
He blinked again, and a tiny part of me wanted to squirm for the first time in my life.
“You know, that you had her with me,” I threw in before making myself shut the hell up.
Those long lashes dipped down over his cheeks, and Jonah pinned me with a gaze that felt heavier than any body I’d ever tried throwing in my life. His words held the same weight. “I only said that because I thought maybe you wouldn’t want anyone to tie you to me. I’m the one who lives with the criticism. It’s always going to be there, at least while I play.
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