The Best Thing

by Zapata, Mariana

  He could see it. I saw that. He could see that I wasn’t going to budge. Not anymore. Not when spending time with him had once been second nature. But that had been a long, long time ago.

  The way he said “fine” almost got to me.

  Almost.

  But I had an imaginary Kevlar vest on, so it bounced right off.

  And when Noah sneered at Jonah before basically stomping his way out of my office, all I could do was regret not giving him the official kick out of my life when he had ruined one of my dreams by being a careless prick.

  “That went well.”

  Jonah turned toward me. “You’re going to talk to him?”

  I blinked. “I’m going to listen to him. At the juice bar. In the gym. I thought I said that out loud?”

  That wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting based on the scowl on his face.

  The scowl that honestly pleased me a hell of a lot more than I would ever admit.

  I’d had friends before who got all pissed off when their boyfriends and husbands got jealous, but I couldn’t find even the tiniest bit of anger inside of me. Annoyance, yeah. But just a little.

  Because hadn’t he fucking listened? Did he not understand that I’d downgraded our conversation from dinner—when we hadn’t had dinner together by ourselves in… never—to being here at Maio House in front of people? Hello?

  I had to keep my face neutral. I wasn’t about to ruin this shit. I was going to soak it up, eat it up, and gorge on it. Then do it all over again.

  “You know what he’s planning on saying,” he accused in a voice that was almost that deadly one but not.

  He was mad.

  Hehe.

  “I don’t understand why you need to listen to that fucking arsehole.”

  Seriously, my heart soared, just flew right out of my chest and straight into the sky, and I had to keep my face straight so I wouldn’t give myself away, and it was a lot harder than I ever would have imagined.

  This beautiful, handsome, amazing man was jealous.

  Was that what joy felt like? It had to be. It fucking had to be.

  It was because of that joy, and the borderline anger on his face and the fact that he had no idea that he was making my whole year by being mad, that I put a hand on that beefy-ass upper arm and told him calmly, “I’m only going because if I don’t, he’ll never drop it. Whatever it is he’s thinking isn’t going to go away with time. He needs to totally understand what the situation is, and he won’t listen if I do that in front of you, Jonah.”

  He opened his mouth, but I kept going.

  “I’m not going to dinner with him. I don’t even want to meet with him period, and I’m only doing this because he was my friend for a long time.”

  “He hasn’t been your friend for a long time either.”

  That was a good point. “But he was my friend for a long time first. I know what I’m doing. I know who I’m dealing with. I’m talking to him for thirty minutes at the juice bar. I was trying to be considerate of your feelings, if you don’t see that.”

  This man I had so rarely seen lose his shit, huffed, shook his head, and then nodded all in less than a minute. “Bloody considerate.” He took a step back and swallowed hard. “I need to finish my workout. Good luck over juice.”

  I didn’t say shit as he walked out, and I waited to smile until he was way out of the office.

  That little jealous asshole.

  I loved it.

  * * *

  Hours later, after I’d spent two of them on the phone arguing with the cleaning company about how they had double-charged me—Maio House—I was still feeling a little on edge as I headed toward the juice bar.

  It wasn’t that I was dreading my conversation with Noah, because I wasn’t.

  I already knew what the outcome would be, and it was going to suck, and it was probably going to be uncomfortable, but… it had to be done. That chapter of my life, the one that had him in it was over. He’d made his choice, and even if he changed his mind now, it was too late.

  The thing was, he wasn’t going to change his mind.

  I could see that by the way he had reacted when I had just brought Mo up.

  The other thing was, I didn’t regret shit.

  The training facility part of the building was starting to fill up with guys filtering in slowly, taking their time talking outside of the locker rooms and making loud noises inside them. Peter was already leading his group of ten men through warm-ups that consisted of jogging the perimeters of the mats with their full gear on: head protection, shin, chest, and gloves.

  I had spilled the details about Noah showing up an hour ago when he’d first arrived, and it hadn’t been hard at all to notice the way Peter’s normally easygoing eyes had narrowed and the way his head had lulled to the side more than normal while I’d recounted most of the incident.

  Minus Jonah getting all butthurt and jealous over it. That was my own personal little treat I got to indulge in.

  The other thing I got to enjoy was the long, warm hug that Peter had given me before we’d noticed the time; he had to get back out on the floor. His arms had still been around me while he’d said in that calm way he had about him constantly, “We outgrow clothes the same way we outgrow people, Len. We change inside the same way we do outside.”

  It was that thought that I had in my heart and my head as I pushed open the door that led to the walkway and then a few moments later as I opened the connecting door to the main part of the gym. It was in its early stages of getting packed. In fifteen minutes, the cardio machines would be filled and three-fourths of the dumbbells would be missing from their racks. I waved at a few people I recognized but kept on walking, not wanting to get distracted. I had thirty minutes for this; then I was going to tell the assistant manager on duty that I was going home.

  Turning toward the juice bar, I smiled at Bianca when she caught my eyes, and she smiled back at me a second before I noticed that Noah wasn’t there. The employee behind the counter was moving quickly through whatever the customer in front of him had ordered, with a line of two more people. I fought off the irritation that Noah wasn’t around and took the last stool along the counter, hooking my knee over the top of the stool right next to me to save it.

  Under normal circumstances, I would have helped make the juices, but I really did need to get this conversation over with.

  But as one minute went by and then another, and those two turned into five and Noah still wasn’t there, this feeling of just… being resigned… of being over this shit fully hit me.

  I glanced down at my watch to see that it was five forty-four.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” the voice that belonged to Noah said over my shoulder a second before the stool I’d been saving for him got pulled out from under my thigh.

  Five forty-six.

  Some form of disappointment made my chest tighten. Pasting a blank look on my face, I waited until he’d taken the stool, watching his movements. The expectant look on his face was almost enough to get me to want to be nice to him while we did this.

  But… nah.

  Grandpa Gus said that when you made your bed, you had to sleep in it. So don’t shit or piss in it.

  And like with a lot of things, he was fucking right. You made your choices in life, and you had to deal with them. There weren’t take backs. You could never and should never expect a second chance.

  “Don’t be pissed. I forgot how much traffic there was,” he said in a huff that pierced my chest a little tighter. He was apologizing because he knew being late drove me nuts. Because he’d known me so well for a while there.

  “I’m not,” I told him honestly, because I wasn’t. “I’ve got… thirteen minutes before I have something else I need to do, so I hope you can summarize whatever it is that you need to say in that amount of time.”

  “Thirteen?”

  I’d told him I was busy, hadn’t I?

  “Jesus, Lenny, you can’t reschedule to hang out with
me?”

  Did he not know me at all? He remembered enough to know that being late drove me fucking batshit. The fact that he didn’t care enough about me and my time to leave early enough and spend the time he wanted to spend with me didn’t bother me.

  This was what I expected.

  Sometimes you really did outgrow people, no matter how much they meant to you at some point.

  “No, I can’t,” I told him calmly. “Twelve minutes now, Noah. What’s up?”

  His face went red, and he said, “Are you—” He cut himself off. Of course I was serious. He knew it. His hand went up to his face and brushed the short blond hair to the side, the back of his hand going up to draw a line across his forehead. “Len, I’m sorry. Jesus. I thought you were bullshitting.”

  No, he hadn’t.

  I slid my gaze to the right so that I wouldn’t roll my eyes.

  And when I did that, I immediately spotted the three people sitting at one of the tables across the walkway from the juice bar. There was one green and one beet red drink in between them. And a bottle there too.

  A baby bottle.

  The two biggest—the two adults—were both staring over at where I was sitting. And if my eyes weren’t deceiving me, Grandpa Gus and Jonah were sitting there muttering to each other, with Mo standing on top of Jonah’s thighs; she was the only innocent party in this entire thing.

  I wanted to be surprised. I wanted to ask myself if they were fucking for real. These two people who barely spoke to each other—mostly because Grandpa Gus still hadn’t allowed himself to join the Jonah bandwagon—apparently deciding that they were each the lesser evil, and they were now banding together to spy on me.

  Goddamn it.

  Goddamn it.

  I couldn’t fucking laugh.

  I could not fucking laugh even if it fucking killed me.

  These idiots….

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Noah move his body so that he faced the stool I was on, reminding me of why I was there and why I had to ignore the wannabe retired CIA agent and whatever secret service New Zealand had. Those two….

  Peter was going to die with me when I told him about their little meetup.

  One of Noah’s hands went to rest at the top of the bar counter, those navy eyes focused directly on me, searching and searching… like he hadn’t seen me before. He looked sad and a little tired and stressed. I’d forgotten he’d lost his last fight, and there was no way that hadn’t stung his ego.

  But I didn’t feel pity. I didn’t feel bad. I just wanted to get this over with. To be done.

  The hand he had on the counter inched closer to where mine was, and I wasn’t sure whether to look at it or at him as he said, in a voice too soft, “Look, I… I miss you, Len.”

  I faced him again, expecting some level of tenderness to flood me, but getting nothing.

  “I miss talking to you about shit.”

  A hundred different examples of proof of how that couldn’t exactly be true and hadn’t been in a decade went right through my head, but I was proud of myself for keeping my mouth shut.

  “I know that I’ve fucked up a lot. I know that I’ve said a lot of stuff to hurt you, but I love you.” His fingertips grazed mine, and I had to make sure not to look in the direction of Inspector Gadget or Pink Panther again as much as I wanted to.

  “We’ve been through everything together,” he kept right on going, and I knew I was going to have to stop him because this little declaration was pointless. “No one knows me better than you, or ever will. I’m sorry, Lenny. For everything. I just… I don’t know. I got so mad at you for getting fucking pregnant. It felt like you cheated on me.”

  Cheated on him? Okay.

  My eyes strayed toward the table beyond, where I could see Grandpa Gus’s lips moving, probably talking shit—all right, not probably, for sure talking shit, this was Grandpa Gus after all—and Jonah nodding in response.

  I had wanted these two to bond, and what the hell did they have to bond over?

  Hating Noah.

  I swear I didn’t understand my life sometimes.

  “Lenny?”

  He’d caught me. I glanced back at him and raised my eyebrows. “Yeah?”

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yeah. Mostly,” I told him the truth because, well… it was the truth. And if he looked butthurt about it, I didn’t know what to say.

  He did look butthurt on second glance. His forehead was wrinkling, and he was frowning, insulted. “You don’t give a fuck about what I’m telling you?”

  I couldn’t help but give him a long look as I thought about the two goobers sitting together. “It isn’t that I don’t care, Noah. I do. I care about you. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you. But you telling me that you love me and that you’re sorry for the things that you’ve said….” I drew my hands up at my sides as I shrugged at him. “I will always love and care about you, frankly, and maybe I missed something, but we haven’t been in each other’s lives in forever.”

  The fingertips on mine jerked away, and I couldn’t say I wasn’t glad.

  “Noah, come on. You were here a year ago, but the only time you ever talked to me was when you wanted me to help you train.”

  He opened his mouth like he was going to argue but shut it right back.

  “But you don’t love me.”

  “Yeah, I do,” he insisted, leaning forward, expression intense. “I always have.”

  It was way too hard to keep a straight face. “No, you haven’t. Maybe you’ve convinced yourself that you do, but it isn’t real. If you’re going to feel that way about someone, it should be honest. It shouldn’t be because my daughter’s dad is here and you decided to get all possessive for no reason. You care about me, in your own way, but you don’t love me, Noah.”

  My words weren’t sinking in. I could tell. “I’ve loved you my whole fucking life, Len!” he claimed, eyes moving around to see if anyone had heard him. I didn’t give a fuck if someone did, so I didn’t bother caring. “Always. There’s never been a fucking day when I didn’t.”

  “You should’ve thought about that at some point before I was pregnant, and I wanted my friend around. When I needed some support and you made it out to seem like I was walking around with radiation poisoning. You called me a slut.” I gave him a smile that wasn’t a happy one by any means. “I needed you, and you left me. Not just now but years ago. I used to fucking take you to the hospital, Noah. I stayed with you the whole time, and that was when you needed stitches.”

  He tipped his head back. “You’re going to bring that shit up? I was eighteen. I wanted to go away to school, and you’re still pissed off about that? I didn’t give you shit for graduating early.”

  Oh hell. Yeah, none of this was doing anything. I couldn’t help but snort and look up at the ceiling as I shook my head.

  He wasn’t the boy who had been my brother and best friend. He wasn’t anyone I knew anymore. And that really did suck.

  “You know what, Noah? Yeah, I’m going to bring the past up. Because all of this goes back to you not being a real friend to me since then. I never would have just been a chickenshit and gone away to school without giving you a fucking warning. Without telling you I was thinking about it. You never even apologized to me over fucking up my ribs back then either; you know how fucking shitty that is?”

  Noah opened his mouth, but I wasn’t letting him get another chance. I’d given his ass enough chances, and I was done. I had been done years ago.

  But fuck it.

  I didn’t give a shit anymore.

  “But none of that matters anymore, Noah, because you don’t really love me. You don’t even really care about me. Because now I know what that’s supposed to be like, and it isn’t supposed to be like this. You don’t get to be territorial and ugly to anyone in my life. Sorry you realized too late that I’m pretty fucking awesome and that I have no gag reflex. But I love Mo and wouldn’t trade her for fucking anything, and I love her dad
too, and they’re what I want. And I don’t say that to hurt you, but so that you know that even if Jonah wasn’t around, Mo always will, and if I could go back in time, I would still have her. And I can see that you could never look at her and see a child you could love. You don’t love me enough to love something I do, and that right there is the biggest neon sign in this shit.”

  I pinned him with a glare and shrugged. “I get it, I really do, and I don’t blame you. It’s fine, but you don’t have a single right to say anything to me about anything.”

  I saw his face change. Saw the anger take over his features. But he let me finish talking. He listened, at least to part of it.

  Not enough based on the comment he went with next.

  “You think you love that asshole?” was what he asked. “I’ve known you our entire lives. We used to be able to look at each other and know exactly what we were thinking.”

  When we had been teenagers.

  “And you’re going to choose some dipshit you’ve only known for a couple months over me?”

  Oh fucking hell.

  I just sat there and watched his features twist and turn as I leaned back into my stool. I was done with this conversation. I wasn’t about to waste my time going over this shit in circles, and unfortunately, words had never been my strong suit, but they were going to have to be enough. “Noah,” I told him as calmly as possible, digging in real deep for all that “mom patience” I’d developed… not that there was much of it, “he’s not an asshole. He’s not even close to being an asshole, and I could give you all the reasons why he isn’t, but I’m not. But, yeah, I do love him, and it isn’t choosing one person over the other. That’s not at all what it’s like, and the fact that you think that says everything.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  I shook my head and couldn’t help but smile. I had known exactly what I was walking into. Hadn’t I? Yeah, and that only made the next words out of my mouth a little easier. But they came out after I slid off my stool and paused before pecking Noah on the temple. Standing up beside where he sat, I told him as seriously as I could, “It means that it isn’t that I love him because I don’t want to love you. It’s that I know him, and I can’t help it.”