Filed to story: The Best Thing by Mariana Zapata
“It’s me. Again. Lenny. I went by your apartment. Akira told me they haven’t heard from you either. Look, a ruptured Achilles isn’t the end of the world, even though it feels that way, okay? And I’m sure your face will be fine once the swelling goes down. Don’t be all vain and shit. At least text me back.”
I knew that I wasn’t even trying to hide my bad mood when the second person in less than an hour walked into the office, looked at me, and then turned around and walked right back out, not saying a word.
It was that shitty.
Never, ever had I been the kind of person who bottled shit up and let it fester in the first place. For as long as I could remember, Grandpa Gus had made me talk things out to get whatever out of my system. If that didn’t work, then there were other things I could do to calm down again. To reel back. To center. Pressure makes everything pop, he said.
But despite being fully aware that meditation helped me relax and focus—some days it helped me not think, and other days it helped me think about things that were bothering me but without raging—I didn’t do it. I hadn’t woken up and hopped on the stationary bike either to get out of my head. I knew better.
I had tossed and turned the entire night, staring up at the ceiling and then listening to a true crime podcast because I hadn’t wanted to turn on the television or go downstairs because I didn’t want to risk running into Grandpa Gus, having him see that something—someone—was up my ass and wondering about it. Because he always knew when something was up. Always.
And I wasn’t ready to tell him the things he needed to know.
Not yet. Not while I wasn’t completely convinced I could be rational. So I was going to blame keeping things from him as the reason for my crappy mood the next day. That and a night of sleeping like shit, mixed with the anticipation, anger, and hurt, made this uncomfortable stone that didn’t want to pass through my system.
Picking up my cell phone, I ignored the spreadsheet on my desktop screen and sent a text message I should have the day before. If I couldn’t tell Grandpa, there was someone else I needed to have a conversation with. Someone younger, less hairy, and a hell of a lot nicer.
Me: You busy today?
It took ten minutes to get a response.
Luna: Nope. :] What’s going on?
I shook my foot beneath the desk, thinking about what I needed to tell my best friend of the last eleven years.
Me: Nothing bad, but I need to tell you something, and it’ll be easier in person.
That time there was only a one-minute delay in getting a reply.
Luna: Tell me now please.
Me: I didn’t pee myself again, if that’s what you’re about to ask.
I only partially regretted telling her that I’d peed myself a month ago because I’d sneezed too hard after holding it in too long.
Only thirty seconds passed before I got another text.
Luna: I thought for sure that’s what it was going to be!
Me: WTF is that exclamation mark for, bish? Don’t sound so disappointed.
Luna: It’s been a long day. A girl can dream.
Luna: I can come over tonight.
Me: [middle finger emoji]
Me: You okay?
Luna: [laughing emoji] I’ll text you when Rip gets home so he can stay with my shortcake. I’m taking her to the doctor in an hour. She’s been pulling at her ear and crying. I feel so guilty she’s feeling bad is all.
The fact that we were talking about her baby, planning around a little thing named Ava, was just another reminder of how quickly life could change. Just two years ago, everything had been normal. Or at least what normal had been for us at that point. She’d had a guy in her life—not that her now-husband was a guy; he was a big hunk of a man—but things had changed.
Once upon a time, I had been a nineteen-year-old with maybe two friends who were girls, and Luna had been an eighteen-year-old who had smiled her way through a self-defense class that I had taught at Maio House for a little extra cash. I had asked her out to eat because I had liked how nice she had been to the other women in the class. I didn’t like judgy-ass people, and that was why I had invited her. I was competitive enough, but I didn’t give a fuck what other people did or didn’t do, and Luna hadn’t given me a single vibe that said she was anything but easygoing. And, as I learned, she really was about as laidback as you could get.
I fell in love with her within a month. She was kind, patient, optimistic, and was so chill, it relaxed me. Luna was a whole lot of shit that I wasn’t. We spent the next eight years navigating through life together. Two girls with a lot in common but at the same time nothing in common, trying to survive and grow up. Then she got a boyfriend—and again, not that there was any boy in him—and right around that time, everything changed.
The next thing I knew, I was thirty-one years old, and the only thing in my life that was the same was my grandfather and Peter existing in it. Even my relationship with Luna had changed a little. I no longer knew who the hell this new person in my body and in my mind was. Not that it was bad or that I didn’t like myself, but… I was just different. Everything was different. Circumstances had changed. I had changed. Everything about life had too. Like when you lose weight or gain it and aren’t sure how you fit in your own skin anymore.
You aren’t who you used to be.
And you aren’t totally sure how it happened or when it happened, but it did.
And that was supposed to be okay. At least that was my grandpa’s sage-ass advice. God knows he made up shit all the time, but it made sense… in a way. Like how, by the time every seven years rolls around, every cell in your body has been replaced by new ones. You’re different. You’re supposed to be. It’s inevitable. It’s natural.
Life keeps evolving whether you want it to or not.
And I wasn’t about to whine about it.
Me: Okay. I’ll text you when I get home, but it should be at the same time. Hope my goddaughter feels better, and chill out. It’s not your fault she’s sick.
I pushed all those thoughts aside: about needing to tell her the truth, about being different, about my worries, about my fucking regrets too, and cast one last look at the frame sitting on my desk. I focused back on the spreadsheet I needed to go through so I could send it off to the gym’s accountant by the end of the week.
Jonah Collins was going to call, or he wasn’t. He was going to come here, or he wasn’t. There was nothing I could do to stop it other than calling someone in immigration and claiming he was smuggling drugs in his butthole. So….
I glanced at the picture on my desk then got back to work, turning the playlist on my phone on, which pushed it through a small Bluetooth speaker. Somewhere in the background, I heard the sound of voices coming back into the gym. Heard the sound of bodies colliding. I thought about whether I should go out on the floor and take advantage of Peter working on Brazilian jiu-jitsu skills today since my shoulder wasn’t aching more than normal, unlike the day before. It had been at least a couple weeks since the last time I’d gotten on the mats with anyone, and even then, that had only been for about fifteen minutes to show one of the new girls how to do a submission choke she had been struggling with.
Meh.
Or maybe I’d just hop on an elliptical later and get a few miles of HIIT—high-intensity interval training—in to get my heart rate nice and elevated and burn some calories. Yeah, that sounded like a better idea.
I got back to work on cataloging expenses. Everything familiar and usual, or at least that was what I thought. I had my head full of numbers as I copied some expenses into the computer and was just lightly mumbling along to my 90s playlist when I heard the knock, knock on my opened door. Two lazy, light knocks.
Nothing special. Nothing to warn me.
“Come in,” I called out, trying to hold back a sigh because, to be fair, it was nobody’s fault I was in a shitty mood other than my own.
So when the footsteps treaded across the floor, I was still trying to tell myself to snap the hell out of it. Maybe I didn’t need to be in a good mood, but I didn’t need to be in a bad one either. Nobody deserved me being a bitch today. Not even my own body deserved that kind of stress.
Things were going to happen, or they weren’t. It was that simple, and I knew it. I just couldn’t convince the rest of me that that was the case.
So when the footsteps stopped and a throat was cleared, I took my sweet time looking away from my computer screen to take in the poor idiot who was being brave by coming into the office.
And that’s when everything went to fucking shit.
At least that was what it felt like.
Like someone saw me living my life, minding my own business, trying my goddamn best, then decided to pick it up and throw it into a fire, just to watch it go up in flames.
I wasn’t ready for the wide shoulders taking up the width of the hallway that separated the office from the rest of this part of the gym. I wasn’t ready for the long, strong legs, that had led up to a body wrapped in nothing but layers of muscle, in my space. That body that out of so, so, so many I had seen over the years had done something to my internal organs—including my heart, if I was going to be honest.
I had seen so many half-naked men in my life that I had become desensitized to six-packs, ripped arms, and good-looking faces. I had never put any weight into physical beauty, honestly. I remember once, when I had been about fifteen or sixteen, telling Peter that I was worried about how much I didn’t really care about boys. Or girls. I knew that some guys were attractive, but it didn’t do anything to me. I hadn’t found myself wishing for a fucking boyfriend. Most people I knew wanted to be in relationships, and I just hadn’t given a fuck. Peter, though, had told me that there was nothing wrong with me.
You’re perfect the way you are, he had said, like it was no big deal.
It hadn’t been like I was lonely. I had friends. I had things to keep me busy. I had been a healthy teenager who got curious one night, put my hand over my underwear, and discovered that I really enjoyed masturbating. And that’s what I did, frequently. But I’d never felt the urge back then to have someone else make me orgasm when I could do it myself pretty damn well.
I had enough nonsexual physical interactions with other people that it wasn’t like I missed affection or any shit like that. When I usually thought about guys, I thought about how bad they smelled when their deodorants wore off and how bitchy they got when things went wrong, but that I enjoyed working with them because they were stronger than I was and helped me better prepare to compete against other females who weren’t.
And if there had been a short period in there where I’d thought I might have had feelings for my friend, that was one thing, but I’d come to terms with that real quick, and I’d moved on from that idea just as fast.
As I got older, I hadn’t been hoping to meet anyone. It wasn’t something I thought about period. Not even for sex because I doubted anything could compare to my vibrators or my hand or my toss pillow that I kept hidden on a shelf in my closet.
I didn’t have my first kiss until I was twenty. Only had sex at the same age because kissing had been all right and I was curious if sex was worth all the hype. I’d done it with a friend from college who had been a year younger than me and had been a virgin too. Sex had been like the time I took up rock climbing out of curiosity for a few months. Done and never repeated after those few times.
And then, I’d met him.
If I closed my eyes, I was 99 percent positive I could still picture those massive shoulders capped with rounded muscles. The biceps bigger than my head. The forearms that made my calves look puny. I’d never be able to forget how solid his pectorals had been in profile, or how perfect his flatly muscled abs were as they sloped into a waist that was so trim, most people would have a hard time believing just how much food it could pack away.
Most importantly though, there had been that damn smile. That had done it.
That dipshit… that fucker… had been an awakening that hit me out of nowhere the first time I saw him. Like those kids in videos who get hearing aids and can hear for the first time, and you get to witness their life changing. Or color-blind people who get glasses and can finally totally see all the fucking colors you take for granted because you can’t appreciate having something that seems so natural.
That’s what it had been like to look at him for the first time.
And if that wasn’t enough, that two-hundred-and-fifty-pound body was connected to the face that had had me doing a double take. A forehead dotted with countless tiny scars on it, a nose that was still in great shape considering he had told me that it had been broken multiple times. Then there was the tanned skin stretched tight over high cheekbones, the lightest honey-colored eyes that were almost almond-shaped, and a mouth that was almost fake from how pink its lips were.
A year ago, when I’d been having a really bad night, I’d looked Jonah Ho-bag Collins up online, and in the process, found a list of the twenty-two sexiest rugby players in the world.
Of course, he’d been on it.
Maybe I hadn’t known who he was when we met, but I’d been an exception. There had been no reason for me to recognize him. And as I took him in right then, in that moment, it struck me just how familiar his face seemed to me now. How familiar those features, especially those eyes and skin color, were. I had to hold my breath for a second it hit me so hard.
But this was a face that I hadn’t seen in seventeen months. That mix of rugged yet handsome bones and bright eyes had disappeared on me. That mouth had never called me back.
The face looking back at me in my office hadn’t liked me back as much as I had thought it did.
This face was on a person who had made me cry in fucking fury and disappointment. This face that was the second one to ever make me feel used and fucking stupid. I’d dreamed, literally dreamed, about punching the fucking face looking at me.
Stop.
I knew what was important. I knew what mattered. I knew what I had told myself I would do, even if it were hard as hell.
Most importantly though, I was no weak bitch.
It took a second, but I did it.
I focused, and I clung to it, but I accepted and processed the truth: this stupid face had given me joy… and love—and not a little bit, but a lot. So much that I wasn’t going to instantly chuck my stapler at him like I really wanted to or scream “stranger danger” so someone else could beat him up for me.
I had gotten over the bone structure facing me. I didn’t give a flying shit over the clear, honey-colored eyes that were set into those sockets below heavy, dark eyebrows. I felt nothing good for the man suddenly standing in my office in fitted jeans and an olive-green hoodie that hugged every part of an upper body that hadn’t lost a single pound of muscle since the last time I had seen it.
I wasn’t going to get mad. I wasn’t going to cuss him out or do any other stupid shit. I was going to handle this.
I had promised myself that if this day ever came, I would do what I had to do. With some honor. With some pride.
But that didn’t mean I had to be nice.
And it was because I didn’t feel shit anymore for this specific person—because hating his guts didn’t really count—that I didn’t even raise my eyebrows at his random appearance after seventeen fucking months, even as some part of my brain freaked out at the fact that Peter had literally just told me about him yesterday. Yesterday. The same day I had just read about him not signing his contract.
He was here, in Houston of all places, when he had told me before he’d only been to the United States twice and both times had been for work.
God, I couldn’t believe this fucker actually had the balls to be here.
I took a breath in through my nose and let it right back out. Seventeen months. It has been seventeen months since the last time I’ve seen him, I reminded myself.
I had this.
“Jonah.” I let that sense of I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-you flow over my arms and up into my throat, making it easier to say his name. To look at him.
There was nothing he could do that I couldn’t fight. There was nothing he could say that would possibly hurt me. I had prepared for this. I’d warned myself it might happen… one day maybe ten years from now, when, hopefully, I might be hot as hell and living my best life, so I could rub it in his face that I was better than ever. That I hadn’t missed or needed his ass for a second.
This asshole with those honey-colored eyes had the nerve to stand there, watching me, with all those muscles and that face and that green hoodie and those jeans and that closely cropped hair and smoothly shaved jaw, and say, all soft and almost shyly, and in that fucking accent that had been the second thing to catch my attention, “Hi, Lenny.”
Hi, Lenny.
He’d Hi, Lenny-d me.
This fucking long and he was going to go with “Hi, Lenny” like we had seen each other a week ago at the grocery store?
I can do this, I repeated to myself.
If I could have reached my stress ball, I would have, but I couldn’t, at least not without him noticing, and I wasn’t going to give him the gift of seeing me squeezing my ball to keep my shit together in his presence.
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, MÄori, 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.