Filed to story: The Best Thing by Mariana Zapata
“Jonah, it’s Lenny. Look, you really need to call me back. I’m not fucking with you. Seriously.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He was lucky I had Mo in my arms when that stupid question came out of his mouth, because if I’d had my hands free, I would have been sliding over the desk like I was on Dukes of Hazard to choke the shit out of him.
I was pretty sure a lawyer somewhere would have let me plead Jonah’s murder as a crime of passion. But unfortunately, I was never going to find out because of the kid sitting in my lap. Her simple existence was saving me from a life in prison and saving her dad—not that she knew he was her dad—from being murdered.
I could feel my face getting hot as I stared at him like I had never stared at anyone, not even someone I was competing against that I had beef with. His same stupid question rang in my ears all over again.
Why didn’t you tell me?
Why the fuck didn’t I tell him? Was he shitting me? Was he delusional?
Yeah, my nostrils were flaring, my face was hot, and my eyelid suddenly felt like it was on the verge of exploding off my face as I took in the man clutching at a chair for dear life. Even his mouth hung open like all the life had been sucked out of him. I was pretty sure I wasn’t imagining the fact that he looked on the verge of fainting either.
I kept my mouth shut though, at least while I had this booger on my lap. I didn’t want her getting all flustered because she could sense me getting that way. She was sensitive, and if she’d sensed me even starting to get upset, whether it was sadness or anger, she’d immediately pick up on it and get fussy.
So, with all the strength I had inside of myself, I kept my voice nice and even, tried to will my eyelid to get its shit together and my face to quit being hot and my nostrils to go back to normal. I managed to put a smile on my face, even though part of me was making stabbing motions inside, and asked, almost sounding sweet, “Why didn’t I tell you?”
God, the sarcasm was dripping off every word out of my mouth.
I bounced Mo on my thigh, earning a big toothless grin. We were pretty sure she was about to start teething soon, a little late but the pediatrician said not to worry, and from everything I’d heard, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, but that wasn’t for me to focus on right then. I had bigger things to stress over. Specifically six foot five inches and two hundred and fifty pounds of fuckface to focus on.
I kept my voice light…ish even though I gave him a bitchy bright smile. “What do you consider me calling you and calling you, and calling you some more? Me not trying to talk to you?”
He didn’t answer, and whether that was because he borderline fainted or because he knew I was right, I had no fucking idea. Mostly because I didn’t give him the chance to talk because I kept going.
“You never answered, Jonah. And I left you… oh, I don’t know… a dozen messages too. I did that until you stopped checking your voice mail and let it get full and stay full.”
Jonah Collins brought both hands up to palm his forehead.
Why didn’t I tell him? He was either a master liar, an asshole, or just… a jackass. I wasn’t done though. “There were the texts too. It might have gotten old deleting every email I sent you, but I did try to contact you until right after she was born. So… I did try and tell you. Don’t try and turn this around on me.”
I thought about his words for a moment, watching his palms scrub over his forehead as he forced one loud, ragged breath after another.
Was he having a panic attack? He wasn’t straight-up wheezing, but it wasn’t much off. What a fucking asshole.
I stared at him, my anger rising. “Is that what you’re trying to imply? That you either didn’t care enough to listen to my voice mails, read my texts, or my emails? That you didn’t know?” I told him on a whoosh, my stomach clenching up in pure fucking fury that almost made me want to throw up. On him.
Because it had pissed me off when I thought he didn’t care enough to reply, but the possibility he hadn’t listened or read a single fucking thing I’d sent him over nearly nine months, might have honestly been worse.
I wasn’t going to overanalyze it and figure out what won because it didn’t matter.
I didn’t look at him, and because I didn’t look at him, I didn’t see his reactions.
The only thing of his that I did catch was probably the hoarse curse word he spit out. “Fuck.”
He could say that again.
Why was he making it seem like he didn’t know? I’d left him so many voice mails, emails, and texts. So many. And he wanted me to believe he had either not gotten them or ignored every single one?
Motherfucker.
Piece of shit.
Asshole.
Of course this would happen to me. The one time I picked out a guy who I felt comfortable with, who I was unbelievably attracted to, who I liked so much, who seemed like a decent human being… who wore a condom and everything… knocked me up during the two months of almost nightly sex we’d had. Then his life had gone to hell, and he’d disappeared.
Like some of the assholes in my life did. They just left me for other people to be there for me. Or for me to be there for myself.
And that was where my sad sob story ended.
So what, I had asked myself back then, once I’d made my decision to have Mo? So what if the baby’s dad wasn’t going to be in the picture? So what if I was going to raise this kid without him?
I was thirty, not sixteen, I had told myself. I had a grandpa, a Peter, a Luna, a sister of a Luna, a Ripley, a Cooper couple. I had friends.
I had been raised by a village, and my daughter was and would be too.
Everything had been going fine too, not counting that nonstop worrying and the fuckups.
Yet none of that made me feel any less pissed off toward this asshole having the nerve to look like he’d seen a ghost. Like he had any right to be mad or upset. Like I hadn’t fucking tried telling him a hundred times he was going to be a dad.
He’d known.
He had to have known.
And on the tiniest, tiniest chance that maybe he’d been an extra prick and had ignored everything I had tried to tell him…
Well, I still couldn’t believe that was possible. He was an athlete. He’d told me about having endorsements. He was a human being with family. There was no way he’d ignored all forms of communication. It was stupid for him to even try and pull that lie on me.
It had just been me he’d ignored.
Goddamn it, I hated his guts.
“You… you…,” the mountain of a man stuttered, quietly, forcing me to take in his pale face. But at the same time, making me notice the way those huge shoulders had started to hunch too.
I stared steadily at him, leaning forward just enough to take another whiff of Mo’s clean baby smell because I needed it for fuel to get through this ridiculous-ass conversation. “You what?”
Jonah reared up to that height that had been one of the first things I’d noticed about him, and he breathed out with wide honey-colored eyes that were bouncing back and forth between Mo’s spine and myself. “I listened to the first two months of voice mails….”
Did he want a gold star or something?
I glared at him as Mo gave a wiggle warning me she was going to want to be put down soon. She was already rolling from her stomach to her back. I had a feeling it was going to be no time before she was crawling… or even fucking walking.
And really, what the hell was wrong with this asshole?
One of those big, hard hands went up to the top of his head, and I couldn’t miss how it shook in the process. Fucking faker. “I broke my phone, but I didn’t… I didn’t….” He kept going, looking worse and worse with every word out of his mouth. Paler and paler, sick….
This was what he was trying to say? That he conveniently hadn’t read any of my texts either? Just the ones at the beginning, and then he’d given up on the rest of them because he’d broken his little phone? That’s where this was going?
Yeah, fucking right. I rolled my eyes. “Okay,” I told him, sarcastic as hell. How fucking convenient was that?
His shoulders dropped, and his fingers curved over his nearly buzz-cut head.
And then he pissed me off even more when he peered over at me through his eyelashes, those honey-colored irises flashing. “You didn’t say anything about being pregnant!” he suddenly exploded quietly on an exhale, color literally flooding his face. His tanned cheeks with faint honey freckles over the bridge of his nose and across his cheekbones went pink.
I didn’t tell him I was pregnant? Was this bitch for real? Was he trying to turn this around on me? No. No, he couldn’t be.
He was shaking, I could see he was shaking, but what-the-fuck ever.
“I’m sorry, Jonah, that you chose not to call me back or read my emails. I didn’t know I was pregnant when I first started calling you and you were still listening to my messages, supposedly. I’m sorry that I was just contacting you because I was worried about you. I’m sorry that I didn’t think to plan that you would only listen to my messages for the first… what? Two months or so, you said? Or that I waited until the last few months of my pregnancy to straight-up tell you over email.” I rolled my eyes. “Dipshit.”
Fury backed up my throat as I won the hardest match of my life and somehow managed to keep my tone cheerful even though I was literally ready to go to jail for the remainder of my life if I could beat him with a bat. Fuck it. “Are you going to pretend like I didn’t blow you up for months? That you broke your phone and that’s why I never heard back from you? Do you really want to make it seem like I’m the one who forced you to ignore me for so long?” I asked him, hoping that didn’t come out as borderline hysterical as it felt in my chest and in my brain and in every goddamn part of my body.
But I wasn’t done. Oh no. “I don’t know about you, Jonah, but if someone were to leave me a ton of voice mails and text messages and notes on my apartment door, I would actually call them back. I wouldn’t be a coward—”
“I haven’t checked my email since then, Lenny,” he said roughly, his accent coming out thicker, his voice cracking at the end even as the pink across his cheeks became deeper, stretching up to the tips of his ears. “Since I broke my phone. I swear!”
Did I look like an idiot?
I smiled at him again, and I knew he could see the smart-ass there. “If you want to play this I had no idea game, go for it, but I’m not an idiot. No smart, reasonable person would suddenly just disappear from the world and kill their career. You would have been communicating with someone. You just weren’t communicating with me.”
I was not mad. I was not.
The hand that wasn’t already on his head went up to meet the other one, where he cupped the expanse of his scalp, breathing harder than I had ever, ever seen before, and that was saying something because I had seen him right after finishing a rugby game when he’d been exhausted and riled up and sweaty. I’d been in the stands and he’d come over and kissed me on the cheek—
God, I hated his guts.
“Lenny,” he said, luckily ripping me out of that memory with the jagged quality of his voice, like it hurt him to speak. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know about… about….”
It was the strangest thing, seeing a human body imitate a balloon that had been pricked by a needle just small enough to make its ultimate death slow.
But that was what I saw.
And I wasn’t sure what to think of it other than be suspicious.
This enormous asshole who weighed more than any other person in the building slowly sank to his knees behind the chair he’d been gripping onto for dear life minutes ago. If I hadn’t been watching him so closely, I would have figured he fainted, but no, he’d just… dissolved. Both of his hands were all of a sudden gripping the back of the chair again, his body curled so that his forehead was pressed into the material in between his hands. And he was gasping for breath.
Was this a joke? Was he acting? I didn’t see what he would get out of any of this but…
He was faking it. He had to be.
Jackass.
After a moment, his face lifted and his eyes moved back to Mo like… I wasn’t sure how, honestly. Shocked, mostly. A little anger resided somewhere in there, but mostly… mostly it was surprise hidden in his eyes as he looked at the dark-haired baby on my lap…. with the same honey-colored eyes he saw in the mirror every day even though he didn’t know it.
He was faking it.
“You…,” he stuttered, those big hands still clinging to the chair with white knuckles. “The messages….”
In my lap, Mo started to fuss, and I knew I only had a few moments before I had to set her down.
“You’re serious?”
I didn’t even bother responding to that stupid-ass question.
“She’s… she’s my daughter?” Jonah Collins asked with all the speed of a damn turtle, each word basically whispered and gasped at the same time, making it really easy for a moment to reconcile him with the man I had known who had been sweeter and more easygoing than any other man I had ever known before.
But I forgot about him just as easily because she’s my daughter?
I wasn’t going to waste my time responding to stupid questions.
Then the man who was clinging to a chair and watching me with glassy eyes, went there, softly, but he still fucking went there. “Are you sure?”
I’d taken four different pregnancy tests when I missed my period because I hadn’t wanted to believe it was possible, that this was happening to me. I’d asked the doctor to test me twice when I had gotten around to going to a physician in France. Since I’d been fifteen, my period had been like clockwork. It was more reliable than my first car had been.
Hadn’t I told this fucker multiple times I could count the number of times I’d had sex on two hands?
“You can say I’m sure that you and I were together a lot exactly nine months before Mo was born. And I’m sure that she has the same eyes and hair as you do,” I told him coolly, but really stabbing him in the throat in my head.
He didn’t say anything. What he did do was squeeze his eyes closed. Gulp.
I felt myself sneer. “Why are you looking like you’re going to be sick?” I demanded, even though I didn’t want to, but I was pissed, and him looking like that just made me even madder. He had no right.
Jonah lowered his forehead until it was back to resting on the chair in front of him, and I could barely hear him as he mumbled, “Because it feels like I am.”
I narrowed my eyes and started to lift Mo up to wobble on feet that weren’t yet ready to walk, when her squirming got worse. She was going to need to go in the playpen sooner than later, but I was feeling real damn clingy right then.
The Fucker tipped his face back up to the ceiling, eyes closed, and took so many deep breaths in through his nose and out of his mouth that I lost count.
“She’s really…. She’s mine?” Jonah Hema Collins stammered at some point.
I glared the fuck out of him, annoyed he was asking the same damn questions again. But I saw the same things that I’d been seeing. The white-knuckled grip. The unsteady body. I could hear what might have sounded like anguish in that voice that had pulled an Ariel in The Little Mermaid on me.
And I had to fucking think about it.
If anyone else was trying to claim this bullshit to someone I knew, I would tell them they were full of it. That there was no way it was possible for someone to just disconnect like that. And I wanted to believe that, I really did. But Jonah didn’t look right.
The fact was, his hands had been shaking. His mouth and skin were pale again. Unless he’d been practicing in the mirror for the last year and a half, what were the chances he could make himself look like he’d been kicked in the balls repeatedly?
But still… if something seemed too good to be true, it’s because it was.
Like he had been.
Too nice. Too easygoing. Too humble. Too good-looking. Too perfect.
Too interested in me.
The fact was… it didn’t matter who he had seemed to be and who he hadn’t. It was this man in front of me I was going to have to deal with… potentially for the rest of my life if I didn’t kill him first. And all it took was a quiet stream of gibberish from the kid in my hands to remind me I’d do anything for her.
Even put up with and get past this asshole. Set aside all the shit and just… deal. Handle it.
“I don’t want to talk in circles around this; if you knew, if you didn’t know, it doesn’t matter anymore.” I was mostly lying, but not totally. “I thought that’s why you were here. To see her. To talk about her. The only thing that matters now is if you’re going to stay. If you’re going to be part of her life or not. Like I said, I don’t actually give a fuck about your excuses anymore, Jonah. I just want to know what you plan on doing.”
I stopped talking because he dropped his hands.
And because it almost made me feel sick that I was going to have to put up with his dumbass for who knew how long.
This massive, intimidating man who tackled men just as big as him for a living without pads, with just the sheer size and strength of himself, lifted his head and eyed the kid I was bouncing up and down on my lap… and me. And I couldn’t miss how he looked more like a popped balloon than ever. How… defeated or something. Sick.
His shoulders went up, and I’d swear he sniffed.
He fucking sniffed and my arms bubbled up with goose bumps.
And I hated myself for how my heart dropped as I watched him. Maybe because I’d seen grown men in all stages of despair before: after lost fights when they were disappointed in themselves, after fights when they thought their lives and worlds were over. I’d seen men and women when life was just taking a massive shit on them and they weren’t sure how the hell to get out from under the weight of all that crap.
But I had never, ever seen someone so big look so small.
And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that I felt bad. It wasn’t my fault.
Mostly though, I was pretty sure I didn’t like the way he looked or that it affected me.
“Are you about to cry?” I asked him, hearing the horror in my voice, but it was only because I didn’t know what the fuck to do with it. With him.
His answer was another sniff.
And then his fucking eyes went and got glassy.
I narrowed mine even more, ignoring the tightening in my chest as his tanned hand went up to his temple. And in that way that reminded me of the man I thought I had gotten to know, he answered, “I may, Len.”
Did he have to answer that honestly? Goddamn it. Was I that annoying too when I told people the truth even when they didn’t want to hear it?
“Her name is Mo?” that voice with its New Zealand tones to it, asked on the end of another sniff that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle.
I pressed my lips together, ignoring those fucking sniffs and the way they made my head, and other parts of my body, feel. “Did you think I was going to name her Jonah?” I griped, still watching him, trying to pick up on his body language. “Her name is Madeline. I saw it was popular in New Zealand,” I explained honestly, because that was exactly why I had done it. “But we call her Mo.”
That first-base-sized hand went to his chest just as his eyes closed, and he took in this breath that seemed so rattled, it might have hurt me if I still gave a single fuck about him.
Jonah’s head tipped toward the ceiling, and he wiped at his cheek with one of his tan fingers as his Adam’s apple bobbed—and nope, I didn’t feel shit. I didn’t feel a thing while he wiped at his olive cheek, leaving behind just the slightest glitter behind. “I… need a minute, Lenny. I came back to apologize. To try and talk to you again after this morning. I wasn’t expecting…,” he said so quietly I had to strain to hear. I blinked. “I need more than a minute to think about this. Is that all right with you?”
No. I wanted to give him a middle finger and a kick to the fucking balls, that would be all right with me. But what he actually got was silence. He could do with that whatever he wanted.
Dickface.
I didn’t say anything as he opened his eyes, cast another long look at Mo’s back… glanced at me for another moment, and then seemed to nod to himself. I was pretty positive his eyes were even glassier too. I watched him turn around and walk right out after another exhale, shoulders slumped, everything about his arms and shoulders and even his neck and chest were just… suspicious.
I wasn’t sure what to think about what the hell he’d just said and done. Wasn’t sure how I felt because obviously I was confused because I’d felt bad at how upset he seemed to be. And that irritated me.
With a sigh, I looked down at Mo and blew out a breath. Her bright brown eyes were zeroed in on me, like she wasn’t sure how I was feeling. Then she smiled and grabbed the collar of my shirt and tried to tug it toward her, choking me a little in the process.
It was then I remembered why I was here. Why I’d just gone through this conversation. How the hell this child made me a weak bitch and a stronger bitch at the same time was beyond me.
“Well, that didn’t go the way I thought it would,” I told her quietly as I peeled her fingers off my shirt before she really did choke me out.
I didn’t think she cared about how it had gone down, honestly, because she just kept on smiling at me… and clinging to my collar for dear life.
With another kiss and finally succeeding in extracting myself from her grip, I opened up her playpen while she sat on the floor and then set her in it. I pulled out a few toys from the cabinet beside my desk and set them in there too. Then I picked up my phone from the top of my desk and opened my messages so I could shoot one off to Luna, who was the only reasonable person I could bring this up to right then.
Me: My baby daddy was just here.
I bit my lip and sent off another message.
Me: He made it seem like he had no idea who Mo was. He tried to say that he’d stopped checking his voice mails and texts, and that he broke his phone, and that he hadn’t read an email in his account since before he “took off.” I don’t know what the hell is going on, but he just left. He seemed pretty upset.
Luna wrote me back immediately.
Luna: He’s there???!!!
Luna: Wait.
Luna: If he didn’t know about Mo, then why was he there in the first place?
Wasn’t that the million-dollar question?
I set my phone back on the desktop and stared at it.
I stared at it for a long time, not knowing how the hell to answer.
“So, what are you going to do?”
I sighed to myself as I finished washing off the pureed lentils that were all over my hands from Mo’s dinner. She didn’t mind being fed with a spoon, but she liked me putting a dab in her hand and then trying to hoover it herself even more. The girl was all about eating. Luna’s baby was a fussy eater, but Mo scarfed everything down. She got that from me. You didn’t come between us and food. The only thing she regularly tried to spit out was peas, and I couldn’t blame her. I hated peas too.
But that wasn’t at all related to the question that Peter had just shot me.
I was actually surprised that Grandpa Gus hadn’t brought anything up while I fed Mo—and tried to sneak my own bites in—as they ate dinner. Grandpa had come back into the office maybe ten minutes after Jonah had left and seen the look on my face. He’d made his own face, swallowed his comment, even though it had to have been hard, then grumbled out his and Mo’s plans for the rest of the day, settling for giving me a slanted, pissy look before they disappeared, leaving me all alone to think about my decisions in life.
It wasn’t my fault he hadn’t been in the building when Jonah had come by.
Grabbing the dishtowel from the hook on the cabinet to my left, I turned around to face the two men sitting around the kitchen island and shrugged. We all knew what Peter was asking. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” the smart-ass, Grandpa, asked before raising his eyebrows and bringing his after-dinner decaf coffee up to his mouth to take the smallest sip in history.
“No.” I shot him his own special look that said I know you, old man. “He came into the office and made it seem like he had no idea Her Majesty existed. He acted like he was….” An image of Jonah’s devastated face filled my head, tears in his eyes and all. “He looked really upset after I told him.” Why the hell I didn’t mention him tearing up was beyond me, but I kept my mouth shut. “Then he walked out of the office because he said he needed to think.”
Grandpa hmphed from behind his coffee cup, and it made me wonder what Peter had said to him to make him be so… subdued. Because he had to have said something. Nothing I suggested would sure as hell be enough to keep him from making comments. Peter was Grandpa’s voice of reason and was usually the only thing in the world that would get him to think rationally.
I was going to have to thank him later for whatever he’d said or done.
Luckily, it was Peter who kept up the questions… confirming that he had gotten my grandfather to bite his tongue on the topic of Jonah and Mo.
Jonah and Mo.
I’d never had an ulcer before, but I suddenly wondered if that weird feeling in my stomach was a sign I might be getting one even though I didn’t eat anything, usually, that would cause one. But weirder shit had happened. Like me even meeting the Shithead in the first place. I hadn’t decided that I was even going to take a three-month teaching position at the judo club until weeks before. My friend had bailed on me at the last minute for that trip to Versailles. And Jonah wasn’t even supposed to be on the same tour I had been assigned to. If he’d gone on the original tour he was going to be on, or if I hadn’t decided to get a sandwich right at that moment…
I wouldn’t have had a reason to talk to him.
I would have just checked him out and left him alone. Maybe. Who the fuck knew?
But he had been on the same tour, and I had gotten in line behind him and overheard him and his friend struggling to communicate with the cashier. That was all it had taken. And here we were.
“Do you believe him?” Peter asked in a careful voice as he tapped a finger against the lip of his coffee mug.
Leaning back against the counter, I shrugged. It wasn’t like I hadn’t asked myself the same thing since he’d walked out of the office. “No. But at the same time, I don’t think he could be that good of an actor.” I was going to have to finally explain part of the story, wasn’t I? “None of it makes sense, but at the same time, it does. I guess.”
Bringing the towel to my face, I scrubbed it downward, trying to get my thoughts together. Grandpa was staring at me with his beady, evil little eyes, and Peter just sat there, his attention on Mo who was in her own little world, babbling away her own story, living her best baby life with a full belly after a day of fun.
Fuck.
They needed to know the whole story now. Well, most of it, anyway.
“He was a professional rugby player in France when we met right after I got there. He had just started playing for a team in Paris,” I told them, trying to keep my voice and story impartial. “He had a game one day… or a match, whatever they call it, with a team in another city.” I knew exactly what team and city, but my pride wouldn’t let me admit it was burned into me. “He ruptured his Achilles during the game and fractured his orbital bone.” The rupture had been one thing. As he stumbled away, he got elbowed in the face by a man that had looked like a giant even in comparison to Jonah, but that wasn’t relevant to the story. I didn’t give them those details. “I didn’t hear from him again after that,” I kept going. “He sent a few postcards to where I was living in Paris, but that was it.”
He’d cut me out of his life almost cold turkey. We had gone from texting each other throughout the day, making plans to see each other almost every night when I didn’t have to coach in the evening or when he had to wake up early the next day, or he didn’t have a game somewhere else, to… nothing. Just nothing except for those postcards that didn’t say anything. He’d been a surgeon about it. In there one moment and out the next.
Well, mostly out the next. It took me a month to figure out that he’d left me a going-away present. Fuckface.
Grandpa let out a breath through his nose that sounded like he was blowing a raspberry, and it snapped me back into focus. I had to tell them the rest.
“I tried almost everything to get in contact with him. The guys I knew that he played with told me that he’d had surgery in Paris, but that they hadn’t seen or heard from him since that game. No one knew where he went, and if they did, they wouldn’t tell me. All I knew was that he’d ruptured his Achilles, he had a broken bone in his face, and that he was going to be out for twelve months, if he even came back. I guess he’d had another Achilles injury before.”
This part was getting harder and harder for me, but it just took one glance at Mo to help me calm down. She was busy making noises and playing with a squeaky toy in her chair, oblivious to how loud she was being and that it made me have to raise my voice. That fucking girl.
Maybe everything had happened for a reason.
But here was the only moment where I had felt shame. Because I had thought yeah, right, bish, when an ex-girlfriend or ex-fuck buddy showed up at the gym trying to reconnect with one of the guys. I had felt embarrassed for them and how they’d been ghosted and thought how sad it was that they were trying to hold on to these men who didn’t want them anymore. I had pitied them.
And then I had been put into their shoes, and it wasn’t a party. It wasn’t nice. It made me angry. It made me feel ashamed… of myself.
I had tried so hard my entire life to not ever be embarrassed by anything I did. Whatever I did, I did for a reason, with no regrets, even the shady shit. Yet, I had been there. Because of a guy.
Because of a man who had grinned, blushed, and told me cheers after I’d helped him.
“I even tried contacting his brothers and sisters, but they must have thought I was a stalker or delusional or something,” was as far as I told Peter and Grandpa, not wanting to go into details. “I never heard back from any of them. Or him, obviously. Or his teammates. You know most of the rest of the story after that. I found out about Mo when I was there, came home. I gave him one last chance when she was born, and then I stopped trying to contact him. A few months later, articles popped up that he was coming back to finish his contract with the Paris team…. And he still never reached out.
“All I know is that he’s here now, and he’s pretending like he didn’t read a single one of my texts.”
Bitch.
“Or hear a single one of the voice mails I left him.”
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.”