“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 b
right 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.”
The Best Thing Page 9