The anger. The bone-deep sadness. Some people never got over it, and I should know. I had seen that happen to a lot of people I had known who went from being competitive athletes one second, to losing it all in another. I had known after my first surgery, that I ran the risk of hurting myself so badly that the next time might be my last. That each injury and surgery took me one step closer to losing it all. So I was mentally prepared to a certain extent.
But most people weren’t.
And not everyone could accept that something they had worked for their entire lives might be gone in the blink of an eye.
“Thinking I was done, Lenny… not of my own choice… it hurt. That… that anger and grief….” I blinked at how he’d picked that one word out of so many others he might have used. “I had to talk to someone about it, understand? It made me make heaps of decisions I regret now. The biggest being that I was so lost in thinking my life was over then, that I made it that way. I lost all my endorsements. Nearly lost my agent if it hadn’t been for my grandmother calling to give him updates. I was almost dropped by my team for what I did.
“I didn’t have the nerve to get back to you or anyone. And later, once I was back, once I knew I still had footy, I had to wait to come here. To find you again. You blocked me on everything, and I doubted you’d communicate with me unless I came,” he finished on an exhale, his hand moving over mine, molding itself over mine even more. “To apologize and explain that what I did was my fault and had nothing to do with you.”
I stared at the step beneath my feet, and then I swallowed as hard as I ever had, trying my hardest to ignore the warm skin on me.
I had always trusted my gut. My instincts had never failed me. Not ever.
And those instincts right then were telling me…
That this fucker was being honest. That he had gotten hurt, panicked, became… depressed. He had been hurting back then. And if I were anyone else, I might have not understood how dark of a place that could be… but I did.
And I knew without a doubt that it couldn’t be easy for him to admit this to me. It couldn’t have been easy to do something about it, even if it had taken him months to go talk to someone as he’d put it. Everything in me said he was being truthful.
Asshole.
I had to glance at that open face of his, and I couldn’t wrap my head around him being in the slums. I really couldn’t. At least not by looking at him and seeing all the brightness he carried around in his smiles and even in his damn eyes.
And… I knew exactly what it was like to think that your life was over. That everything you had hoped and dreamed for was gone, just like that.
I thought I was pretty fucking tough, but all that toughness hadn’t been enough to keep me from sobbing into my pillows when no one could hear me because I was never going to compete in judo again and my life was never going to be the same again.
Because I had made a choice that hadn’t been easy, but that I hadn’t been able to find it in me to regret.
Maybe if I hadn’t been injured so much in the past…. If the chances of becoming reinjured weren’t so great, I could have still continued competing. But the risks outweighed everything, and I had a whole lifetime ahead of me to do things with my girl that I wasn’t willing to possibly lose because I’d already pushed my body to the limits so many times.
So… yeah, I understood. I understood very, very well.
Except I hadn’t been a little bitch about it. I had cried into my pillow, but I hadn’t gone off the deep end. I hadn’t run away and hidden.
But I knew one thing, and I knew it well.
If Jonah Collins had tried to feed me some other excuse, I would have thought he was full of shit.
But he hadn’t fed me anything but what my gut honestly believed was the truth, damn it.
What did it say about me that it annoyed some part of me that he wasn’t the total douche I had been thinking he was for the last year? He was just… a human being who thought he had lost the thing he loved the most in this world. He’d lost his shit and didn’t want to be around anything or anyone.
I would never do anything like that, but then again, I wasn’t that sensitive. For me, getting mad made me want to get even with whoever had pissed me off. Anger and grief were an accelerant for me; those things didn’t douse shit in my brain. They made me want to attack. To continue on and persevere.
Yet here he was, this Maybe Not a Douche who claimed he had waited too long to come here, where I lived, to explain why he’d left.
Who knew I’d blocked him.
While it wasn’t exactly relief that I felt at his admission, it did feel like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Off my chest. Even a little off my heart and soul.
There were still a thousand questions I had that I would be willing to ask, but… not then.
Not when it was hard enough to talk about going through a dark period in your life in the first place. I didn’t kick people who were already down. I wasn’t going to start now. One thing at a time.
Sitting straight up, I slid my hand out from under his and then reached over to pluck his phone off his knee.
He gave me a curious look as I exited the app he had open, the one that showed his ride would be at my house in two minutes and took in the default background image on his screen. By the time the SUV had pulled up to the front of my house, I had just finished hitting the Save button.
“I added Grandpa Gus’s phone number to your contacts since you already have Peter’s,” I told him as we both got to our feet. “I saw you still have my number. I’ll unblock you when I get inside so your calls can start coming through again.”
He didn’t move as I took Mo from him, sucking up her warmth and weight and giving her some of my body heat even though she felt nice and toasty, probably from her dad’s body heat.
“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I get to work at seven in the morning. I stay at the gym, and then leave work at four unless I have to stay for some reason. Most Tuesdays and Thursdays I work from nine until six, and every once in a while I might stay later, but it’s rare now. I usually work every other weekend and take Monday and Tuesday off on those days. Each of those Saturdays I teach a self-defense class at eight in the morning,” I told him carefully. “You can call me anytime.”
He blinked. And by the next blink, he was nodding. “Ta.”
I didn’t know what the fuck “ta” meant, but I’d look it up inside. I took two steps backward and stopped. “Jonah.”
Even in the darkness without the porch light on, I knew he was listening.
“You aren’t the first person to get injured and think the world was over. I would have understood. I get why you left, but it still fucking sucks that you did that. I thought I knew you, and it hurt that I didn’t because I never would have expected for you to just… leave like that.” I hugged Mo a little closer. “Don’t fuck this up, all right? Don’t make me regret this.”
I know I didn’t imagine the way his shoulders rolled backward, his spine straightening, and his entire body seemed to just… come to life. He grew in front of my eyes. From a six-foot-five monster to one that would give the Hulk a reason to pause.
And he said in that beautiful voice, “I won’t.”
Chapter 11
8:30 p.m
Fucking Christ,
you fucking asshole,
text me back.
JUST TEXT ME BACK.
We need to talk.
I don’t care if you don’t want to.
Don’t be a bitch.
There’s something important
you need to know
“That’s a stupid deal and a stupid fight,” I said into my cell phone as I turned around and backed into the door, opening it with my butt.
The man on the other end of the line said the same thing he’d been trying to sell me on for the last five minutes. “It’s a start—”
“A worthless one. He’s not going to take it, and you’re wasting his time and
my time by bringing it up again. It isn’t enough money, and I’ll tell you right now his offer with other organizations is a lot better,” I cut him off, looking around the gym floor as I headed toward the juice bar counter.
“Lenny,” the man on the line groaned.
“Sorry, but you know I’m not going to tell him to take it,” I kept going, taking in the members working out, living their own lives. It only reminded me that I had woken up late, hadn’t meditated, and Mo had peed all over me—and her crib—before seven in the morning. I needed to squeeze in some time on the bike or the Stairmaster today, at least. Maybe during my lunch break. Fifteen minutes of high-intensity cardio was better than nothing. “Offer him more. I know you can.”
My eyes narrowed in on an impressively tall figure standing at the juice counter, chin tucked in, gaze focused downward. That height looked awfully familiar. So did those shoulders, and that haircut and color.
What the hell was he doing here?
The man on the other end groaned and moaned without actually using words, eating up the time it took me to make it to the bar, still holding my phone to my face, while I stopped directly to the side of the man I knew. A little too well. It was Jonah.
He was pulling bills out of his wallet with a funny look on his face.
“Look, do it or don’t do it, but I told you what’s going on,” I said into the phone, the familiar head instantly turning in my direction.
Jonah gave me one of his endless little smiles. I held up a finger.
“I need to go. Call me back if you can do better. Bye,” I said, not bothering to wait for him to say “bye.” It was one of the most important intimidation tactics that Grandpa Gus had taught me over the years. If you wanted something, you could get it using sugar, but if you used a little vinegar too, sometimes it worked better.
But I wasn’t worried about him or the deal. I was just doing a favor for a member who had asked Peter for some advice. Then Peter had come to me to help him out.
What I was busy focusing on was the man holding five twenty-dollar bills in his hand the night after he’d left my house.
I flicked my gaze toward the employee behind the counter, who doubled making juices if they were busy enough. She smiled innocently. I really liked Bianca. I smiled back at her but saved the words for the man. I had already told her good morning earlier.
“What are you doing?”
“Good morning, Lenny,” he said in that voice I was planning on surviving through for the next eighteen years of my life. “How ya goin’?”
“Fine,” I confirmed, glancing at his wallet and his money again. “You?”
He flashed me that little smile again. “I came over to see about a membership, if that’s all right. You’ve got a flash facility here. I like it.”
Flash…. Flash…. Fancy?
I’d looked up “ta” the night before, and apparently it was slang for thanks.
“He’s doing a month-by-month membership,” Bianca chirped up politely. “That’s what you asked for, isn’t it, Mr. Collins?”
Jonah’s smile fell off as he looked at the receptionist and nodded tightly, back to looking weird.
What the fuck was that about? I wondered before a more important idea filled my head. I still had no clue how long he was going to be here for. Or where he was going. I figured that was something I should know, wasn’t it?
I’d ask him later. Or sometime in the near future at least. One thing at a time.
“Activate a card for him, but default it as a manager special, please, Bianca. He’s family.”
Her blink said more than I wanted it to. He was family. I had just fucking confirmed something. The next few words out of her mouth did the same. “What’s a manager’s special?”
“It’s on the house.”
She blinked again. “Um, I haven’t done that in the system before.” She lowered her voice. “How do you want me to do it?”
“That’s not necessary,” Jonah butted in, speaking to me as he sidestepped so that his outer left biceps brushed my shoulder.
I slid him a look before rattling off instructions to my employee, at the last minute throwing in access to the other building too.
“You don’t need to do that.” He decided not to drop it, his arm touching mine again. “The gym at my hotel isn’t much, and I liked the look of this place. I wasn’t expecting a thing by coming here.”
If he was trying to suck up to me by complimenting Maio House, it was working. But I didn’t want it to.
Grandpa Gus and I had spent a lot of time going over the floor plan when he’d decided to rebuild. I had loved Maio House back when it had been a hole-in-the-wall boxing gym. Now it was all sleek and clean and brightly lit—both buildings were—and I loved them. I took a lot of pride in this place. How could I not when it had my last name tied to it?
“I’m sure you didn’t,” I assured him. “But you are family, and you don’t have to pay to work out here. So quit arguing with me. You’re making it weird.”
I could feel Bianca’s gaze on me, and I wondered if the nosey asses in the other building had started whispering over in this building too about who they thought Jonah might be. To give her credit though, her fingers flew across her keyboard, and she scanned one of the laminated keychains with a barcode on it.
Glancing up at Jonah again, I found him with his attention already down on me. I gave him a small smile, and he raised his eyebrows like it was me he was exasperated with.
“What?”
“You don’t need to do this,” he said, angling his body some more so that his arm was fully pressed against mine, his thigh right there too.
Well, unfortunately for his ass, I didn’t have any personal space issues. He could press that arm and that leg against me as much as he wanted, and it was never going to bother me. I’d had strangers’ feet literally on my face countless times. Mo had thrown up in my open mouth before. I’d licked her poop by accident.
There weren’t even a handful of things that grossed me out, and that arm and leg right there and those honey-colored eyes nearly glaring into mine weren’t going to get him more than a blink and a raise of my eyebrows right back.
“No offense, but I don’t really care what you think I need to do or not,” I whispered back to him, using those same words he’d thrown at me the night before when I had tried to tell him not to give me his excuses.
And what I got as a reply were his dark eyebrows knitting together.
And then that slow fucking smile crawled across his mouth—and even his fucking eyes somehow—and he nodded, still smiling, as he said, “It’s going to be like that, is it?”
I fucking hated him. I really did. And that was why I kept myself from smiling at him, at least totally smiling, and shrugged my good shoulder. “Yeah, it is.”
This microscopic douchebag laughed.
“Just as saucy as I remember,” he muttered, with that laugh that was just as bright and cheerful as his smile was. It was so annoying.
The memory of him sitting next to me on the bus the day we’d met and laughing then too, You’re a bit saucy, eh, hit me straight in the chest like a dull ache. I’d teased him over… I couldn’t remember what anymore. But I’d been teasing him, I knew that much.
We had hit it off.
And now we were here.
“Would you like me to get Deandre to give him a tour?” Bianca asked, cutting into my thoughts, as she handed him his new laminated keycard.
I only had to linger over his words from the night before for a second before I reminded myself of my decision. Eighteen years. I might as well make the best out of it. I wasn’t about to start being my own worst enemy now. We did get along. A little too well.
At least he wasn’t Noah.
“I can do it,” I told the receptionist. I didn’t double-check with Jonah if that was fine, because what if it wasn’t? I wouldn’t get over him preferring a stranger to me even though I knew I should. “I’ll show you around real quick
.”
He nodded back before bending over to grab a duffel bag I hadn’t noticed until right then that he had sitting between his feet. It was navy blue with lighter electric blue accents on it. And it was then, as I looked down at his bag, that my eyes finally noticed something else.
Jonah was wearing shorts. And not just any shorts. His rugby shorts.
They were navy blue and about as loose as thighs the size of Jonah Collins’s could let shorts be, which wasn’t that loose at all, especially not higher up on his legs. Looking at the seams for a split second, I was pretty positive he’d had to tug the material apart hard to give it a little more of a stretch to not be so tight.
And yeah, there was a tiny split at the bottom of each leg like he’d taken scissors to them for just a little more room.
And speaking of his thighs, they were just as big, if not bigger, than I remembered. Considering I had grown up around men who babied and pampered their bodies, I was pretty nonchalant about looks and muscles. But his were something else completely. He had the kind of thighs that no bodybuilder, light heavyweight, or even heavyweight MMA champion was capable of. Sprinting legs. Massive. Bulging muscles that my hands briefly remembered were rock hard.
And those damn shorts started about five or seven inches above his knee, showing way more leg than any of the guys around the gym showed, except for the handful in on the MMA side who favored tiny compression shorts.
But none of them, as fit as they were, were any comparison to Tall, Dark, Less of an Asshole Than Yesterday, and Handsome.
And just like I remembered, he wasn’t the slightest bit self-conscious about it.
Or his long white socks that set off the dark curly hair of his legs.
No big deal. I had seen them, and I could move on with my life now. There were plenty of other rugby players in the world who probably had the same build.
I sniffed and shot him a pleasant expression as I raised my eyes. This funny shape came over his mouth, but he didn’t say anything about whether he knew exactly what I was looking at or thinking about. Good. “Come on, I’ll show you around,” I told him, tipping my head to the side.
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