The Best Thing

by Zapata, Mariana

  “Nunchucks?” Sarah was too busy gasping. “Where did those come from?”

  Only Grandpa Gus would laugh his fucking ass off at a six-year-old having nunchucks. “Her godfather. She asked Pierre for them for Christmas.”

  Even Peter chuckled. “He was never able to tell her no. All she had to do was ask, and he would do whatever she wanted. She’d ask if he was coming to one of her competitions even though he was in the middle of filming a movie, and he would come every time.”

  “Like a sucker.” Grandpa Gus chuckled. He put his hand on his chest and smiled almost dreamily over at Sarah. “I really hope Mo ends up taking more after Jonah than Lenny. I really do. My heart can’t handle another Lenny in the world.”

  Liar.

  But maybe not.

  I edged my way closer to the door with my girl, shooting a glance toward Jonah again who still had the same thoughtful expression on his face that was almost a confused one. “I was a precious angel, and you know it.” I flicked Grandpa Gus behind the ear as I walked behind him. “Jonah, you coming?” I asked as I shouldered the door open, and he got up.

  I had barely made it about three steps into the hallway toward the stairs when he came up behind me. “Lenny?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Peter said something about your godfather, Pierre….”

  Oh. That. “Yeah?” I started up the stairs.

  “Making movies…,” he kept going, following me up. “Is he referring to Pierre St. Cloud? The actor?”

  “Yeah,” I told him, stopping to shoot him a glance over my shoulder. “He filmed a couple movies here in the 80s. Grandpa trained him during them.”

  His face was blank with surprise. “Blood Games Pierre?”

  I nodded.

  “Karate master Pierre?”

  I lifted a shoulder. “A second dan black belt. I wouldn’t call him a master….”

  Jonah blinked.

  “I used to call him Pew-Pew because I couldn’t say Pierre,” I told him. “You’ll probably meet him one day. I still see him a couple times a year.” You know… if Jonah was around in the four months he had off from work.

  Fuck.

  I turned forward again and kept heading up the stairs, listening in to the fact that I was almost all the way to the top before I heard his footsteps again.

  “Why didn’t you say anything about it?” he called out after me.

  “Because it’s not a big deal.” I paused. “And because sometimes people make fun of him when they know. People say he’s cheesy and stuff, but he’s always been great to me. I don’t like him being made fun of. If it hadn’t been for Blood Games, I don’t think MMA would have ever blown up the way it has because he inspired so many kids who are now adults, you know.”

  His footsteps stopped again as I made my way down the hall, passing the master bedroom, the spare, and finally getting to Mo’s room, separated from mine by the bathroom in between. Jonah stopped just to my side and, without prompting, took the baby out of my arms and into his, his biceps bunching and showing off the fact that one was just about as big as Mo’s entire body.

  The boy was ripped.

  And that wasn’t saliva pooling in my mouth at the memory of running my hands up and down those arms while he’d—

  Nope.

  I forced a smile onto my face. “I’m gonna brush my teeth and change. Just holler if you need anything.”

  I ducked into the bathroom. Brushing my teeth, washing my face, and rubbing some moisturizer into my skin didn’t take long and neither did applying deodorant. On the walk from the bathroom to my room, I heard Jonah talking quietly, but I had no idea what was being said or done. He’d been around long enough. He knew what he was doing.

  I stripped down to my underwear and sports bra, deciding to leave that sucker on because the last thing I needed was a boob to pop out in mid-swing push, and had just put on my high-waisted black leggings when I heard a cough from the doorway.

  “The door was open,” Jonah murmured as I turned, one hand in my drawer as I pulled out a sweater.

  Mo was holding a toy in one hand, gnawing and drooling on it at the same time.

  I had never been too-too ashamed of my body even after having her. I wasn’t back down to pre-baby weight yet—and I sure as hell wasn’t at my competing weight or body composition—but I was getting to what was becoming my new normal. And, well, a lot of things had changed and moved around a bit, but I had expected that to happen from the books and blogs I’d read while I was pregnant.

  But now, all of a sudden, standing there in my high-waisted pants, I got self-conscious for what might have been the first time in my fucking life.

  “I’m almost ready,” I told him, tugging the sweater out, suddenly aware of how much of a mess my room was. There was a pile of laundry on the floor in one corner, another rocking chair I’d used pretty often with Mo over the last few months that was covered in clothes that I’d worn but could wear again. Then there were the handful of toys all over the floor that I hadn’t put back up after bringing them over for my booger to play with while we hung out in my room.

  The bras hanging off the doorknobs of my closet were a nice touch too, I thought, knowing there was no way to miss the giant bra cups.

  And that was where his gaze went straight for.

  I’d swear on my life that his eyes moved down to my boobs for a second. And I’d swear on my life too that his Adam’s apple bobbed as he looked at them. They’d always been big, and had only gotten bigger with Mo, even if she’d decided a couple months ago that she was too good for breast milk.

  Was this kinky bastard….

  “Are you staring at my boobs?”

  His gaze flicked back up, eyes wide. “No,” he spat out before pausing, shaking his head and giving me the start of a bashful smile. “All right, yes.”

  Well, well, well.

  I pulled the sweatshirt over my head and only let myself smile when it was covering my face, wiping it back off once my head popped through the top.

  In the three seconds it took me to do that, he’d maneuvered further into my room and deposited Mo on the floor, sitting, by some of her toys.

  “Only one trophy?” he asked in that beautiful accent, lingering by the drawer chest closest to him. Over the last few weeks, he had been in Mo’s room plenty of times but never in mine.

  I tugged my sweater down as far as it would go over my hips. “Just my last national title. The ones from Worlds are downstairs, and the rest are in the shed out back.”

  One single finger touched the plaque at the bottom of the trophy, swiping across the gold-plated face. “You aren’t fond of looking at them?”

  “Not really,” I told him. “Peter always said it was good to not get hung up on the things you’ve done but on the things you will do. And no one ever comes up here anyway.” Which reminded me of the fact that he was up here, and for about the twentieth time, I wondered if I should worry over the idea of him noticing that things were… off or not. “There’s a lot of them.”

  “That many?” he teased.

  I shrugged my good shoulder with a smile.

  “You’ll give me a complex. I have one.”

  I raised an eyebrow as he bent over to inspect my trophy closer. “Is it a participation trophy?”

  Jonah’s grin spread when he glanced at me. “Close.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “World Rugby Player of the Year.”

  I’d forgotten that lovely fact that I’d learned when I’d looked him up online. I also forgot that it had annoyed me that he hadn’t told me about it either. I’d only learned about it from his public page.

  World Rugby Player of the Year. Fancy, humble fucker.

  I knew for a fact he’d been on the last national team that had won a World Rugby Cup title, but he kept that to himself.

  “Excuse me,” I joked.

  He shook his head, and I didn’t imagine the quick glance he shot down to my chest one more time, before co
ming back up again like it hadn’t happened in the first place.

  I could see his feet out of the corner of my eye move around my room. It wasn’t anything flash, like he would say. Light gray. The furniture was from the last six years, all black and low, covered by a teal comforter to add some color. Really the only personality in it was the knickknacks all over the place, things I’d been given or collected when I went on trips—shells, rocks, random figurines or souvenirs from different countries, picture frames of periods throughout my life. There was nothing on the walls.

  Jonah continued moving, stopping at my bed and setting a hand on the mattress. “Big bed.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him as I hopscotched a block across the floor in front of Mo. “For me and all my boy toys.”

  His eyebrows slammed down into a straight line.

  “I’m kidding,” I told him, not able to keep from smiling because seriously? Like, for real? How did he not know I was fucking with him?

  Mo threw a block at my face that I didn’t have enough time to block or dodge out of the way of. It hit me right in the center of my forehead, and I couldn’t help but laugh as I said, “No, Mo. No.”

  Jonah had a tight little smile on his face as he watched us, but his throat bobbed and something funny came over his face as he asked in that still, still voice, palm lingering over the mattress, “Your granddad brought up a Noah earlier. Is he an old friend?”

  I should have known this was coming. “Yeah. I’ve known him since I was three.”

  His fingers brushed over my comforter some more, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t imagining that his voice got deeper. “Where does he live?”

  This was the conversation he wanted to have? I would have rather told him about the hemorrhoid I’d gotten while I’d been baking Mo. Or tell him about how I had gone three days without pooping during that time too and thought I was dying.

  But I guess Jonah had told me about some of his darkest moments, so there was that.

  Glancing back up at his face, I lost my train of thought because… well, because of the fucking face he was making.

  “What?”

  I was so used to seeing him smirking or smiling or just looking like the world was an okay place that this was something else I didn’t know he was capable of.

  But I think I kind of liked a scowl-y, serious Jonah.

  At least in tiny doses.

  “I think I’m beginning to regret asking,” was his low answer.

  “Why?”

  “You’re thinking about it a bit much. Seems to me that’s a sign the answer is complicated, and I don’t know how I feel about you feeling conflicted over someone.”

  I dropped from my crouching position to flat on my ass as I stared up at him standing beside my bed, looking down at me with a seriously aggravated fucking face. And I took my sweet-ass time asking yet again, “Why?”

  If I had ever doubted the fact that this guy clicked with some part of me that I wasn’t sure I would ever understand, his fucking answer, without hesitation, without any sort of shit I would have faced from any other man in the world, came at me. “I’m jealous, and I’m not much of a fan of that, but I want to know what happened even if I regret it more than I do already.”

  My hand reached out toward him on its own, without a single thought, until I had my fingers wrapped around his calf—because it was the closest body part to me—and, chances were, I probably had a dreamy look on my face as I did it.

  Was this why some women played games? Because it made them feel like a champ? Because I liked it. I liked it a lot more than I had any business liking it, because Jonah was jealous.

  Because of me.

  And as his eyes slid down to look at the hand I was touching him with, a tiny part of his expression faltered, and the next thing I knew, he was dropping onto the edge of the bed and saying more quietly than a moment before, with a little less of an edge, “Tell me, would you?”

  The words just about got caught in my throat, but I grabbed them and flung them out at him. Humbled. Honestly. Feeling way too good for something so dumb. Because he really didn’t have a single thing to be jealous over.

  “Noah and I grew up together, like I said.”

  Even the way he nodded was grave.

  “We met in tae kwon do when we were three. It turned out his family lived down the street from us, and his parents were nice. Do you remember that first day we went on a walk? When the woman honked at us? That was his mom,” I explained. “He was an only child too back then, and I guess it made sense for us to be friends. When I got old enough to start judo classes, Grandpa moved me over to that, and his parents did too because he wanted to do the same thing I did, I guess,” I started to explain, noticing the way one of his eyes started to narrow a little.

  This story wasn’t exactly going to go the way he expected.

  This wasn’t one of those kinds of stories.

  “We were in all the same classes in elementary school; I don’t know what you call it in New Zealand, but I’m sure you get the picture. He was my best friend, my brother kind of, I guess. His mom picked me up from school twice a week and kept me at her house until I got picked up. Grandpa Gus dropped us both off every morning. We went to the same middle school too, and everything was the same.

  “When high school started—that was grade nine—he followed me to the same school then. I remember he got mad that I was going to go to a school further away instead of the one we were zoned to, but….” Mo slapped a hand on my thigh, forcing me to glance down and smile at my little turkey. I grabbed one of her toys and started walking it up one of her legs as I kept on talking to him.

  I squeezed Jonah’s leg a little more, still looking down at Mo who was watching me trot her toy down her opposite leg. “Anyway, one day, I was seventeen, I woke up, looked at Noah and thought I was in love with him. He was still my best friend, but it was like this switch flipped, and I found myself getting jealous—literally all of a sudden—over him dating other girls and fooling around with them.”

  If only I could go back and kick myself in the vag.

  “I never planned on saying anything because he was closer to me than a brother would be, and I was too scared to ruin our friendship. I knew he didn’t like me the same way. I knew how he thought of me, and it wasn’t romantically. And then one day, he had sex with my friend and I got so mad, it killed what I thought I felt. Literally, the next morning, I woke up and was just over it. I know now it wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t known how I felt, but anyway.”

  Jonah was full-on frowning at that point, eyes totally thoughtful and narrowed. His whole body was tense.

  And I started to regret being this honest. Maybe I should have just… skewed the truth a little. Oh well now.

  “I graduated a year early because the Olympics were coming up and I wanted to try my best to be able to compete in them. I went straight on ahead with training; he stayed in school to finish like normal. That summer I came home for a weekend because I’d been at the big training facility they have in Colorado, and out of the blue, he told me he was leaving for Oregon. I talked to him on the phone every two or three days for months before that, and he never hinted that he was thinking about leaving. He never said a word. I felt so betrayed. I trusted him, and he kept that from me, you know? I didn’t keep anything from him. I wouldn’t have cared if he’d just said something, fucking anything, but it was like he kept it a secret on purpose to hurt me. Then a few weeks later, I slipped and broke my wrist the day of the opening ceremony.”

  I had to roll my eyes as I thought about how much I had cried, thinking I was getting away with hiding my heartbreak even though apparently Peter and Grandpa Gus had known from the fucking beginning. I’d been so stupid. Of course they had known.

  “He left, and he never reached out to me once he was gone. Not even a fucking picture message after he’d spent every other weekend at my house for just about fifteen years. He came back for Christmas break, and I made it a point not
to see him even though he went by Maio House almost daily. Grandpa Gus and Peter were both on my team, I realize that now, and lied for me every time. And when that following summer rolled around, I saw him, but by then, I was going full steam ahead with competing, and I was taking a couple classes at the university, and he’d quit judo, and that felt like another kick to my fucking balls. And that next year, he called me twice in twelve months, can you believe that? Twice.

  “And, I guess to wrap the next ten years up, I think he grew up a tiny bit and realized what he’d done and tried his best to be my friend again, but I was over it. It was the beginning of the end. Four years after telling me he was going to leave, he broke my fucking rib when I came home again from Colorado, like a dumbass, and even though I know it was my fault for putting myself in that position, I was still mad at him. I know I’m a hypocrite. Our friendship was never the same again. I tried to be there for him when I could, but it was totally different.

  “And you know the rest. I went to France and came back pregnant. Grandpa, Peter, and I decided to keep it a secret for the first few months, and then one day, when I realized I wasn’t going to be able to hide it anymore, and I was scared as hell and sad and pretty fucking pissed off at you for ghosting me, I finally put on a tight shirt that showed off the whole grain loaf I was baking in the oven and everyone saw.

  “An hour later, he showed up while I was in the office doing some accounting work, and just… tried to rip me a new one. How the hell could I be pregnant? How could I do something so stupid? Why wouldn’t I tell him who the dad was? Where the hell was the dad? Why would I do this to him? Blah, blah, blah, like he had any say in my life. I almost went to jail that day, Jonah. I was going to rip his nipples off and stuff them down his throat. He made me feel like a slut. This asshole who went through girls like they were toilet paper after he took a shit made me feel like I had done something unforgivable. This prick who hadn’t been a real friend to me in a decade made me feel like trash.”

  Mo decided to put her hand on my thigh, like she could sense my frustrations from before she’d even been born, and I couldn’t help but drop a kiss on the back of her head, seeing the fucking finish line of this shitshow of a story and sprinting toward the end. “I didn’t say anything to him, for the record. My hormones were crazy then, and I guess I was in shock, but it made me cry, and I don’t ever cry. And the next day, Grandpa Gus called and told me that Noah had cleaned out his locker at Maio House. Two days later, he posted a picture on his Picturegram that he’d joined a new family at a gym in New Mexico.”