eyes and try to lean away… but he wouldn’t let me. His hand curled over my neck, keeping me in place. “Why are you doing this?”
“What? Why am I telling you this?”
“Yeah,” I told him, speaking around the knot that had taken up space in my throat. “You didn’t come back for me.”
His gaze didn’t move off mine for a second. “No? You think I know so many people in Houston, Texas?”
I wanted to look away, I really did, but I didn’t. I looked right into his eyes, and he did the same in return, this hurt, this… this… sense of how he’d just left me because he hadn’t cared about me enough, set up shop right in the center of my damn heart, stealing the air from my lungs, the pride from my spine. “It was seventeen months, Jonah.”
“Yeh, it was,” he replied, hotly. “Seventeen months of me being miserable and then thinking of you and how much fun we’d had before I’d fucked up my life in one moment.”
But he’d still left. For so long.
“I didn’t cheat on you, is that what this is about?”
I didn’t mean to hold my breath, but it happened. I didn’t want to do this, I knew I didn’t want to, but… “It wouldn’t have been cheating because we weren’t together.”
“We weren’t together?” he taunted me in another whisper, that hand on my neck inching up to cup my jaw as I continued resisting looking in his direction. “Is that what you’ve been telling yourself? From the second we met, we were only apart when I had to train or I was gone with the team, or when you had to coach. We slept in the same bed together more than we did apart after those first two weeks,” he told me, like I hadn’t been there. Like I didn’t know.
How could I forget? And when I went to suck in a breath, it was harder than normal. So much fucking harder.
“I still sleep on the left side of the bed even without you, Lenny.”
Some primal part of my brain that knew all about survival didn’t want to believe what he was implying. Saying. It wanted to cry bullshit.
But an even bigger part of me, the reasonable, practical part, thought she knew Jonah well enough to tell the rest of me that he wouldn’t lie. Not about that. Why would he? I had told him he was under no obligation to me. I wasn’t and hadn’t been trying to reel him back in. I’d enjoyed his friendship. I’d enjoyed him.
He wasn’t lying, and I wasn’t going to insult him by claiming he didn’t know his own thoughts and feelings.
That didn’t mean it made it any easier for me to handle what he was implying. Maybe it was easier to think that he hadn’t wanted me as much as I’d wanted him. Maybe it was a hell of a lot easier to not dream that he’d made a huge mistake and that he had felt the same way.
None of that meant I was anywhere near being ready for it or wanting to do anything about it.
“I don’t ask you to lunch because I want to just see Mo. I want to see you too. I want to be your friend again. I want to be more than your friend. I want to be more than any other friend you’ve ever had before or ever will.”
Well.
I gulped as I looked into his eyes and saw a million different things reflected in them.
And not a single one of those things were bad.
I still hadn’t taken a breath as I told him in a voice that only wobbled a little bit, because apparently today was the day for me to face shit, “Are you sure about that?”
The hand on my jaw cupped my cheek then, and his voice was soft and strong somehow as he answered, “Oh yeah.”
I finally turned to look at him. We stared at each other. We stared at each other and stared at each other.
Finally, he broke the silence, quietly. “I’m willing to prove it. If the children try and hurt you inside, you can use me as a human shield.”
I didn’t say anything for so long that Jonah flashed those dimples at me and had me shaking my head and setting all those things I wasn’t sure I wanted to face yet aside. “You’re an idiot.”
He smiled even wider, but I could see something in his eyes that was an awful lot