slow looks like the one this woman was giving me countless times in my life. Before and during high school. Sometimes when I met fighters’ girlfriends.
It was measuring and calculating and not thinking much of me.
Luckily, I didn’t give a single shit what people I didn’t know thought.
I didn’t even care enough to look her up and down right back. I just stared at her as I crossed my arms over my chest and waited. I had all day.
There were only a few people in this universe who could out-stubborn me. Jonah’s maybe-mom could try her best. I’d been dealing with Grandpa Gus for thirty years. If anything, I’d be impressed if she ended up getting under my skin even a little.
Luckily, or maybe not so luckily, she only did one more sweep of me, pursed her lips, and went with being direct. “Is he here now?”
Yeah, there was the accent.
And oh, hi to you too. I blinked once. “No. We’re not in the business of keeping track of our members, so I’m wondering if there’s something I can help you with.”
It wasn’t my imagination that one of those familiar honey-colored eyes went a little funny for a second before one hand—perfectly manicured—slipped into the purse at her side. In the blink of an eye, a matching wallet was pulled out, and in another blink of the eye, she was handing over a card. Her license.
“I’m looking for my son. I would like to speak to him,” she said, sounding like just telling me this information was a hassle.
It took me a second to process the information on it. Sure enough, Collins was on the license along with a first name of Sarah. The date of birth on the license too showed a year that would have made sense to go along with the thirty-year-old I had gotten off the phone with. Huh.
Why wasn’t Jonah answering her calls? Every impression he’d given me was that he was close to his family, at least some of them. It didn’t exactly make sense.
He’d obviously told her where he was at some point. Given her enough information to come to the gym to look for him, but not the name of his hotel or anything else like that. This wasn’t totally adding up.
“If it isn’t an issue, I have no problem waiting here until he arrives,” the woman, Sarah, said in a snooty voice that didn’t hit me anywhere near the way her maybe-son’s did. Mostly because he didn’t talk like he thought he was better than me.
I handed her back her license. “I don’t have a problem with you waiting here if you want, but it might be a better idea to find him at his hotel.” Maybe I should have said something different, but I didn’t. Fucking attitude.
And then this woman gave it right back. “I would go to his hotel if I knew where it was.”
Was that my fault?
I smiled at her, and it wasn’t anything like the smiles that my best friend—and Jonah, now that I thought about it—handed out like they were candy on Halloween. “I was under the impression that if someone wanted to see you, they would tell you where they were staying.”
Shots fired.
I felt a little bad right after the words were out, but only a little. All right, not really. If this was Jonah’s mom… well. That meant she was Mo’s grandma. Which meant that even if I didn’t like her, she was still her grandma. Which meant that she was family. I had seen enough friends have shitty family members to know how that game went. It had made me grateful on a lot of occasions for how lucky I was that my family was tiny and I liked and loved everyone in it.
Her eye did that funny thing again as she lightly dropped her wallet back into what might have been a three-thousand-dollar purse. “May I speak to the manager?”
“That’s me,” I explained, letting my asshole smile dissolve. The grandma, grandma, grandma chant in my head went nowhere.
There.
The woman who my baby girl may or may not be related to, opened her mouth like she was going to say something else, but another voice beat her to speaking.
A voice with the same accent that Jonah and his maybe-mom had. “Still no Hema?” A woman’s voice.
I glanced to the side to find a woman walking over.
A really pretty woman with long, dark brown hair, an oval-face, and blue eyes.