tied together to me forever, Lenny,” he went on. “You will always be in my life. It’s my responsibility to worry about you, even though I know you have experience with criticism and opinions. I know you can handle yourself, and more than likely anything, but I want you to know you have a choice. It’s up to you how much that is. If you want others to know that we… made Mo together. If you want your name connected to mine. But I know what I want.”
It was his responsibility to worry about me.
I could handle anything.
I had him.
Was he trying to tell me all the things my subconscious wanted to hear? It fucking seemed like it. And that made me itchy.
This was my decision.
In it or not in it.
There was no middle ground.
I was scared of being a bad mom. I was scared of spiders crawling into my ears while I was sleeping. I was scared of fucking birds. But I wasn’t scared of screwing up. I’d fallen a lot of times in my life. You might get bruised and it might hurt for a while, but you didn’t die.
And what? He was worried I would get turned off by people talking shit about him? Ha.
So I told him what he hadn’t yet figured out about me. “You’re stupid handsome and you’re a good person too. You can tell whoever you want. I’m not ashamed of you.” I went up to my tippy toes and gave him the most direct look I could muster. “I could’ve had Mo with worse. Actually, I can’t think of anyone else I would rather have had her with, and I will never repeat that out loud again. If anyone wants to talk shit to you with me around, they’re going to regret it, and that’s what they’ll deserve. The only person who gets to call you a dumbass is me… and your siblings… and maybe Grandpa Gus.”
The silence between us, ignoring the sounds in the background, was deafening.
And that was why I wasn’t expecting Jonah to throw a hand up and cover his mouth with it before he turned around and walked out of the room as he started fucking chuckling.
All right.
That went well.
No one in this country would ever care about who Mo’s dad was, but in other places, they would. And none of those people mattered. The only thing that mattered was what we knew.
Why the fuck would Jonah think I’d be turned off by people criticizing him? I wasn’t joking when I told him that anyone who talked shit to him would end up regretting it, if they got me involved. They could all shut the hell up.
Too afraid to wake up Mo, I turned her baby monitor on even though I wouldn’t need it, turned down the white noise machine just a little, and headed downstairs.
On the way, I stopped in the kitchen and filled up a glass of water while I talked to a couple of the guys from the gym who had showed up while I’d been upstairs, and then eventually made my way toward the living room, which was packed with at least twenty male and female bodies wedged on the couch, on the floor, and on chairs that had been dragged from the dining room we only used on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“Len!” and “Lenny!” all came out from half the people in the room.
“Where’s Madeline?” one of the guy’s girlfriends asked. I couldn’t remember her name.
I pointed upstairs as I looked around the room to find somewhere to sit. “Sleeping.”
“Aww,” one of the other girls groaned. Amanda? Mandy? She was a new-ish girlfriend I had met twice, and I liked her. “That’s why I came. I wanted to see her.”
Her boyfriend made a comment about how he thought she’d tagged along to spend time with him, while I went back to looking around the room for a spot.
Grandpa Gus and Peter were both hogging the love seat that everyone knew was theirs, but it was when I glanced toward the couch that I found one big body taking up a whole lot of it, a beer wedged in between two enormous thighs.
Jonah smiled at me, one of the only people in the room who wasn’t totally focused on the television, and I smiled back at him, just as one of the guys who had been training with Peter on and off for years called out, “Len, you can come sit with me if you