what else goes in there, carrots and cinnamon too, I think, and don’t make that face at me. You ate everything I put in front of you when you were a baby and everything I didn’t put in front of you.” He snorted. “You still do.”
I frowned. “These muscles don’t feed themselves.”
“I thought I was the only one who noticed how much Lenny ate. It’s impressive.” This fucker Jonah was nodding at Peter, who was telling him with his own dip of a chin that yeah, he wasn’t imagining how much food I put away every meal. “I’ve wondered a time or two where it all goes.”
That was a nice compliment, at least.
“You should have seen her when she was competing in a higher weight class. She was packing in around five thousand calories a day,” Grandpa Gus said, sounding pretty damn cheerful all of a sudden.
“How many kilojoules is that?”
How the hell he knew the conversion was beyond me, but it only took Peter a second to reply. “About twenty thousand kilojoules.”
“I was doing physical activity for several hours every day,” I tried to explain drily, not enjoying the stunned face Jonah was making.
“I eat around twenty-thousand now to maintain my weight,” he said, his expression turning into an amused grin that still didn’t amuse me at all.
“I have a high metabolism. It’s a gift,” I threw out again to the haters. “And I needed to gain weight. Thank you. It was your idea, Grandpa, for me to go up a weight class.”
No one was listening to me.
“We used to joke that one of us was going to need to get a job at the grocery store to get an employee discount,” Peter chuckled.
“Darling, you have no reason to tease,” Sarah commented out of nowhere with a properly contained smile.
I turned my head to cheerfully gaze at the man who was still looking extremely pleased by the conversation.
“You would eat your meal, then eat whatever your brothers left. Did you forget about hiding cans of Watties when you were in primary school?”
Color rose up on his face instantly, and I couldn’t fucking help it. I couldn’t. “What kind of food did he hide?”
That got the first laugh out of Sarah I’d heard. “Canned spaghetti. Baked beans. Loved them. He would try taking them in his school bag so he would have a snack to eat on the walk home from school.”
I opened my mouth and turned to look at Jonah with it still open. “Did you have to carry around a can opener to eat cold spaghetti and beans?”
His face just got even pinker. “I was growing.”
He had. I was going to die from cuteness overload. My body didn’t know what to do with that.
“Darling, you didn’t grow hardly any until you were sixteen, or did you forget that as well?” Sarah egged on with another light laugh that seemed totally opposite of the distance she’d been showing.
“I was saving up the calories and the energy for the future,” he replied under his breath.
I snickered.
“It’s hard to see it now, but he was a skinny thing for so long. We thought he was going to take after me instead of his dad. Do you remember all those talks we had with you when you were younger?”
“Yeah,” he responded with a normal smile. “Used to tell me how it wasn’t important that I was smaller than the other boys. That all that mattered was that I use my ticker and that I try my best and work harder than the rest of them. Dad would have a list of all the shorter players who made careers of it, so I’d know it was possible. If I remember correctly, you fed me all that food to get me to bulk up so at least I wasn’t all skin and bones.”
Then he sniffed and blinked, and I had to swallow because was he getting fucking emotional thinking about his parents trying to make him feel better about being short and scrawny? To tell him that he could still pursue this dream of his even though biology worked against him? Damn it. Goddamn it.
I pressed my lips together and forced myself to keep my eyes open for a few seconds.
The heavy chuckle that came out of Sarah told me I wasn’t the only one thinking this over a lot. “Then you grew and kept on growing. If I thought you ate so much before, it was nowhere near as much as you did