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.”
Jonah, who had been sitting on the edge of the bed, slowly melted off the edge, sliding down and down and down until he sat directly in front of me, his long legs crossed, his knees bracketing my own. But it was his facial expression that made me swallow and blink. Noah hadn’t hurt my feelings in a long time, but the look on Jonah’s face had something churning inside of me.
It was a scowl for sure, and it was sad for sure, but it was mad and something else I couldn’t completely understand, and those honey-colored eyes were totally and completely focused on me.
Then, then, it was then that those big, rough, tan hands came to my face, cupping one cheek in each, and he leaned forward, and I leaned forward too for some reason, until our foreheads touched, and I could smell Mo from how close she was. And Jonah kept us like that. Foreheads touching. His breath and mine mixing together. His hands on my face, gentle and comforting and sweet. And his voice was a low wave as he asked, “And what happened after that?”
I stared at the freckles on his cheeks as I answered. “He called me a few days later and tried to apologize. I answered because I told myself that I wasn’t him. That I hadn’t done anything wrong and I wasn’t going to hide from his hypocritical ass. He said that he loved me, that he had always supposedly loved me, but he was full of shit—you don’t have to squeeze my cheeks so tight, hey—and he tried to claim that he thought he would be the one who would give me kids one day and that he was hurt and confused and a bunch of other bullshit.
“Stop holding your breath, Dimples. I’m telling you the truth. He was jealous, and for some reason, he had the impression that my dumb ass was sitting around and waiting for him to decide he wanted to settle down. But now he couldn’t, and it was my fault because I hadn’t loved him enough in return. For the record, I’d never given him a single impression that I cared about him like that. He didn’t know about what I’d felt in high school, so that even more so didn’t make sense.
“Anyway, he got mad when I called him out on why that was stupid. You know, like there hadn’t been a thousand girls over the years and like our friendship hadn’t devolved to the point we only spoke to each other if he wanted or needed my help once he’d started doing MMA at Maio House. Then he hung up, and I didn’t hear from him again until you showed up.
“Grandpa Gus refuses to speak to him, and after knowing and training with Peter for most of his life, all he gets out of him is distant politeness. And I know that chafes his ass big-time. I know it. It’s easy for people to love you when you’re doing things for them, when they get something out of it. But it isn’t so easy to find people who will still love you when you’re down and need help getting up. That’s when you really find out who’s with you for the right reasons.
“My best friend, Luna, told me once that everyone has a threshold for what they’re willing to forgive. That you can forgive someone but never forget what