If I was working in the MMA building, he would sit and watch me like he had nothing better to do. When I’d do something he thought was impressive, he would clap, and later on tell me how amazing he thought it was. Then he’d ask me to do it to him to know.
My heart grew and grew with every day with him. And grew even more every night that we were together with Mo. Like a big family.
At night when it was just the two of us holed up in my room like horny teenagers… baby Jesus would have been traumatized. We might have even had an addiction problem. I sucked him off when my period hit, and he’d shoved my shirt up high to suck on my nipples and rub at my clit over my underwear at the end of my period. But mostly, it was the way I woke up with his arm thrown around my waist most mornings that was the best. Or waking up with my face in between his shoulder blades, my toes touching his calves.
And then when the day came that his agent called with news that he’d been signed and would have to leave….
That was the worst day I’d had in a long time.
Chapter 21
Subject: Email me back
Lenny DeMaio:
Wed 4/8/2019 1:29 p.m.
to Jonah Collins
I hate you. I really do.
My heart was heavy as fuck, and there was no use denying it or trying to hide it.
I was moping. Big fucking time. Massive fucking time.
So far, I’d been fortunate enough to never lose anyone really close to me, but I had a feeling that my body was going through the closest thing to grief it had ever known.
And Jonah hadn’t even left yet.
It had been three days since the call had come through confirming that he had been picked up by a team. That he’d signed another massive deal with more than a handful of zeroes behind it. That he had to leave.
Two years. That’s how long his deal was for. Two years with the Kobe Chargers.
The bittersweet smile on his face while he’d held the phone to his ear as he’d laid in bed beside me, bare-chested with Mo sprawled over him with her bottle, had been awesome and painful.
Awesome because he was going to keep doing something that he loved doing. Something that he was meant to do. But… painful because of what it meant.
I’d still slapped a smile on my face and kept it there. I’d hugged the shit out of him and kept on hugging the shit out of him since. I’d booked his plane ticket for him. I had even downloaded the app that may or may not work once he got to Japan so that he could see Mo at daycare through the cameras.
One week was all the team had been willing to give Jonah to arrive since they had already started practicing for the upcoming season.
One week didn’t give me enough time to leave with him. If I was going to.
The fact was: we could go visit him no problem. I knew that. He had already eyed his game calendar and circled off clots of days, times that he could squeeze a quick trip to visit, days when he’d be home for longer than three or four days so we could fly over for a visit. Bye weeks when we could meet up somewhere.
I’ll take any time I can see you both, Jonah had told me when we’d sat beside each other in the kitchen with his calendar. An hour. Three. A day. Whatever you can do, I’ll take.
Whatever I could do he would take.
Two days later, that comment still pounded away at my head. And my heart.
My entire fucking body.
I hadn’t said a word to Jonah about how much my chest hurt every time I looked at him—which was half the day because he’d been picking up Mo from Grandpa and bringing her to Maio House in the afternoons, where they would hang out with me in my office. Half of my family. Half of my heart.
And a fourth of it was leaving me in four days.
This man I fucking loved the shit out of.
He was going.
And he’d asked me to go with him. To fly halfway across the world, away from half of the people I loved with all of my heart, away from my job, my life. And be with him there. In Kobe.