Fury backed up my throat as I won the hardest match of my life and somehow managed to keep my tone cheerful even though I was literally ready to go to jail for the remainder of my life if I could beat him with a bat. Fuck it. “Are you going to pretend like I didn’t blow you up for months? That you broke your phone and that’s why I never heard back from you? Do you really want to make it seem like I’m the one who forced you to ignore me for so long?” I asked him, hoping that didn’t come out as borderline hysterical as it felt in my chest and in my brain and in every goddamn part of my body.
But I wasn’t done. Oh no. “I don’t know about you, Jonah, but if someone were to leave me a ton of voice mails and text messages and notes on my apartment door, I would actually call them back. I wouldn’t be a coward—”
“I haven’t checked my email since then, Lenny,” he said roughly, his accent coming out thicker, his voice cracking at the end even as the pink across his cheeks became deeper, stretching up to the tips of his ears. “Since I broke my phone. I swear!”
Did I look like an idiot?
I smiled at him again, and I knew he could see the smart-ass there. “If you want to play this I had no idea game, go for it, but I’m not an idiot. No smart, reasonable person would suddenly just disappear from the world and kill their career. You would have been communicating with someone. You just weren’t communicating with me.”
I was not mad. I was not.
The hand that wasn’t already on his head went up to meet the other one, where he cupped the expanse of his scalp, breathing harder than I had ever, ever seen before, and that was saying something because I had seen him right after finishing a rugby game when he’d been exhausted and riled up and sweaty. I’d been in the stands and he’d come over and kissed me on the cheek—
God, I hated his guts.
“Lenny,” he said, luckily ripping me out of that memory with the jagged quality of his voice, like it hurt him to speak. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know about… about….”
It was the strangest thing, seeing a human body imitate a balloon that had been pricked by a needle just small enough to make its ultimate death slow.
But that was what I saw.
And I wasn’t sure what to think of it other than be suspicious.
This enormous asshole who weighed more than any other person in the building slowly sank to his knees behind the chair he’d been gripping onto for dear life minutes ago. If I hadn’t been watching him so closely, I would have figured he fainted, but no, he’d just… dissolved. Both of his hands were all of a sudden gripping the back of the chair again, his body curled so that his forehead was pressed into the material in between his hands. And he was gasping for breath.
Was this a joke? Was he acting? I didn’t see what he would get out of any of this but…
He was faking it. He had to be.
Jackass.
After a moment, his face lifted and his eyes moved back to Mo like… I wasn’t sure how, honestly. Shocked, mostly. A little anger resided somewhere in there, but mostly… mostly it was surprise hidden in his eyes as he looked at the dark-haired baby on my lap…. with the same honey-colored eyes he saw in the mirror every day even though he didn’t know it.
He was faking it.
“You…,” he stuttered, those big hands still clinging to the chair with white knuckles. “The messages….”
In my lap, Mo started to fuss, and I knew I only had a few moments before I had to set her down.
“You’re serious?”
I didn’t even bother responding to that stupid-ass question.
“She’s… she’s my daughter?” Jonah Collins asked with all the speed of a damn turtle, each word basically whispered and gasped at the same time, making it really easy for a moment to reconcile him with the man I had known who had been sweeter and more easygoing than any other man I had ever known before.
But I forgot about him just as easily because she’s my daughter?
I wasn’t going to waste my time responding to stupid questions.
Then the man who was clinging to a chair and watching