feeling in my stomach was a sign I might be getting one even though I didn’t eat anything, usually, that would cause one. But weirder shit had happened. Like me even meeting the Shithead in the first place. I hadn’t decided that I was even going to take a three-month teaching position at the judo club until weeks before. My friend had bailed on me at the last minute for that trip to Versailles. And Jonah wasn’t even supposed to be on the same tour I had been assigned to. If he’d gone on the original tour he was going to be on, or if I hadn’t decided to get a sandwich right at that moment…
I wouldn’t have had a reason to talk to him.
I would have just checked him out and left him alone. Maybe. Who the fuck knew?
But he had been on the same tour, and I had gotten in line behind him and overheard him and his friend struggling to communicate with the cashier. That was all it had taken. And here we were.
“Do you believe him?” Peter asked in a careful voice as he tapped a finger against the lip of his coffee mug.
Leaning back against the counter, I shrugged. It wasn’t like I hadn’t asked myself the same thing since he’d walked out of the office. “No. But at the same time, I don’t think he could be that good of an actor.” I was going to have to finally explain part of the story, wasn’t I? “None of it makes sense, but at the same time, it does. I guess.”
Bringing the towel to my face, I scrubbed it downward, trying to get my thoughts together. Grandpa was staring at me with his beady, evil little eyes, and Peter just sat there, his attention on Mo who was in her own little world, babbling away her own story, living her best baby life with a full belly after a day of fun.
Fuck.
They needed to know the whole story now. Well, most of it, anyway.
“He was a professional rugby player in France when we met right after I got there. He had just started playing for a team in Paris,” I told them, trying to keep my voice and story impartial. “He had a game one day… or a match, whatever they call it, with a team in another city.” I knew exactly what team and city, but my pride wouldn’t let me admit it was burned into me. “He ruptured his Achilles during the game and fractured his orbital bone.” The rupture had been one thing. As he stumbled away, he got elbowed in the face by a man that had looked like a giant even in comparison to Jonah, but that wasn’t relevant to the story. I didn’t give them those details. “I didn’t hear from him again after that,” I kept going. “He sent a few postcards to where I was living in Paris, but that was it.”
He’d cut me out of his life almost cold turkey. We had gone from texting each other throughout the day, making plans to see each other almost every night when I didn’t have to coach in the evening or when he had to wake up early the next day, or he didn’t have a game somewhere else, to… nothing. Just nothing except for those postcards that didn’t say anything. He’d been a surgeon about it. In there one moment and out the next.
Well, mostly out the next. It took me a month to figure out that he’d left me a going-away present. Fuckface.
Grandpa let out a breath through his nose that sounded like he was blowing a raspberry, and it snapped me back into focus. I had to tell them the rest.
“I tried almost everything to get in contact with him. The guys I knew that he played with told me that he’d had surgery in Paris, but that they hadn’t seen or heard from him since that game. No one knew where he went, and if they did, they wouldn’t tell me. All I knew was that he’d ruptured his Achilles, he had a broken bone in his face, and that he was going to be out for twelve months, if he even came back. I guess he’d had another Achilles injury before.”
This part was getting harder and harder for me, but it just took one glance at Mo to help me calm down. She was busy making noises and playing with a squeaky toy