lie to him, he was shit out of luck. “Yeah, he does,” I agreed, because it was the truth. Grandpa Gus did hate him.
What surprised the hell out of me was the snort that ripped through Jonah’s nose at my response. It triggered, for one second, memories of him doing the same thing when we’d known each other. What I didn’t let myself remember was how much I’d liked it.
“Can’t say I blame him much,” the fucker accepted, while I made myself stop thinking about his snort.
All I could manage to do was grunt out a “humph.” I got a side-eye in return. A tight expression came over Jonah’s face as we briefly made eye contact.
“Lenny—” he started almost immediately before I cut him off.
I had a feeling I knew where this was going and didn’t want to go there. “I don’t care what happened or what your reasons were, Jonah. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” I had before, and I wanted him to know that. But I didn’t now. Not anymore.
That was a lie, and my heart knew it and my brain did too. A tiny part of me wanted to hear what he had to say. But nothing he said or did changed a thing.
He told me he would call me.
He got hurt.
He disappeared.
For. Seventeen. Months.
He had reappeared into the world a year after I’d last seen him, and over the next few months, he didn’t make a single effort to contact me.
Motherfucker.
I mean it didn’t matter. It didn’t need to be brought up anymore. It really didn’t, and I had to focus on that. We were here, and we were going to be in this together, some way, somehow, and that was the important part. And if we needed to do this for a long time, then I needed to not get pissed off and become irrational.
I wasn’t spending the rest of my life being bitter toward him. I could passively hate him. That worked.
“All that needs to matter at this point is our relationship with Mo. I don’t want to talk about… then.” I squeezed my hands into fists. It was the truth. It was. “If you’re going to be part of the rest of her life, that is.”
The look he sent me though….
I wasn’t sure what to think of the way his eyebrows knit together or the clench in his cheek. I wasn’t sure what to think of the words that came out of his mouth next either. “I’d like to explain, Lenny,” he said carefully, dousing me with that accent of his that made everything out of his mouth instantly sound prettier than everything out of mine, even though I still wanted to trip him near a flight of stairs. “Need to, really. I’m not going anywhere.”
“It’s easy to say things. It’s not as easy to do them.”
I didn’t mean for my words to come out so bitchy, but it wasn’t like I could take them back after they were out. Maybe he didn’t remember how he had stood in front of me the day before his game—match, whatever—held my face in between those big hands, and said, We should go to the catacombs when I get back from Toulouse, yeh?
We never made it to the catacombs.
I had never made it to the catacombs.
“I deserved that,” he replied, and not for the first time, it hit me that he didn’t fight back, or that he didn’t get mad or try and deflect. Jonah looked down at the ground, that wide jaw working.
His fucking throat started to go pink, and I almost felt guilty. Almost.
But Jonah kept going, his throat bobbing as he owned my borderline bitchy comment. “If that’s what you want, I won’t say anything, but know I want to.” One bright brown eye focused on me. “We can talk about our girl, then?”
We passed by one of my favorite historic houses in the Heights. A massive white and purple home that reminded me of my best friend’s much smaller house, but I had my mind on other things. Our girl. He’d gone with that, huh? Fine.
“Sure,” I told him, training my eyes on the house as we walked by.
“I’m going to contact my lawyer—”
I stopped moving at the same time as a car honked from behind where we were walking. Clenching my fist and holding my breath, I glanced over my shoulder just as a familiar voice hollered, “Hey, Lenny! Hi, Mo!”