Lenny, if you give me the chance. I can promise you that. I will do better.”
I still said nothing.
The Mo League?
I fucking hated how much I liked it. Hated how reasonable and even sweet he was attempting to be. Hated that I was even in this position in the first place. Not having a kid, but not having her with someone who I could fully trust. Someone I loved, even. That would have been nice.
But this was what I had so….
A hand with short, trimmed nails wrapped itself around my wrist, and I looked up into those honey-colored eyes that popped so much on his tanned skin and held my breath. “There’s so much we have to work out, but I’m more than willing to. I won’t give you a reason to regret it.”
Regret was a weird thing. It was the one topic that Grandpa Gus had drilled into my head over and over and over again when I’d gotten nervous while I’d been growing up. You did something and you could regret it, or you could not do something and regret it. You never knew which way it would go. Everything in life is a gamble.
But I knew what I would regret the most. I knew it deep inside my bones, deep inside my soul, deep inside everywhere.
I looked at the man standing with me on a quiet residential street at ten-thirty in the morning on a Sunday and thought of the words he had already used both in my presence and out of it.
He claimed he wanted to be around for Mo. He’d said it without thinking about it too much, which I wasn’t completely sure was a good thing. But… he couldn’t fuck up if I didn’t give him a chance to.
Jonah couldn’t be a dad if I didn’t give him the opportunity.
I didn’t need to look at the sweet little booger with big honey-colored eyes to know there was nothing I wouldn’t do for her, and spending time with a man who’d hurt my feelings… being obligated to be in contact with that man for the rest of her life—of my life—well, I could do it. I would do it. The way Mo had come to exist was in the past already. But her future was up to us.
I could only hope this might be the easiest thing I ever had to suck up to do.
Being a mom wasn’t for weak asses, that was for sure.
So, I flashed him a grimace that I hoped was at least part of a smile. “Fine. Welcome to the Mo League. You can be the vice president if you’re willing to fight Grandpa Gus for the spot, but he fights dirty, so you’re probably better off being the secretary, I guess.”
Chapter 9
9:08 p.m
Your voicemail is full.
In case you deleted my number,
this is Lenny.
Call or text me. Please.
When I walked into Maio House on Tuesday morning and felt the awkwardness in the air, I knew something was up.
And I had a feeling it was because of a bubblehead from New Zealand.
He had come over multiple times by that point. Of course they’d seen him, he was massive and an unknown. They hadn’t been aware of why he was coming in. It wasn’t unheard of for people to drop by the office to talk about training or marketing stuff or different programs. Managers for the athletes came into the office to talk about one thing or another from time to time. Some of the guys dropped by for advice or to talk… a lot less now than before, but it still happened. Sometimes. Rarely, really. And that kind of made me sad.
Most of my real friends had stopped training MMA over the last few years for one reason or another, mostly from injuries and some because of relationships and families. Priorities changed, and I was the last person to not understand that, especially now. During the last big hurricane, a lot of them had moved away when our old facility had been destroyed by floodwater and mold. And they hadn’t come back.
But whatever.
Where I’d gone from knowing everyone and being friends with them all, now… at most I was someone they kind of knew. I didn’t work with them on the floor much, and if I did, it wasn’t for hours on end like before. Hell, even with Luna, we had to work a lot more at our friendship than we’d had to in the past. We had to schedule lunches every