think?”
That was what she thought because she kept on going.
Once Mo was done telling him her life story, I decided to be decent and try my best to be a good person.
Okay, at least a decent one.
“Were you waiting for long?” I made myself ask, even as I told myself that I didn’t really care how long he’d been waiting.
“Yeah, nah.” His eyes flicked down toward me, but his head didn’t actually move. After all, Mo was still holding on to his nose even though she was staring at something over his shoulder.
“Did you drive here?” I suddenly thought about how I hadn’t actually seen him getting in or out of a car at any point. Now that I thought about it… I couldn’t remember seeing a parked car outside of the house on Sunday when he had come over either. Or Saturday night when he’d left. I’d taken Monday off and not seen him.
Jonah was busy still looking at Mo as he lowered himself into the seat beside me, knees going wide to plant her on the thigh furthest from me… the side of his opposite leg touching my knee. “An Uber brought me,” he explained. “I do need to look into a hire car company though.”
A hire car company? Like a rental company?
“I wasn’t sure how long I would be here.” He glanced at me with those honey-colored eyes, lingering on my face for a second too long. “At first.”
It was a miracle I didn’t scoff.
“But I have my IDP,” he rattled on, like I’d asked, moving his attention back to probably the nicest person in the room. She was definitely the cutest person. I watched as one of Jonah’s cheeks went higher than the other and his fingers touched her red stretchy pant-covered lower leg. “I’ll get a ute for the rest of my holiday soon.”
His holiday.
That got me thinking about our time frames again. How he would have to leave. For work. For rugby. Because his life was elsewhere. I didn’t know where. But the point was: he would be gone for a long time, regardless of what continent or country he was in. Would he actually come back?
I really wasn’t sure how we were going to make this all function, but… we couldn’t be the first dumbasses to put ourselves in this kind of situation. One person living and working on one continent, and another living and working on another.
If you want something to work, you find a way to make it, my fucking brain attempted to remind me right then.
Damn it, I hated when my conscious made me feel guilty. If Jonah had been a friend, I wouldn’t have hesitated to offer him help. Yet here I was.
I glanced at the Fucker and found him smiling gently at Mo who had half her fist shoved into her mouth as she stared at the ceiling tiles.
Jesus, I was going to need to tell Luna about this. Someone was going to need to fawn over me being a decent human being toward someone I legit wanted to kick in the ass.
“If you need to borrow a car before you rent one…” I started to say, feeling only slightly bad that I was struggling so much to get the words out. I was a decent person. Just with people who I didn’t have beef with, is all. He was my girl’s dad, and I was going to be stuck with him, I tried to reason. And mostly, I’d just fucking promised myself that I wasn’t about to make my life more miserable because of him. I wasn’t going to be the crazy shit non-ex. I was going to be the cool one that thought she’d dodged a bullet by not being still together. “You can borrow mine.”
Jonah blinked, and I would swear even Mo looked at me like she didn’t know who I was.
“Thank you,” he replied after a second, clearing his throat. “But I wouldn’t want you to be without a car. I can hire one, it’s no problem at all.”
Mo’s hand moved to Jonah’s ear, and I watched his gaze follow the movement. His nostrils flared, and the cheek I could see twitched. Then he reached down to tap her own ear in return, earning him the cutest, sweetest little giggle.
They were going to make me throw up.
“If you change your mind, just let me know,” I pretty much mumbled. He was still a fucker.
The smile he aimed was at the baby. “It’s all good.