bother me too much.”
That wiped the smile off him, replacing it with a frown. “Because of the shoulder you’re always pretending doesn’t hurt?”
What? It was my turn to frown. “I’m not always pretending like it doesn’t hurt.”
His face was a little too smug and knowing.
“I’m not.”
One honey-colored eye squinted at me. “You sure?”
I scoffed. “Yeah, maybe sometimes, but not all the time. And it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to since I don’t use it the way I did before. Thank you.” I wasn’t over here watching how he ran to see if his Achilles was as good as it used to be, was I? Which reminded me I hadn’t once asked him how it was doing. He didn’t seem to favor it at all, but you never knew. I’d known players with genuinely fucked-up knees—knees they could barely stand on—who still competed, adjusting their fights to not leave themselves too defenseless by staying on their feet.
“Sure,” he agreed way too fucking easily, still looking smug, but his eyes were curious. “Been like that for a bit, hasn’t it?”
So he had noticed. Before. “I guess we never did talk about that?” I asked him, earning a shake of his head. “But yeah, my shoulder has been shot for a long time. One more injury and I might never be able to lift my arm up over my head, is what the doctors said the last time.” It still hurt to say that sentence out loud. Less, but the ache was still there. “It’s why I don’t do judo anymore.”
Jonah froze, the lines across his forehead deepening again. “Not at all?”
I shook my head.
His already soft voice got even quieter. “Why?”
“I’ve had five surgeries on just one of my shoulders. Each time they said I was done, and I didn’t listen or give a shit. But now I’ve got someone who needs me, and I’m not going to risk doing something irreparable to it anymore.” I shot him a smile that was still tighter than I would have wanted. I was okay with my decision. Mostly. I had gotten used to the idea. It wasn’t like I hadn’t known the day would come eventually.
I just hadn’t known it would be so soon. Judo was brutal on a person’s body. At the international level, everything was harder. It required more power, more strength, and at some point, your body just couldn’t handle taking the beating or even inflicting it. We all wanted to win, and that meant doing what you had to do to ensure you were the winner.
But…
Well, it still sucked. Eighteen years were gone.
But my life wasn’t over.
“It was my choice, and I would make the same one if I had to,” I told him honestly. It hadn’t been easy, but it had been right. That was fucking life sometimes, wasn’t it?
He watched me with those honey-colored eyes and nodded, but I could see the tightness at his jaw. It made me wonder if he thought he had lost everything, but he hadn’t actually. He just hadn’t known it from the start.
I’d had my dream ended too, and maybe I had been in the literal dumps, but here I was. These people I loved wouldn’t let me mourn and wade in my heartbreak and pity for too long. They would never let me forget what really mattered.
When life throws bad shit at you, you dodge it and throw whatever you can right back.
At least that was how Grandpa Gus had tried to raise me.
“Why? You want me to show you how to do the same so you can start doing that to other players if they tackle you too hard?”
That got me one of those deep laughs that made his face light up even more than his smiles did. “That wouldn’t be a bad idea.” He grinned. “Could you do it to me?”
I felt my eyebrows go up, felt my brain tell the rest of me to go back into the office. To leave right now and quit playing around. We weren’t enemies, but we weren’t friends either.
We were a team. In a way. Because a team worked toward a greater good, and our greater good was eighteen pounds and six ounces.
My subconscious tried to remind me I’d never really been a big fan of team sports. I didn’t like the idea of leaving my future in the hands of someone else who might not give as much of a fuck as I did. It’s why I’d