I hit the answer button and didn’t bother trying to hide the tension in my voice. “Grandpa.”
“How’s my favorite demon?” he answered like he always did when he was in a really good mood, and like always, it made me smile even though I didn’t feel like it. I squeezed my eyes closed as I did it, feeling this knot swell up in my throat all of a sudden.
“Everybody is getting on my nerves today,” I told him honestly, struggling to even get those words out as a mental picture of Jonah’s face filled my head with those damn freckles and that grimace/frown/smile.
“Everybody is always getting on your nerves,” he replied. “Want to get out of there and get some lunch?”
We needed to talk. Now, apparently. Shit. I knew I should have done this months ago… even a year ago… but…
I hadn’t. I thought I’d have more time. My fault again.
“Are you in the mood for Pho Palace?” I asked. “I can meet you there in fifteen.”
“Meet you there in thirty,” he agreed a second before hanging up, not waiting for me to confirm thirty was good and not bothering to say bye. He never did. He said the b-word sounded too final.
That and I think he just liked hanging up on people.
Lowering my hand to the desk, I squeezed my eyes shut for another moment, shoved my chair back, and got to my feet. Fuck it. I had put myself in this mess, I was going to have to get myself out of it.
Chapter 4
“Jonah, it’s Lenny again. I’m worried about you. Where the hell are you hiding?”
My best friend hadn’t said anything in two whole minutes.
In the first sixty seconds, she had narrowed her eyes, looked up at the ceiling, made a thoughtful face, looked back at me, narrowed her eyes some more, and then pressed her lips together, squinting so much that she probably couldn’t see anything.
In that same amount of time, I had crossed my arms over my chest and waited for her to make a comment.
Over the course of the next minute, she had pulled her phone out of her purse, which had been sitting on top of my desk since she was in the chair across from me, and started pecking away at the screen. Luna didn’t let me down as she finally loosened her lips, sat back in the chair, and took a deep breath. Her eyes went wide a moment before those green eyes flicked back in my direction as we sat there in my office the following morning.
Her index finger came up a second before she held up her phone with her other hand and aimed the screen at me. “This is him?”
The image on the screen was of a deeply olive-skinned man with shorts halfway up his thighs, a green short-sleeved jersey stretched so tight across his chest it made you wonder how the hell he got it on and off, standing on a field with his arms loose at his sides. The man had biceps so big it looked like someone had shoved a ball under his skin, thighs wide and tight and lined with muscles that overlapped each other. The ultra-serious expression on his face, brows furrowed, mouth slightly parted, irritated the fuck out of me.
“Yeah, that’s Jonah,” I confirmed, looking back at Luna’s face because I didn’t want to look at his anymore than I needed to.
My best friend gaped, literally gaped, as she looked back at the screen. Her finger started pecking away at her phone again, and it didn’t take a genius to guess she was scrolling through more pictures of him.
I sighed. “You’re about to say something stupid, aren’t you?”
Fucking Luna nodded before she made yet another face—still at her screen—and asked, in total fucking disbelief, “You slept with him?”
“No, we just played patty-cake,” I answered her dryly.
Her phone went down, and I had her undivided attention again. Even her elbows went to her thighs as she leaned forward and asked way too carefully, “No, Lenny, for real. You. Had. Sex. With. Him?”
I blinked. I didn’t need that reminder. “Yes.”
“Him?”
I poked at my inner cheek with the tip of my tongue. “I’m not really feeling your tone of voice right now.”
This bish looked back at the picture of Jonah Collins and shook her head again like she couldn’t believe it. “I just… I mean…” She was stuttering. She was literally stuttering, and I just about rolled my fucking eyes at her.
I mean, yeah, I understood. Jonah was… a fucker, of course… a dipshit, dumbass, motherfucker… but he was beautiful. Handsome in a way that only few men could be, not feminine at all, but sculpted so perfectly from his perfect hairline to his roughly striking face… and then there was that body.
God, I hated his guts, no matter what I told myself about not feeling anything. Hatred. Hatred was a feeling. But it was also a verb sometimes.
“Him?” she asked again in disbelief.
“I think I might be starting to get a little offended by how surprised you sound, Luna,” I told her, totally joking, because really, I did get it.
“I always… you never…” She kept stopping and starting with her words as she grew flustered. “You’ve never said anything about a guy before, Len. Not once in ten years. I just thought you were… asexual or something for the longest time.” Her cheeks went pink as she whispered, “I thought you were a virgin until... you know.”
I blinked at her again, knowing she had a point. “Yeah, no.”
She gasped. “You never said anything! I thought for a while there you had something going on with that Noah guy, but then nothing ever happened, and I know you, if you really liked him, I bet you would have gone for it, and—did you lose it to him?”
My shady-ass past was finally coming to light. “I’m thirty-one. I didn’t lose my virginity to Jonah, Luna. Jesus.”
“Who then?”
There was a reason I’d never brought this up before: I just hadn’t seen the point. On the other hand, Luna had given me some intimate details of her and the guys she’d dated before so… it was the least I owed her. “This one guy I was friends with when I started going to college. He was in a few of my classes.” I shrugged, thinking about the guy that I had liked as a friend.
“Let me see a picture of him.”
I rolled my eyes with a snort. “Stalker, much?”
“Does he look like him?” she asked, shaking her phone at me.
I slid her a look. “No. And stop looking so surprised. You might start hurting my feelings.”
That had her groaning. “You know what I mean!”
I shrugged my good shoulder at her, honestly relieved that I had finally managed to tell her the entire story. At least 90 percent of it. Even though she was my best friend, she didn’t need to hear the bad parts. No one did. I knew there were plenty of things she hadn’t shared with me over the years. The same way I knew there were a handful of other things I had never told her either.
“So he’s back?” she asked, focused back on her screen.
“Yeah.”
Her green eyes went wide as she sat in the chair, eyes moving back to her phone while she processed my news. “What are you going to do?” she asked after a second.
“See what he says,” I answered her simply. “I don’t really have another choice.” It wasn’t like I could pick him up by his ankles and give him the shakedown over the side of a skyscraper so he’d tell me why he was here or what he wanted. Unfortunately.