And I hated myself for how my heart dropped as I watched him. Maybe because I’d seen grown men in all stages of despair before: after lost fights when they were disappointed in themselves, after fights when they thought their lives and worlds were over. I’d seen men and women when life was just taking a massive shit on them and they weren’t sure how the hell to get out from under the weight of all that crap.
But I had never, ever seen someone so big look so small.
And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that I felt bad. It wasn’t my fault.
Mostly though, I was pretty sure I didn’t like the way he looked or that it affected me.
“Are you about to cry?” I asked him, hearing the horror in my voice, but it was only because I didn’t know what the fuck to do with it. With him.
His answer was another sniff.
And then his fucking eyes went and got glassy.
I narrowed mine even more, ignoring the tightening in my chest as his tanned hand went up to his temple. And in that way that reminded me of the man I thought I had gotten to know, he answered, “I may, Len.”
Did he have to answer that honestly? Goddamn it. Was I that annoying too when I told people the truth even when they didn’t want to hear it?
“Her name is Mo?” that voice with its New Zealand tones to it, asked on the end of another sniff that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle.
I pressed my lips together, ignoring those fucking sniffs and the way they made my head, and other parts of my body, feel. “Did you think I was going to name her Jonah?” I griped, still watching him, trying to pick up on his body language. “Her name is Madeline. I saw it was popular in New Zealand,” I explained honestly, because that was exactly why I had done it. “But we call her Mo.”
That first-base-sized hand went to his chest just as his eyes closed, and he took in this breath that seemed so rattled, it might have hurt me if I still gave a single fuck about him.
Jonah’s head tipped toward the ceiling, and he wiped at his cheek with one of his tan fingers as his Adam’s apple bobbed—and nope, I didn’t feel shit. I didn’t feel a thing while he wiped at his olive cheek, leaving behind just the slightest glitter behind. “I… need a minute, Lenny. I came back to apologize. To try and talk to you again after this morning. I wasn’t expecting…,” he said so quietly I had to strain to hear. I blinked. “I need more than a minute to think about this. Is that all right with you?”
No. I wanted to give him a middle finger and a kick to the fucking balls, that would be all right with me. But what he actually got was silence. He could do with that whatever he wanted.
Dickface.
I didn’t say anything as he opened his eyes, cast another long look at Mo’s back… glanced at me for another moment, and then seemed to nod to himself. I was pretty positive his eyes were even glassier too. I watched him turn around and walk right out after another exhale, shoulders slumped, everything about his arms and shoulders and even his neck and chest were just… suspicious.
I wasn’t sure what to think about what the hell he’d just said and done. Wasn’t sure how I felt because obviously I was confused because I’d felt bad at how upset he seemed to be. And that irritated me.
With a sigh, I looked down at Mo and blew out a breath. Her bright brown eyes were zeroed in on me, like she wasn’t sure how I was feeling. Then she smiled and grabbed the collar of my shirt and tried to tug it toward her, choking me a little in the process.
It was then I remembered why I was here. Why I’d just gone through this conversation. How the hell this child made me a weak bitch and a stronger bitch at the same time was beyond me.
“Well, that didn’t go the way I thought it would,” I told her quietly as I peeled her fingers off my shirt before she really did choke me out.
I didn’t think she cared about how it had gone down, honestly, because she just kept on smiling at me… and clinging to my collar for dear life.
With another kiss and finally succeeding in extracting myself from her grip, I opened up her playpen while she sat on the floor and then set her in it. I pulled out a few toys from the cabinet beside my desk and set them in there too. Then I picked up my phone from the top of my desk and opened my messages so I could shoot one off to Luna, who was the only reasonable person I could bring this up to right then.
Me: My baby daddy was just here.
I bit my lip and sent off another message.
Me: He made it seem like he had no idea who Mo was. He tried to say that he’d stopped checking his voice mails and texts, and that he broke his phone, and that he hadn’t read an email in his account since before he “took off.” I don’t know what the hell is going on, but he just left. He seemed pretty upset.
Luna wrote me back immediately.
Luna: He’s there???!!!
Luna: Wait.
Luna: If he didn’t know about Mo, then why was he there in the first place?
Wasn’t that the million-dollar question?
I set my phone back on the desktop and stared at it.
I stared at it for a long time, not knowing how the hell to answer.
“So, what are you going to do?”
I sighed to myself as I finished washing off the pureed lentils that were all over my hands from Mo’s dinner. She didn’t mind being fed with a spoon, but she liked me putting a dab in her hand and then trying to hoover it herself even more. The girl was all about eating. Luna’s baby was a fussy eater, but Mo scarfed everything down. She got that from me. You didn’t come between us and food. The only thing she regularly tried to spit out was peas, and I couldn’t blame her. I hated peas too.
But that wasn’t at all related to the question that Peter had just shot me.
I was actually surprised that Grandpa Gus hadn’t brought anything up while I fed Mo—and tried to sneak my own bites in—as they ate dinner. Grandpa had come back into the office maybe ten minutes after Jonah had left and seen the look on my face. He’d made his own face, swallowed his comment, even though it had to have been hard, then grumbled out his and Mo’s plans for the rest of the day, settling for giving me a slanted, pissy look before they disappeared, leaving me all alone to think about my decisions in life.
It wasn’t my fault he hadn’t been in the building when Jonah had come by.
Grabbing the dishtowel from the hook on the cabinet to my left, I turned around to face the two men sitting around the kitchen island and shrugged. We all knew what Peter was asking. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” the smart-ass, Grandpa, asked before raising his eyebrows and bringing his after-dinner decaf coffee up to his mouth to take the smallest sip in history.
“No.” I shot him his own special look that said I know you, old man. “He came into the office and made it seem like he had no idea Her Majesty existed. He acted like he was….” An image of Jonah’s devastated face filled my head, tears in his eyes and all. “He looked really upset after I told him.” Why the hell I didn’t mention him tearing up was beyond me, but I kept my mouth shut. “Then he walked out of the office because he said he needed to think.”