Grandpa hmphed from behind his coffee cup, and it made me wonder what Peter had said to him to make him be so… subdued. Because he had to have said something. Nothing I suggested would sure as hell be enough to keep him from making comments. Peter was Grandpa’s voice of reason and was usually the only thing in the world that would get him to think rationally.
I was going to have to thank him later for whatever he’d said or done.
Luckily, it was Peter who kept up the questions… confirming that he had gotten my grandfather to bite his tongue on the topic of Jonah and Mo.
Jonah and Mo.
I’d never had an ulcer before, but I suddenly wondered if that weird feeling in my stomach was a sign I might be getting one even though I didn’t eat anything, usually, that would cause one. But weirder shit had happened. Like me even meeting the Shithead in the first place. I hadn’t decided that I was even going to take a three-month teaching position at the judo club until weeks before. My friend had bailed on me at the last minute for that trip to Versailles. And Jonah wasn’t even supposed to be on the same tour I had been assigned to. If he’d gone on the original tour he was going to be on, or if I hadn’t decided to get a sandwich right at that moment…
I wouldn’t have had a reason to talk to him.
I would have just checked him out and left him alone. Maybe. Who the fuck knew?
But he had been on the same tour, and I had gotten in line behind him and overheard him and his friend struggling to communicate with the cashier. That was all it had taken. And here we were.
“Do you believe him?” Peter asked in a careful voice as he tapped a finger against the lip of his coffee mug.
Leaning back against the counter, I shrugged. It wasn’t like I hadn’t asked myself the same thing since he’d walked out of the office. “No. But at the same time, I don’t think he could be that good of an actor.” I was going to have to finally explain part of the story, wasn’t I? “None of it makes sense, but at the same time, it does. I guess.”
Bringing the towel to my face, I scrubbed it downward, trying to get my thoughts together. Grandpa was staring at me with his beady, evil little eyes, and Peter just sat there, his attention on Mo who was in her own little world, babbling away her own story, living her best baby life with a full belly after a day of fun.
Fuck.
They needed to know the whole story now. Well, most of it, anyway.
“He was a professional rugby player in France when we met right after I got there. He had just started playing for a team in Paris,” I told them, trying to keep my voice and story impartial. “He had a game one day… or a match, whatever they call it, with a team in another city.” I knew exactly what team and city, but my pride wouldn’t let me admit it was burned into me. “He ruptured his Achilles during the game and fractured his orbital bone.” The rupture had been one thing. As he stumbled away, he got elbowed in the face by a man that had looked like a giant even in comparison to Jonah, but that wasn’t relevant to the story. I didn’t give them those details. “I didn’t hear from him again after that,” I kept going. “He sent a few postcards to where I was living in Paris, but that was it.”
He’d cut me out of his life almost cold turkey. We had gone from texting each other throughout the day, making plans to see each other almost every night when I didn’t have to coach in the evening or when he had to wake up early the next day, or he didn’t have a game somewhere else, to… nothing. Just nothing except for those postcards that didn’t say anything. He’d been a surgeon about it. In there one moment and out the next.
Well, mostly out the next. It took me a month to figure out that he’d left me a going-away present. Fuckface.
Grandpa let out a breath through his nose that sounded like he was blowing a raspberry, and it snapped me back into focus. I had to tell them the rest.
“I tried almost everything to get in contact with him. The guys I knew that he played with told me that he’d had surgery in Paris, but that they hadn’t seen or heard from him since that game. No one knew where he went, and if they did, they wouldn’t tell me. All I knew was that he’d ruptured his Achilles, he had a broken bone in his face, and that he was going to be out for twelve months, if he even came back. I guess he’d had another Achilles injury before.”
This part was getting harder and harder for me, but it just took one glance at Mo to help me calm down. She was busy making noises and playing with a squeaky toy in her chair, oblivious to how loud she was being and that it made me have to raise my voice. That fucking girl.
Maybe everything had happened for a reason.
But here was the only moment where I had felt shame. Because I had thought yeah, right, bish, when an ex-girlfriend or ex-fuck buddy showed up at the gym trying to reconnect with one of the guys. I had felt embarrassed for them and how they’d been ghosted and thought how sad it was that they were trying to hold on to these men who didn’t want them anymore. I had pitied them.
And then I had been put into their shoes, and it wasn’t a party. It wasn’t nice. It made me angry. It made me feel ashamed… of myself.
I had tried so hard my entire life to not ever be embarrassed by anything I did. Whatever I did, I did for a reason, with no regrets, even the shady shit. Yet, I had been there. Because of a guy.
Because of a man who had grinned, blushed, and told me cheers after I’d helped him.
“I even tried contacting his brothers and sisters, but they must have thought I was a stalker or delusional or something,” was as far as I told Peter and Grandpa, not wanting to go into details. “I never heard back from any of them. Or him, obviously. Or his teammates. You know most of the rest of the story after that. I found out about Mo when I was there, came home. I gave him one last chance when she was born, and then I stopped trying to contact him. A few months later, articles popped up that he was coming back to finish his contract with the Paris team…. And he still never reached out.
“All I know is that he’s here now, and he’s pretending like he didn’t read a single one of my texts.”
Bitch.
“Or hear a single one of the voice mails I left him.”
Double bitch. He was lucky I knew it was possible to delete all of your messages without actually listening to them. Even if that possibility was pretty far-fetched.
“Or wasn’t a professional athlete with endorsements and under contract and try to claim he didn’t check his email. Or maybe it was just my emails he didn’t want to read,” I finished, thinking fucking bitch again. “So I don’t know what to believe.”
Grandpa’s fingers had already been pinching the bridge of his nose before he started talking. “He can believe I’m going to—”
All Peter had to do was glance at him, and that had Grandpa instantly pressing his mouth together and literally hunching over, hand still in place between his eyes.
That had me raising my eyebrows, and when Peter glanced at me, the slightest hint of a smile crossed his mouth. Oh yeah, I was going to have to ask him what he’d said to get him to chill out. It was impressive.
“I don’t need you going back to your coven of vampires or your Grandpas Gone Wild clique and getting them all riled up—” I started to say before the sound of a phone vibrating on the counter had all of us looking around. It was Peter who frowned down at his cell, which I guess had been resting on his thigh or something, because he got up and walked out of the room before answering it.