On the floor, two brown-haired men, one with more salt than pepper in it and the other with a fade cut, were kneeling, surrounding a baby kicking two chubby bare legs in the air but also somehow trying to roll over at the same time. A baby that wasn’t wearing a diaper. Beside her, was the stuffed animal that Jonah had brought over the night before but hadn’t gotten around to giving her.
“It’s easy, but you have to be fast now that’s she rolling over.” It was Peter, the smaller one of the two, who spoke as he pulled a diaper out of nowhere like a magician. “You lift her bottom—” He held two feet together and lifted said butt in the air an inch before sliding the opened diaper beneath the bare butt. “—spread it out, fold the front over, and put the tabs back down, and you’re done.”
Jonah, I couldn’t help but notice, was watching him like a hawk as he kneeled beside what looked like two balled-up baby wipes right by his right knee.
“She’s eating real food now. That gets messy, but it’s still simple,” Peter said as he helped Mo sit up.
“How did you learn? With Lenny?”
“No, she was using the bathroom on her own by the time we met.” I watched Peter’s nearly black eyes flick toward the man beside him and saw the protectiveness hidden in them even from across the room. “We took a class and watched some videos to learn how to do everything.”
Jonah made a subtle startled face. “Videos?”
“Yes,” Peter confirmed, stealing another quick glance at the other man before looking back down with a frown. “Len couldn’t sleep much at the end—in the last trimester. We looked up everything then to be ready. We learned together.”
Something flashed across Jonah’s face as he gazed down at the baby. Regret? He might have been faking that too. How the hell would I know?
Peter kept talking though, his gaze shifting back to Mo so that he couldn’t see what I was seeing. But that fiercely protective look on his face didn’t lighten up. It didn’t go anywhere, and it made my heart grow a few sizes. Maybe this other idiot hadn’t liked me enough to even keep being my friend, but Peter would always have my back. Our backs. Always.
“If you’re planning on staying,” Peter said, “you’ll figure it all out. It’s easy. Madeline won’t get mad if you do something wrong. She doesn’t have anything to compare to, and she doesn’t know a bad mood unless she’s hungry. She’s a good girl. She’s tied with her mom for being the best two girls in the world… aren’t you, Mo? Aren’t you good and special and smart? Just like your mama.”
“I didn’t know Lenny was… pregnant. If I had, I wouldn’t….” He swallowed and seemed to struggle for a second to find the right words… or the right lies. “I would have been here. Or maybe… maybe Lenny would have been with me, I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I still can’t believe she… exists.”
Me be with him. Ha. Something that could have been anger or sadness swirled around in my chest.
He continued talking quietly to Peter. “I’ve missed out on heaps. I know it doesn’t change much, but I want you to know that I wasn’t avoiding my… her… Mo.” He closed his eyes for a moment before gluing them back down on the figure on the blanket. His expression startled and nervous and just… heavy. “Wish I could take back the mistakes I’ve made.”
I had no right to let those words make me feel nauseous. I knew that.
I had no right to imagine what those mistakes were—him disappearing for months and having sex with a ton of women, him doing drugs, having another child somewhere, getting married, getting involved with the wrong people—but I ran through all those possibilities in my head anyway.
I hadn’t looked him up in months. The only information I had been caught up on was how his rugby team had been doing over the season, and that was only because of the articles that every so often popped up on my home screen page… from all the previous stalking I’d done before Mo.
I had no idea what he’d been doing with his life. Because it wasn’t any of my business. Because I wasn’t going to look it up.
Jonah and I hadn’t exactly been in a relationship. We had been friends. Who liked each other a lot. Who were attracted to each other, at least I had thought.
But I hadn’t been his girlfriend. I had never been anyone’s girlfriend.
If he had done something after we’d gone our separate ways, it wasn’t like he had cheated on me.
For the most part, I’d always thought I was a logical person. But if I was going to be totally honest with myself, when I had been super pregnant, I would lie in bed and cry over the idea of him being with someone else while I gained weight and my boobs hurt and I couldn’t poop and got irritated by everything even more than usual. I had thought about him spending every night with someone different… even if he had told me before we’d done it that he rarely had sex too. Can’t trust anyone, sweetheart. Hope I don’t bugger this up, he had laughed while he’d taken my clothes off that first time, slowly, letting those big hands linger in all the bare places he came across. And I had laughed and told him I hope you don’t either. And we had both laughed some more after that.
There had been a reason it had been him. Because he had seemed so nice and fresh and honest and good and not at all like the horny assholes I had known who slept with everyone. Or the guys I knew too well to be attracted to. There were good guys out there; of course I knew that. But most of them had girlfriends, and the ones who didn’t were like Jonah—except I felt nothing for them. They knew who they were, they weren’t addicted to sex, and they were particular about who they let into their lives and their beds. And there was nothing there for me.
Some of the most successful men I knew were almost abstinent. Because they knew what it was like for people to want them for all the wrong reasons. You didn’t find real things by looking, usually.
And that’s why I hadn’t second-guessed too much Jonah’s insistence that he was out of practice. He had seemed too real. Too himself. For a while there, he had given me the idea that maybe he could have been mine if we had been together long enough.
That wasn’t how it had worked out, but it’s how I thought it might have. If we’d had time. If he hadn’t been derailed with his injury. If he had liked me more, I guessed.
But that unreasonable part of me that was connected straight to hormones reared its ugly, no-reason-to-be-possessive-but-I-was-going-to-be-a-possessive-psycho-anyway head and made me want to kick the Asshole’s ass all over again for being off living his life, forgetting about me, probably making out with a different woman every week, while I’d been at home, substituting coffee for a hot mushroom drink, missing food I craved out of nowhere that Grandpa wouldn’t let me have either, while my skin stretched and my organs moved with the life I’d been carrying inside of me.
I was a jealous motherfucker, even when I hadn’t had a boyfriend. God knew I had wanted to kill Noah every time I saw him with a different girl while I’d thought I’d been in love with him when I’d been younger. The bitch.
Just thinking about Noah right then made me want to kick his ass too while I was at it, but for a completely different reason.