About me?
I rocked on my feet. “So she’s usually really nice when she hasn’t just found out randomly that she’s a grandma?”
His laugh was awkward and said everything. “Eh… I don’t know if I’d say that. She’s always wanted the best for us. Always pushed us and supported us in her way. But only my second oldest brother has lived up to her hopes. The rest of us… not so much all the time. It’s all good. It’s easier to let her say what she wants and do what we want.” He laughed again, still rusty and tense, his fingers moving even closer to the ones I had almost beside his. “But she’ll be better with you. She promised. I told her everything. About the phone calls and the emails and the messages…. About why I came.” He gave me a pointed look that I wasn’t totally sure what to make of. Did he want her to know that he’d come… to see me?
“I reckon she understands now, and I’m sorry for that,” he said. “You shouldn’t have had to defend yourself or think you aren’t good enough.”
“I know I’m good enough,” I said, earning a quick glance and a quicker, slighter smile. “But I get it. I’m not winning any beauty competitions or charm awards.”
Those big brown eyes widened. “What’s a charm award?”
“The same thing you aren’t winning either, stupid,” I muttered, getting a big grin and laugh that he tried his best to muffle when Mo’s eyes instantly opened in response. “Look, I get it. I’m not what any mom would want for her precious baby.”
His laugh cut off immediately and so did the smile on his face. “Yeah, nah, Len. Why do you say things like that?”
I felt my lips drop out of the smile they’d been in.
“You’re smart, and you’re so damn funny.” I’d swear his eyes twinkled. “I could look at you all day, if it was possible.”
I shut the hell up.
“And I’d tell you what I think about all the rest of you if I didn’t think you’d knock me to the ground again,” Jonah admitted quietly, the smile he gave me afterward, small.
This big, massive man was smiling shyly.
God help me.
Even the hand I had on Mo’s foot stopped moving at what he’d just said.
I’d had more than a handful of—mostly drunk—guys tell me that they thought I was hot or goddamn, that fucking body, but I took it with a grain of salt. Beer goggles were real. I’d seen them in action. And I didn’t give a fuck what those guys thought. Or what most people thought. I saw myself in the mirror clearly.
But this man saying those words…? About me? To me?
Jonah kept on smiling—and fucking stealing my heart straight out of my chest even though I was trying to cling onto it for dear life—and then he did it some more with the “Heh” that came out of his throat.
All I could do was look at him, so that’s what I did even as I swallowed again and said the words I should probably regret in the future but probably wouldn’t. “If you’re trying to get me to want to sleep with you again, it’s working.”
He blinked. “I….” He closed his mouth. Opened it again, said, “Sometimes I can’t tell if you’re joking with me or not.”
I wasn’t.
But I also wasn’t sure I wanted to repeat that sentence either.
Instead, I smiled at him and looked back down at Mo like that would win me a break to get my own thoughts together.
Well, it wasn’t news to me that I didn’t look like Freddy Krueger.
And even though I knew it wasn’t cool or mysterious or flirty or smooth, I found the words, and even though they made me uncomfortable, I still threw them back out into the world. Into Jonah’s direction. “I had started to think that I’d forced you to talk to me.” My lips moved to the side, and I had to fight the urge to grimace-smile at him. “I know I’m not soft or even that nice or sweet or girly. Not that there’s anything wrong with being that way or not being that way, but I know not everybody is into… that.” Me. And my sometimes bad attitude. And my bluntness. And a bunch of other aspects of my personality that I wasn’t going to apologize for.
The lines across his forehead and at the corners of his eyes grew deeper as those eyes moved across my face, and it was right then that big, warm fingers covered in calluses covered mine. And Jonah’s voice was a low, husky thing I didn’t know what to do with. “You didn’t force me to do anything, love.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he shook his head. “And you are all those things, they’re just mixed in with all those other traits I like even more.”
His fingertips slid from my knuckles to my fingertips and back, and his smile grew a little wider, a little more brilliant, as he said, “You’ve got the sweetest face, even when you’re throwing out every insult in the English language.” Jonah’s eyes bounced from one of mine to the other, and he asked quietly, “Do you know why I could talk to you when we met?”
I didn’t.
“You were sitting on a bench at the architectural museum while we waited for the tour organizer to come around to sign everyone in.”
I faintly remembered waiting around and sitting on a bench next to these two teenage boys who were trying to stay as far away from their parents as possible.
“An elderly couple arrived—do you remember them? The Canadians celebrating their sixtieth wedding anniversary?” he asked but didn’t wait for me to answer. “You got up the moment you saw them, said a thing or two to those boys sitting with you, and they got up as well. You invited them to sit down. You went and sat on the ground right next to them and talked to them the whole time. Well, until the sammies.”
I remembered all that. Or, at least, I remember talking to the older couple on and off all day. Frederick and Basil had been their names, from Toronto. But a question lingered in my head over what Jonah said. “I got under your shy shield because I talked to them?”
“No.” If anyone else had given me the smile he did, I would have thought they were mocking me, but his was too sweet. “Because you were nice to them and the way you smiled at them made you look so much more beautiful. It made me forget all about how good you looked in those shorts. You know Akira gave me such a hard time afterward for talking to you. He was so disappointed it wasn’t him you helped. He talked about you in those shorts all the way back to the flat until I told him to stop.”
Why did I feel embarrassed? “I just like older people,” I explained, knowing that probably lost me points. “They’re honest and easy to talk to. It’s why I liked working at the retirement home.”
Those long fingers curled over mine, covering my entire hand, his thumb sweeping up the side of my hand directly below my pinky finger. “Lucky for me my French is awful, eh?”
My whole heart soared a little bit.
Okay, alotta bit.
And I’d be embarrassed to think that my fingers almost twitched under his, because I had touched hands with a lot of people before. Men and women. His. But never… never like… this. With someone looking at me the way he was, so openly.
Jonah held my hand. With his rough thumb sweeping up and down the bones under my pinky finger, being all honest and Jonah and heartfelt.