He didn’t move away as I scooted in, setting the baby monitor down on my other side along with my glass of water.
The last thing I remembered was yawning as I focused in on the television and tried to recall any information I could about the two men fighting in the cage.
I passed out.
At least, I didn’t realize I had passed out until sometime later when I woke up because something was hurting from the general vicinity of my neck.
I opened both eyes slowly, not surprised at all I’d fallen asleep and licked my lips as I focused in on a few things.
One: apparently I’d started hugging and leaning against Jonah’s leg because I had an arm around it, and there was a wet spot over his jeans right by his knee that had to belong to me.
Two: The main fight was over because what was playing on the television wasn’t anything that involved two highly trained fighters trying to win a lot of money. Instead, on our eighty-inch TV, there were a lot of sweaty men running fast across a field, passing a ball from one person to another. Some of them were wearing red jerseys, others were wearing blue jerseys. But it was the short shorts on the screen that confirmed they were watching rugby.
Three: At least half the room had emptied, but Grandpa Gus was still there, so was Peter, and I didn’t know who else to my left.
But most importantly, Jonah was talking quietly. Not in his Mighty Mouse voice, but in a very, very soft one.
And it had to be Jonah who had his fingers loose and heavy over my head as he murmured to someone, “The scrum only happens when there’s been a minor infringement and play has to be restarted.”
“But how do you know when play has to be restarted?” a voice I faintly recognized asked.
“You’re a dumbass. How do you know when any play in any game has to be restarted? When somebody fucks up. Like a foul. What do you think an infringement is?” another voice I also recognized answered.
I yawned as Grandpa Gus’s voice piped in with, “The big one right there is bleeding, and he’s getting into that… what’d you call it? Scum?”
“Scrum,” Jonah corrected.
That word reminded me of how he’d told me so long ago that he had started wearing a scrum cap to protect his ears at his grandmother’s insistence.
“But they aren’t taking him out of the game?” Grandpa asked.
The fingers on the top of my head stirred over my hair. “Yeh. Rugby isn’t… like that. Unless there’s a head injury and an HIA is needed—”
“What’s an HIA?” that was Peter who asked.
“Head injury assessment. Concussion protocol, you’d call it,” the man whose lower leg was giving me all the warmth in the world answered.
“That guy’s nose is still bleeding though.”
Jonah’s laugh was soft. “Yeah, he doesn’t need staples. He’ll play the rest of the match, you’ll see.”
“What the fuck?” another voice echoed. “I still can’t get over that none of y’all wear pads or helmets, and you still tackle the shit out of each other.”
“Yeh,” Jonah said, and those fingers on my head sifted over my hair some more, moving so that the pads grazed my temple. “It’s like what you do with the MMA. They don’t take you out if you bleed a bit, do they?”
I could see Grandpa Gus stirring on the couch, his eyes glued to the game on the screen. “Yeah, but fights happen two, maybe three times a year. You play, what? Once a week for four months?”
“Eh… once a week for eight months sometimes, depending on the schedule and the league. Depending, too, on if you play on the national team or not, then you’re in it for most the year.”
“Eight months?” Grandpa Gus spit out.
Did he sound… impressed? Was that the sound of my grandfather being impressed?
I might have almost felt jealous. Almost.
Jonah’s soft puff of laugh had me lifting my chin so I could peek at him. His eyes were down on me like he’d felt me moving around, and the next thing I knew, a finger was grazing my temple, and that was nice… but confusing. And he looked right at me as he answered back, “Eight months with a two-week break in there.”
“How old are you?” Grandpa asked.
His gaze went nowhere, his thumb still on me, brushing up and down a half inch or so as he said, “Thirty-one in June.”
A little younger than me.
“It’s a young man’s sport,” he went on, still doing that thing with his thumb that was pretty much the equivalent of a snake charmer to me because I wasn’t moving away and had no freaking plans to. “If I’m very lucky, I’ve got another four, five years at best. Maybe less, maybe more. Depends what my body decides.”
Four years left playing?
But what I really heard was… four years left of him living wherever the hell else his career might take him?
And, realistically, wasn’t it a reminder that he had the rest of his life to live somewhere else? I wasn’t expecting him to move here, to Houston, just because of Mo. A person couldn’t just pick up their entire lives and move to another country where they had no one. Especially not someone like Jonah who, as I’d just learned, was close to his family.
What were we going to do?
I turned my head, taking my cheek out of the reach of his thumb and facing forward again, forcing a yawn out of my body to play off the fact that the idea of him being gone for four years, five years, the rest of his life… sucked.
Of course I wouldn’t have a baby… maybe be even a little in love… with a man who was simple. Of course it wouldn’t have been with someone who trained at the gym. Someone who did MMA. Someone who lived in the same city, much less the same fucking country. Someone who didn’t love what he did as much as I had probably loved judo when that had been all my life revolved around.
But I had barely thought that when something that felt an awful lot like a finger grazed the top of my ear.
“And you play where?” a familiar voice asked.
“I finished my season in Paris not long ago,” he answered, without really answering, which made me wonder.
The same voice huffed. “Wasn’t that where Lenny was last year when she—hold up. That’s where y’all met, huh?”
“Yeh. On a tour together. She translated for me while we were waiting on the bus,” he said to them for no reason at all. “Best decision I’ve ever made was buying that sammy that day.”
I held back my sigh because I knew Grandpa Gus could hear me do that in a crowded room with the television blaring and sagged against the leg at my side, my arm still wrapped around it.
I stayed right there, listening to the voice of the man on the couch go on for the next forty minutes of the remainder of the rugby game, and tried my best not to think about how I felt about him or about the time we had left or about how buying my own sandwich that day might be the best decision I’d ever made too.
Chapter 17
11:11 p.m
I can’t believe you’re this much
of an asshole.
All I need is to talk to you for
two minutes.
That’s it.
It’s important.