In the three seconds it took me to do that, he’d maneuvered further into my room and deposited Mo on the floor, sitting, by some of her toys.
“Only one trophy?” he asked in that beautiful accent, lingering by the drawer chest closest to him. Over the last few weeks, he had been in Mo’s room plenty of times but never in mine.
I tugged my sweater down as far as it would go over my hips. “Just my last national title. The ones from Worlds are downstairs, and the rest are in the shed out back.”
One single finger touched the plaque at the bottom of the trophy, swiping across the gold-plated face. “You aren’t fond of looking at them?”
“Not really,” I told him. “Peter always said it was good to not get hung up on the things you’ve done but on the things you will do. And no one ever comes up here anyway.” Which reminded me of the fact that he was up here, and for about the twentieth time, I wondered if I should worry over the idea of him noticing that things were… off or not. “There’s a lot of them.”
“That many?” he teased.
I shrugged my good shoulder with a smile.
“You’ll give me a complex. I have one.”
I raised an eyebrow as he bent over to inspect my trophy closer. “Is it a participation trophy?”
Jonah’s grin spread when he glanced at me. “Close.”
“What’s it for?”
“World Rugby Player of the Year.”
I’d forgotten that lovely fact that I’d learned when I’d looked him up online. I also forgot that it had annoyed me that he hadn’t told me about it either. I’d only learned about it from his public page.
World Rugby Player of the Year. Fancy, humble fucker.
I knew for a fact he’d been on the last national team that had won a World Rugby Cup title, but he kept that to himself.
“Excuse me,” I joked.
He shook his head, and I didn’t imagine the quick glance he shot down to my chest one more time, before coming back up again like it hadn’t happened in the first place.
I could see his feet out of the corner of my eye move around my room. It wasn’t anything flash, like he would say. Light gray. The furniture was from the last six years, all black and low, covered by a teal comforter to add some color. Really the only personality in it was the knickknacks all over the place, things I’d been given or collected when I went on trips—shells, rocks, random figurines or souvenirs from different countries, picture frames of periods throughout my life. There was nothing on the walls.
Jonah continued moving, stopping at my bed and setting a hand on the mattress. “Big bed.”
I raised my eyebrows at him as I hopscotched a block across the floor in front of Mo. “For me and all my boy toys.”
His eyebrows slammed down into a straight line.
“I’m kidding,” I told him, not able to keep from smiling because seriously? Like, for real? How did he not know I was fucking with him?
Mo threw a block at my face that I didn’t have enough time to block or dodge out of the way of. It hit me right in the center of my forehead, and I couldn’t help but laugh as I said, “No, Mo. No.”
Jonah had a tight little smile on his face as he watched us, but his throat bobbed and something funny came over his face as he asked in that still, still voice, palm lingering over the mattress, “Your granddad brought up a Noah earlier. Is he an old friend?”
I should have known this was coming. “Yeah. I’ve known him since I was three.”
His fingers brushed over my comforter some more, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t imagining that his voice got deeper. “Where does he live?”
This was the conversation he wanted to have? I would have rather told him about the hemorrhoid I’d gotten while I’d been baking Mo. Or tell him about how I had gone three days without pooping during that time too and thought I was dying.
But I guess Jonah had told me about some of his darkest moments, so there was that.
Glancing back up at his face, I lost my train of thought because… well, because of the fucking face he was making.
“What?”
I was so used to seeing him smirking or smiling or just looking like the world was an okay place that this was something else I didn’t know he was capable of.
But I think I kind of liked a scowl-y, serious Jonah.
At least in tiny doses.
“I think I’m beginning to regret asking,” was his low answer.
“Why?”
“You’re thinking about it a bit much. Seems to me that’s a sign the answer is complicated, and I don’t know how I feel about you feeling conflicted over someone.”
I dropped from my crouching position to flat on my ass as I stared up at him standing beside my bed, looking down at me with a seriously aggravated fucking face. And I took my sweet-ass time asking yet again, “Why?”
If I had ever doubted the fact that this guy clicked with some part of me that I wasn’t sure I would ever understand, his fucking answer, without hesitation, without any sort of shit I would have faced from any other man in the world, came at me. “I’m jealous, and I’m not much of a fan of that, but I want to know what happened even if I regret it more than I do already.”
My hand reached out toward him on its own, without a single thought, until I had my fingers wrapped around his calf—because it was the closest body part to me—and, chances were, I probably had a dreamy look on my face as I did it.
Was this why some women played games? Because it made them feel like a champ? Because I liked it. I liked it a lot more than I had any business liking it, because Jonah was jealous.
Because of me.
And as his eyes slid down to look at the hand I was touching him with, a tiny part of his expression faltered, and the next thing I knew, he was dropping onto the edge of the bed and saying more quietly than a moment before, with a little less of an edge, “Tell me, would you?”
The words just about got caught in my throat, but I grabbed them and flung them out at him. Humbled. Honestly. Feeling way too good for something so dumb. Because he really didn’t have a single thing to be jealous over.
“Noah and I grew up together, like I said.”
Even the way he nodded was grave.
“We met in tae kwon do when we were three. It turned out his family lived down the street from us, and his parents were nice. Do you remember that first day we went on a walk? When the woman honked at us? That was his mom,” I explained. “He was an only child too back then, and I guess it made sense for us to be friends. When I got old enough to start judo classes, Grandpa moved me over to that, and his parents did too because he wanted to do the same thing I did, I guess,” I started to explain, noticing the way one of his eyes started to narrow a little.
This story wasn’t exactly going to go the way he expected.
This wasn’t one of those kinds of stories.
“We were in all the same classes in elementary school; I don’t know what you call it in New Zealand, but I’m sure you get the picture. He was my best friend, my brother kind of, I guess. His mom picked me up from school twice a week and kept me at her house until I got picked up. Grandpa Gus dropped us both off every morning. We went to the same middle school too, and everything was the same.