He smiled then.
“Our house.”
Hearing those words come out of his mouth made my heart leap.
“It’s your house, Jonah.” I shook my head. “Even if we don’t make it, it’s always going to be your house. This is all going to be done totally amicable because I’m not a bitch who’ll take a man to the cleaners. The world is complicated enough.”
His shoulders drooped slightly.
“I don’t want to go into this with the idea that we’re not going to make it,” he said. “I want you to actually try. So I don’t want you to think about ‘what ifs’ for now.”
I frowned. “Why do you feel so strongly about this? Most men would be freakin’ the hell out right now.”
He dipped another chunk of pretzel into the cheese sauce before popping it into his mouth and chewing.
I watched a piece of cheese drip into his beard and leaned forward with my napkin and wiped it away.
His lips twitched.
“My parents…shit, this is a long story.” He shook his head. “Okay, so I spent the first fifteen years of my life thinking one thing—that the man that I grew up with was my father.”
I blinked.
Then blinked again.
“Ummm…” I paused. “What?”
His lips formed a small smile.
“Okay, so when I was fifteen, I had a half-brother. Lachlan Downy Senior.” He waited for me to nod before continuing. “My sister, Aspen, and I grew up thinking that the man we grew up with was our father. He was cruel, and an awful all-around person. We highly disliked him, but since he was our father, we tolerated it. What our father did not tolerate was Downy.”
I bobbed my head as I nibbled on another piece of pretzel.
He took a sip of his coffee before continuing.
“But shit hits the fan when Aspen finds her now husband. She finds out that our father wasn’t really our father. Our father is really Downy’s father. Condensed version, before he was shipped off for war, they stored some of his sperm. When my mom and ‘father’ couldn’t have children, my mother instead used my real father’s sperm to get pregnant, making Downy, Aspen, and I full siblings and not half.”
I shook my head.
“That’s complicated and messy,” he admitted. “Anyway, long story short, with my messed-up home life, I’m not really comfortable with not giving this marriage a full shot. I want to go into this thinking that we’re going to make it. I don’t know you well, but what I do know of you, I like. A lot. Do I wish we’d have gone about this a different way? Hell yeah. But we didn’t. And I’m hoping that we can try to make it work. If it ever becomes too much…well, at least we gave it a try, you know?”
I understood exactly.
Was our marriage under the right circumstances? Probably not. But was giving up before we’d even given it a try something I was willing to do? No.
“I do know,” I said softly. “And I’m willing to try if you are.”
His smile was quick but genuine.
“As for your dog and cat? Well, hopefully they get along with mine. Because mine are sweet. They’ll enjoy having someone to play with,” he said.
“How many do you have?” I asked, unsure why I hadn’t asked before.
“Two cats and a dog,” he said. “You met one of the cats already. She stays at my house and my house only. My mom comes over to feed and check on her every couple of days. The other two go to my mom’s.”
“Why?” I wondered.
He grinned. “Because Pickles hates my mom’s cat. Like, super hates. Pickles will straight up attack her cat if it gets anywhere near her, and since Pickles is the intruder, we decided it’d be best to leave her at home and my mom just come there. We tried leaving the other cat at home with Pickles the last time I went out of town, but we came home to Pickles guarding the food bowl and refusing to allow Morton anywhere close to it.”
“Pickles sounds like a bitch,” I shared.
Jonah grinned. “She is. But I still like her. She’s all prickly, kind of like me.”
The smile that crossed my face was nothing short of blinding.
“You can relate to a cat?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Tell me about your animals,” he ordered, bringing his coffee cup once again to his lips.
I started telling him about Hans Solo and Princess Francesca.
“You named your dog Princess Francesca?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I call her Princess for short. But yeah, I did. They’re both rescues. Princess only has one ear and a half tail. She’s kind of rough looking, but she’s super sweet.”
He crossed one of his arms over his belly and continued sipping away, giving me every ounce of his attention.
He didn’t once glance at the table full of bachelorettes, women that kept getting louder and louder as the time went on. Nor did his eyes stray to the band that was set up in the middle of the strip about two blocks down.