Me. He remembered he’d left me hanging. How about that?

Jonah kept going. “It was stupid and reckless, and I’ll regret it for the rest of my bloody life. I thought my life was over. All the work, the sacrifices….” The fingers over mine jerked so slightly I thought I might have imagined it.

But I didn’t.

And I still didn’t move my hand away.

“I had to get away, even from myself. I stopped listening to the voice mails altogether. The calls never stopped, you understand. I deleted them at first but stopped doing that too. I was tired of the calls to see how I was doing, to tell me how sorry they were. I thought… I thought it was over,” he explained softly. “I slipped one night getting off the recliner, and I broke my phone out of frustration.

“I’m ashamed that it all got to me—the people ruling me out from coming back, saying I was done because it was my second Achilles injury. I couldn’t bear to read it. To hear it. That’s when I stopped checking my emails, because of all the messages too, and I hadn’t seen them. Not since then. Not until you told me about your emails. I’ve read them all now. It took me a bit to get the right password.”

Now, almost a year later.

“I stopped getting online around then too. The media….” He trailed off.

I squeezed my shins again, his own hand staying exactly where it was over mine.

I had never… I had never been so down over an injury that I had felt like my life was over. But I had seen so many of my friends go through that. The grief. Because that was what it was. Grief over losing your identity. Or at least at the idea of losing it. At the overwhelming possibility of it.

The anger. The bone-deep sadness. Some people never got over it, and I should know. I had seen that happen to a lot of people I had known who went from being competitive athletes one second, to losing it all in another. I had known after my first surgery, that I ran the risk of hurting myself so badly that the next time might be my last. That each injury and surgery took me one step closer to losing it all. So I was mentally prepared to a certain extent.

But most people weren’t.

And not everyone could accept that something they had worked for their entire lives might be gone in the blink of an eye.

“Thinking I was done, Lenny… not of my own choice… it hurt. That… that anger and grief….” I blinked at how he’d picked that one word out of so many others he might have used. “I had to talk to someone about it, understand? It made me make heaps of decisions I regret now. The biggest being that I was so lost in thinking my life was over then, that I made it that way. I lost all my endorsements. Nearly lost my agent if it hadn’t been for my grandmother calling to give him updates. I was almost dropped by my team for what I did.

“I didn’t have the nerve to get back to you or anyone. And later, once I was back, once I knew I still had footy, I had to wait to come here. To find you again. You blocked me on everything, and I doubted you’d communicate with me unless I came,” he finished on an exhale, his hand moving over mine, molding itself over mine even more. “To apologize and explain that what I did was my fault and had nothing to do with you.”

I stared at the step beneath my feet, and then I swallowed as hard as I ever had, trying my hardest to ignore the warm skin on me.

I had always trusted my gut. My instincts had never failed me. Not ever.

And those instincts right then were telling me…

That this fucker was being honest. That he had gotten hurt, panicked, became… depressed. He had been hurting back then. And if I were anyone else, I might have not understood how dark of a place that could be… but I did.

And I knew without a doubt that it couldn’t be easy for him to admit this to me. It couldn’t have been easy to do something about it, even if it had taken him months to go talk to someone as he’d put it. Everything in me said he was being truthful.

Asshole.

I had to glance at that open face of his, and I couldn’t wrap my head around him being in the slums. I really couldn’t. At least not by looking at him and seeing all the brightness he carried around in his smiles and even in his damn eyes.

And… I knew exactly what it was like to think that your life was over. That everything you had hoped and dreamed for was gone, just like that.

I thought I was pretty fucking tough, but all that toughness hadn’t been enough to keep me from sobbing into my pillows when no one could hear me because I was never going to compete in judo again and my life was never going to be the same again.

Because I had made a choice that hadn’t been easy, but that I hadn’t been able to find it in me to regret.

Maybe if I hadn’t been injured so much in the past…. If the chances of becoming reinjured weren’t so great, I could have still continued competing. But the risks outweighed everything, and I had a whole lifetime ahead of me to do things with my girl that I wasn’t willing to possibly lose because I’d already pushed my body to the limits so many times.

So… yeah, I understood. I understood very, very well.

Except I hadn’t been a little bitch about it. I had cried into my pillow, but I hadn’t gone off the deep end. I hadn’t run away and hidden.

But I knew one thing, and I knew it well.

If Jonah Collins had tried to feed me some other excuse, I would have thought he was full of shit.

But he hadn’t fed me anything but what my gut honestly believed was the truth, damn it.

What did it say about me that it annoyed some part of me that he wasn’t the total douche I had been thinking he was for the last year? He was just… a human being who thought he had lost the thing he loved the most in this world. He’d lost his shit and didn’t want to be around anything or anyone.

I would never do anything like that, but then again, I wasn’t that sensitive. For me, getting mad made me want to get even with whoever had pissed me off. Anger and grief were an accelerant for me; those things didn’t douse shit in my brain. They made me want to attack. To continue on and persevere.

Yet here he was, this Maybe Not a Douche who claimed he had waited too long to come here, where I lived, to explain why he’d left.

Who knew I’d blocked him.

While it wasn’t exactly relief that I felt at his admission, it did feel like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Off my chest. Even a little off my heart and soul.

There were still a thousand questions I had that I would be willing to ask, but… not then.

Not when it was hard enough to talk about going through a dark period in your life in the first place. I didn’t kick people who were already down. I wasn’t going to start now. One thing at a time.

Sitting straight up, I slid my hand out from under his and then reached over to pluck his phone off his knee.

He gave me a curious look as I exited the app he had open, the one that showed his ride would be at my house in two minutes and took in the default background image on his screen. By the time the SUV had pulled up to the front of my house, I had just finished hitting the Save button.

“I added Grandpa Gus’s phone number to your contacts since you already have Peter’s,” I told him as we both got to our feet. “I saw you still have my number. I’ll unblock you when I get inside so your calls can start coming through again.”

He didn’t move as I took Mo from him, sucking up her warmth and weight and giving her some of my body heat even though she felt nice and toasty, probably from her dad’s body heat.

“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I get to work at seven in the morning. I stay at the gym, and then leave work at four unless I have to stay for some reason. Most Tuesdays and Thursdays I work from nine until six, and every once in a while I might stay later, but it’s rare now. I usually work every other weekend and take Monday and Tuesday off on those days. Each of those Saturdays I teach a self-defense class at eight in the morning,” I told him carefully. “You can call me anytime.”

He blinked. And by the next blink, he was nodding. “Ta.”

I didn’t know what the fuck “ta” meant, but I’d look it up inside. I took two steps backward and stopped. “Jonah.”

Even in the darkness without the porch light on, I knew he was listening.

“You aren’t the first person to get injured and think the world was over. I would have understood. I get why you left, but it still fucking sucks that you did that. I thought I knew you, and it hurt that I didn’t because I never would have expected for you to just… leave like that.” I hugged Mo a little closer. “Don’t fuck this up, all right? Don’t make me regret this.”

I know I didn’t imagine the way his shoulders rolled backward, his spine straightening, and his entire body seemed to just… come to life. He grew in front of my eyes. From a six-foot-five monster to one that would give the Hulk a reason to pause.

And he said in that beautiful voice, “I won’t.”

Chapter 11

8:30 p.m

Fucking Christ,

you fucking asshole,

text me back.

JUST TEXT ME BACK.