He perked up. “Yes. Okay, is good point. But words are hard. With this much emotion.” He pressed a hand to his chest.
The edges of my vision flickered, and before I could panic, the clear circle got wider. Fuck. I was not going to assume, and I was not going to hope too much. Well, maybe I was going to hope a little.
“Vanny,” I told him and reached for his hand, “you’ve been a really good friend to me, even when I was a major dickhead.”
He tilted his head to the side and frowned. “You were maybe…not so open. Your heart.” He touched my chest. “Maybe have hard time with people who like you.”
That wasn’t a lie.
“But you give me time to wear you down. Like big tide on the beach.”
I snorted. “You’re definitely a big tide, bud.”
He grinned like that was the world’s best compliment. “I want to just say…if you’re scared. Hurt. Lost… Is okay to be alone for a little while. But we are here. Family. Your brother. Good friends. New best friends on Legends.”
I rolled my eyes, and when they refocused, all of him was there. I let out a trembling breath and fought the urge to rub my eyes and see if that would take anything away. “I know. Thank you.”
He nodded and stood up. “I’m expecting more. To hang out. Have barbeque with new friends, okay? You come too.”
I nodded. “I’ll come too.”
He leaned down and kissed my forehead again, then walked back to the couch, grabbed his bag, and let himself out the front door.
All I could do after that was collapse backward onto the couch cushion and let myself feel how really and truly full my heart actually was.
Jonah let himself in forty minutes after the app told me his plane had arrived. I did my best not to pace. I still couldn’t see everything in my periphery, and I had knocked my shins intomy coffee table so many times they looked worse than they did at the end of the season.
I took a shower instead, now that I was allowed to wash my hair. The wound on my head had bled a lot, but the split was shallow enough I didn’t need stitches. The scab was nasty, but everything was healing.
And I could still see.
I stared at myself in the mirror for way too long before finally getting dressed, and I was just sitting down when Jonah appeared.
“Where are you?” he demanded. I grunted in my attempt to get up, and he held up a hand. “Stop right fucking there. Where are you?”
I sighed and flopped back. “Couch. In the L.”
He made his way around the coffee table better than I did for a man who didn’t know my apartment even a fraction as well as I should, and his hands found my thighs before he climbed up on top of them and straddled me.
He kissed me after that, long, slow, and deep. His fingers pushed into my hair, and as he broke the kiss, he felt along the scab.
“No stitches?”
“Mm. Nope. It was a small cut. Feels worse than it is.”
He sighed and pulled his hand away, but he didn’t go far. He traced a touch along my jaw, then down the sides of my neck and over my collarbone. He did this a lot when we were together, and I had a feeling it was the same as the way I looked at him when he was under me.
“I missed you,” he said.
I grinned. “I missed you too. Actually…” I eased him off me, then stood up and tugged him off the couch. “Come with me.” I was careful not to knock him into any of my tables as I headed for the window, then stopped in a patch of afternoon sun.
The rays glinted off his eyes—the prosthetics looking a bit more painted in that light. It highlighted all the shadows on his face—the bruises under his eyes from the way he hadn’t slept, and the little scrapes along his jaw because he had clearly shaved right after that last game.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
I put my hands on his shoulders and took all of him in. My breath caught in my throat. Fuck, he was so beautiful. “Just looking at you.”
“Looking at—oh. Baby. Can you…?”
