And he couldn’t have a child without a mom. Well, he could, but I wasn’t about to hide that Mo was mine. Especially not because I was afraid of people talking shit. Ooh. Let me shake in my flip-flops. What were they going to do? Look me up? What would people say about me? He could have done better? That I could be prettier?

Fuck ’em.

And, when I really thought about it, I wasn’t about to let people drag Jonah through the mud because of whatever they might think.

Fuck that.

But…

There was the part that had nothing to do with me and what I wanted. This was his career. His lifetime of hard work.

And even though my chest suddenly ached at the idea that he would prefer to keep me hidden…. “I’m fine with you letting people know you’re a dad and that you have Mo, but I don’t know what you want to do about me in the equation. I know you keep a lot private”—I knew this from my brief period as a hormonal stalker, whatever—“and I get it, you know I do. So, I guess it’s up to you what you want to do about me.”

He blinked.

“If you don’t want people to know I’m in the picture. For the future.” I swallowed and then added hastily, “But I’m not going to lie if somebody asks. I’d just tell them it’s none of their business with maybe a cuss word or two thrown in there. Just warning you.”

He blinked again, and a tiny part of me wanted to squirm for the first time in my life.

“You know, that you had her with me,” I threw in before making myself shut the hell up.

Those long lashes dipped down over his cheeks, and Jonah pinned me with a gaze that felt heavier than any body I’d ever tried throwing in my life. His words held the same weight. “I only said that because I thought maybe you wouldn’t want anyone to tie you to me. I’m the one who lives with the criticism. It’s always going to be there, at least while I play.

“It’s you who will be tied together to me forever, Lenny,” he went on. “You will always be in my life. It’s my responsibility to worry about you, even though I know you have experience with criticism and opinions. I know you can handle yourself, and more than likely anything, but I want you to know you have a choice. It’s up to you how much that is. If you want others to know that we… made Mo together. If you want your name connected to mine. But I know what I want.”

It was his responsibility to worry about me.

I could handle anything.

I had him.

Was he trying to tell me all the things my subconscious wanted to hear? It fucking seemed like it. And that made me itchy.

This was my decision.

In it or not in it.

There was no middle ground.

I was scared of being a bad mom. I was scared of spiders crawling into my ears while I was sleeping. I was scared of fucking birds. But I wasn’t scared of screwing up. I’d fallen a lot of times in my life. You might get bruised and it might hurt for a while, but you didn’t die.

And what? He was worried I would get turned off by people talking shit about him? Ha.

So I told him what he hadn’t yet figured out about me. “You’re stupid handsome and you’re a good person too. You can tell whoever you want. I’m not ashamed of you.” I went up to my tippy toes and gave him the most direct look I could muster. “I could’ve had Mo with worse. Actually, I can’t think of anyone else I would rather have had her with, and I will never repeat that out loud again. If anyone wants to talk shit to you with me around, they’re going to regret it, and that’s what they’ll deserve. The only person who gets to call you a dumbass is me… and your siblings… and maybe Grandpa Gus.”

The silence between us, ignoring the sounds in the background, was deafening.

And that was why I wasn’t expecting Jonah to throw a hand up and cover his mouth with it before he turned around and walked out of the room as he started fucking chuckling.

All right.

That went well.

No one in this country would ever care about who Mo’s dad was, but in other places, they would. And none of those people mattered. The only thing that mattered was what we knew.

Why the fuck would Jonah think I’d be turned off by people criticizing him? I wasn’t joking when I told him that anyone who talked shit to him would end up regretting it, if they got me involved. They could all shut the hell up.

Too afraid to wake up Mo, I turned her baby monitor on even though I wouldn’t need it, turned down the white noise machine just a little, and headed downstairs.

On the way, I stopped in the kitchen and filled up a glass of water while I talked to a couple of the guys from the gym who had showed up while I’d been upstairs, and then eventually made my way toward the living room, which was packed with at least twenty male and female bodies wedged on the couch, on the floor, and on chairs that had been dragged from the dining room we only used on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

“Len!” and “Lenny!” all came out from half the people in the room.

“Where’s Madeline?” one of the guy’s girlfriends asked. I couldn’t remember her name.

I pointed upstairs as I looked around the room to find somewhere to sit. “Sleeping.”

“Aww,” one of the other girls groaned. Amanda? Mandy? She was a new-ish girlfriend I had met twice, and I liked her. “That’s why I came. I wanted to see her.”

Her boyfriend made a comment about how he thought she’d tagged along to spend time with him, while I went back to looking around the room for a spot.

Grandpa Gus and Peter were both hogging the love seat that everyone knew was theirs, but it was when I glanced toward the couch that I found one big body taking up a whole lot of it, a beer wedged in between two enormous thighs.

Jonah smiled at me, one of the only people in the room who wasn’t totally focused on the television, and I smiled back at him, just as one of the guys who had been training with Peter on and off for years called out, “Len, you can come sit with me if you want.”

Jonah’s smile fell off.

What he didn’t see was one of the other guys from the gym hitting the guy who’d piped up in the thigh and whispering something in his ear that had him leaning forward and looking across the room at the man sitting on the couch.

“I’m good,” I replied, still watching the biggest man in the room.

Clutching the baby monitor under one arm and my water in my other hand, I waited until the end of a round to hop across the floor, stepping on someone’s toes before I made it to the far end of the room.

“Lenny,” Jonah called out, sitting up straight on the couch, scooting forward enough so that he was perched on the end of it, one hand on the armrest. “Sit here.”

I shook my head as I took another step closer, so close I was directly beside him and the couch. “If you pass me that pillow, I’ll be fine on the floor,” I said just as the commentators on the television started talking about what needed to happen in the final round of the fight that was on.

The father of my child shot me a look.

I shot him one back, already slowly lowering myself to the floor to his right. “I’m serious,” I promised him. “If I wanted to sit on the couch, I would. Cushion, please.”

That serious-ass expression didn’t go anywhere as he pulled out the toss pillow that was wedged in between his side and the couch before handing it to me. I set it on the floor, and then parked my ass on top of it, my back against the front of the armrest part of the couch. I scooted over an inch to the left to bring the long length of Jonah’s lower leg closer to me, so I could lean against it slightly.