Page 43 of Cut Off
“Look.” I turn so I’m facing him in the seat, knee tucked up under me. “You can’t do the tough-guy thing.”
“What tough-guy thing?”
“The lock-it-in-a-box-and-hope-it-goes-away thing.” I point at his chest. “Doing that is for hockey players and emotionally constipated dads. You don’t get to be that guy anymore because there’s a small person living in your house who’s going to inherit every single coping mechanism you model for him whether you want him to or not. So if you want him to talk to you, ever, about anything—starting with whether he wants the brown lunchbox or the blue one and ending with whether he ever stops being mad at you for being alive—you have to actually be a person with him. Out loud. Including the parts where you’re not fine.”
He stares at me.
His jaw works. His hand finds the steering wheel. The leather creaks. “Yeah. I’m upset.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah, I’m fucking upset, Zoe.” His voice gets bigger, like it’s gearing up to boil. “I’m doing everything wrong. I bought him a killer backpack. The kind of backpack a kid would—and he hated it. He didn’t want me to walk him into the school because he’s embarrassed of me. He’s embarrassed of me, Zoe, on day one, and I haven’t even had a chance to mess up yet. That’s just—that’s the baseline. And now Gwen, who—” He stops. Breathes. Starts again. “Gwen. Who was a fucking shit mother to Rosie. Who made Rosie’s life a living hell. Who Rosie ran away from. That woman is sitting in a chair telling a judge that I’m unfit, and the judge is taking notes, and I’m—I don’t know what to do.”
He hits the wheel with the side of his fist. Just once. Restrained, even now.
The SUV is dead quiet except for the air.
I’ve never seen him like this. Not when Sydney started dating his best friend, not when he left the Blizzards, and not even since all this started. His shoulders—those NHL-issue, sweater-filling shoulders—slump forward like the air’s been let out of him. He looks breakable. He looks tired. He looks, God help me, like a guy who needs someone to tell him he’s not the disaster he thinks he is.
And the thing about compartmentalizing, is that eventually you run out of compartments. And right now, Jonah Holt has just exhausted the last one.
I unbuckle my seatbelt, swing my legs over the center console—nearly knee myself in the jaw—and end up with one knee planted on either side of his lap. Straddling him in a courthouse parking lot as the world outside goes about its indifferent business. My skirt rides up, tights stretching, coat bunched behind me, and I have the wild urge to laugh. But I don’t. Because he’s just sitting there, fists slack now, blue eyes huge and startled and lost.
“Jonah.” I say.
His breath hitches. A muscle jumps in his jaw. But he doesn’t move, doesn’t push me off, doesn’t even seem to know what to do with his hands, which just hover in the air.
I reach up and cup his cheek, fingertips grazing the stubble at his jawline. He’s so hot—literally, like he’s running a fever.
“Hey,” I say. Soft. “Listen to me.”
He doesn’t look at me.
“Hey.”
He looks at me.
“He liked movie night.”
Jonah blinks.
“You told me. The Avengers. He ate three pieces of pizza and made appreciative noises at fight scenes. That happened.With you.” I stroke his jaw. “He doesn’t want stuff, Jonah. He doesn’t want a Star Wars backpack and a Death Star Lego set. Although he’s coming around to that, but still. He wants you to keep showing up when it’s not cute and it’s not convenient and he’s not making it easy. Him pushing you away right now? That’s him testing whether you’ll stick. Because everyone in his life so far either left or died, and he’s nine years old and he’s bracing. So he shoves, and he watches to see if you stay.”
Jonah is staring at me. Not at his hands. Not at the dashboard. At me.
It is the look of a man who’s been handed a magic wand, and I’d really, really like him to stop looking at me like that, because my heart is doing something traitorous in my chest, a little stuttery flutter, and I don’t have time for that today, or any day.
“You really think that?” he asks. Quiet.
“Iknowthat.”
He nods. Once. He swallows. He looks away first, and I get to breathe again.
“Okay,” I say, brisk, because I need my mouth to keep moving so I don’t kiss him. I also need to climb off him for that same reason, so I do. Once I’m back in my seat, I say, “Now. We need to talk about Gwen.”
“Yeah.”
“You need a lawyer.”
