“He hasn’t been your friend for a long time either.”

That was a good point. “But he was my friend for a long time first. I know what I’m doing. I know who I’m dealing with. I’m talking to him for thirty minutes at the juice bar. I was trying to be considerate of your feelings, if you don’t see that.”

This man I had so rarely seen lose his shit, huffed, shook his head, and then nodded all in less than a minute. “Bloody considerate.” He took a step back and swallowed hard. “I need to finish my workout. Good luck over juice.”

I didn’t say shit as he walked out, and I waited to smile until he was way out of the office.

That little jealous asshole.

I loved it.

Hours later, after I’d spent two of them on the phone arguing with the cleaning company about how they had double-charged me—Maio House—I was still feeling a little on edge as I headed toward the juice bar.

It wasn’t that I was dreading my conversation with Noah, because I wasn’t.

I already knew what the outcome would be, and it was going to suck, and it was probably going to be uncomfortable, but… it had to be done. That chapter of my life, the one that had him in it was over. He’d made his choice, and even if he changed his mind now, it was too late.

The thing was, he wasn’t going to change his mind.

I could see that by the way he had reacted when I had just brought Mo up.

The other thing was, I didn’t regret shit.

The training facility part of the building was starting to fill up with guys filtering in slowly, taking their time talking outside of the locker rooms and making loud noises inside them. Peter was already leading his group of ten men through warm-ups that consisted of jogging the perimeters of the mats with their full gear on: head protection, shin, chest, and gloves.

I had spilled the details about Noah showing up an hour ago when he’d first arrived, and it hadn’t been hard at all to notice the way Peter’s normally easygoing eyes had narrowed and the way his head had lulled to the side more than normal while I’d recounted most of the incident.

Minus Jonah getting all butthurt and jealous over it. That was my own personal little treat I got to indulge in.

The other thing I got to enjoy was the long, warm hug that Peter had given me before we’d noticed the time; he had to get back out on the floor. His arms had still been around me while he’d said in that calm way he had about him constantly, “We outgrow clothes the same way we outgrow people, Len. We change inside the same way we do outside.”

It was that thought that I had in my heart and my head as I pushed open the door that led to the walkway and then a few moments later as I opened the connecting door to the main part of the gym. It was in its early stages of getting packed. In fifteen minutes, the cardio machines would be filled and three-fourths of the dumbbells would be missing from their racks. I waved at a few people I recognized but kept on walking, not wanting to get distracted. I had thirty minutes for this; then I was going to tell the assistant manager on duty that I was going home.

Turning toward the juice bar, I smiled at Bianca when she caught my eyes, and she smiled back at me a second before I noticed that Noah wasn’t there. The employee behind the counter was moving quickly through whatever the customer in front of him had ordered, with a line of two more people. I fought off the irritation that Noah wasn’t around and took the last stool along the counter, hooking my knee over the top of the stool right next to me to save it.

Under normal circumstances, I would have helped make the juices, but I really did need to get this conversation over with.

But as one minute went by and then another, and those two turned into five and Noah still wasn’t there, this feeling of just… being resigned… of being over this shit fully hit me.

I glanced down at my watch to see that it was five forty-four.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” the voice that belonged to Noah said over my shoulder a second before the stool I’d been saving for him got pulled out from under my thigh.

Five forty-six.

Some form of disappointment made my chest tighten. Pasting a blank look on my face, I waited until he’d taken the stool, watching his movements. The expectant look on his face was almost enough to get me to want to be nice to him while we did this.

But… nah.

Grandpa Gus said that when you made your bed, you had to sleep in it. So don’t shit or piss in it.

And like with a lot of things, he was fucking right. You made your choices in life, and you had to deal with them. There weren’t take backs. You could never and should never expect a second chance.

“Don’t be pissed. I forgot how much traffic there was,” he said in a huff that pierced my chest a little tighter. He was apologizing because he knew being late drove me nuts. Because he’d known me so well for a while there.

“I’m not,” I told him honestly, because I wasn’t. “I’ve got… thirteen minutes before I have something else I need to do, so I hope you can summarize whatever it is that you need to say in that amount of time.”

“Thirteen?”

I’d told him I was busy, hadn’t I?

“Jesus, Lenny, you can’t reschedule to hang out with me?”

Did he not know me at all? He remembered enough to know that being late drove me fucking batshit. The fact that he didn’t care enough about me and my time to leave early enough and spend the time he wanted to spend with me didn’t bother me.

This was what I expected.

Sometimes you really did outgrow people, no matter how much they meant to you at some point.

“No, I can’t,” I told him calmly. “Twelve minutes now, Noah. What’s up?”

His face went red, and he said, “Are you—” He cut himself off. Of course I was serious. He knew it. His hand went up to his face and brushed the short blond hair to the side, the back of his hand going up to draw a line across his forehead. “Len, I’m sorry. Jesus. I thought you were bullshitting.”

No, he hadn’t.

I slid my gaze to the right so that I wouldn’t roll my eyes.

And when I did that, I immediately spotted the three people sitting at one of the tables across the walkway from the juice bar. There was one green and one beet red drink in between them. And a bottle there too.

A baby bottle.

The two biggest—the two adults—were both staring over at where I was sitting. And if my eyes weren’t deceiving me, Grandpa Gus and Jonah were sitting there muttering to each other, with Mo standing on top of Jonah’s thighs; she was the only innocent party in this entire thing.

I wanted to be surprised. I wanted to ask myself if they were fucking for real. These two people who barely spoke to each other—mostly because Grandpa Gus still hadn’t allowed himself to join the Jonah bandwagon—apparently deciding that they were each the lesser evil, and they were now banding together to spy on me.

Goddamn it.

Goddamn it.

I couldn’t fucking laugh.

I could not fucking laugh even if it fucking killed me.

These idiots….

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Noah move his body so that he faced the stool I was on, reminding me of why I was there and why I had to ignore the wannabe retired CIA agent and whatever secret service New Zealand had. Those two….