Hail Mary: An Enemies-to-Lovers Roommate Sports Romance(97)

Mom laughed.

Not a quick, sarcastic lash of a chuckle, either, but a full on, belly-deep, had to put her cup of tea down so as not to spill it laugh. She tilted her head up to the sky as it barreled out of her, and then tears were streaming down her face, and she was wiping them away as she laughed even harder.

I didn’t laugh with her. In fact, I watched her like something I should be afraid of before casting a worried glance at my father, silently asking if she was having a stroke. Palico was so startled by it all that she skittered off my lap and used her paw to open the door Dad had left ajar, retreating inside.

“I’m sorry,” Mom finally managed, the words a high-pitched squeak as she still struggled to catch her breath. She reached over and squeezed my knee with her hand, as if we were best friends just yukking it up together and I’d just told the most hilarious joke she’d ever heard. “It’s just that you’re so much like me, it terrifies me sometimes.”

That made my other eyebrow shoot up to join the first.

She waved me off before I could even ask, wiping tears from her face as she sat up straight again. “Ask your dad what happened on our three-month anniversary.”

I wrinkled my nose. “You guys celebrated a three-month anniversary?”

“Oh, we celebrated everything back then,” Dad said with a smile that said he was reliving a memory. “Every day I didn’t screw up my chance with your mother was a special occasion.”

“And I didn’t make it easy for him,” Mom added.

“Imagine that,” I mused.

My parents shared a knowing look.

“We had gone bowling,” Dad explained. “And long story short, some Ivy League prick kept hitting on your mom, regardless of the fact that we were clearly there together.”

“This guy was a smoke show,” Mom said.

“Hey!” Dad frowned.

“And he was massive. At least a foot taller than your dad and a hundred pounds heavier — all muscle.”

“I had muscle,” Dad said, taking an angry sip from his coffee.

“Anyway, this guy just kept on, but I was handling it. Look, if I didn’t want someone’s attention, I wasn’t afraid of them thinking I was a b-i-t-c-h when I told them to get lost.”

“You can say bitch, Mom,” I interjected.

She ignored me and continued. “But toward the end of the night, when I went to turn in our shoes, this guy caught me at the counter and put his arm around me. Your dad couldn’t see straight, nor could he think straight, because he just ripped the guy off me and plowed his fist right into his nose.”

My jaw dropped. “Dad?”

Mom looked almost proud as she nodded. “Oh, yeah. Laid him out flat and then we were thrown out of the bowling alley. We weren’t allowed to go back, either. The guy tried to press charges, too, but luckily for us the judge could see they were just a couple of stupid kids.”

“Not that the judge’s verdict helped me with your mom at all,” Dad piped in. “Because she’d completely written me off.”

“I was so done,” she agreed. “I told him I refused to spend my life with a pig-headed macho man who wouldn’t respect me when I asked him to back off and let me handle myself.”

My stomach turned with how familiar that sounded, and how being on the listening end of someone else’s story made me feel a different way about that decision.

“But you took him back,” I said, because clearly.

Mom sighed, smiling at Dad. “After taking a few weeks to cool down, yes, I did.”

“What changed your mind?” I asked.

“I didn’t really change my mind,” she said. “I still thought he was a big dummy for acting that way and I told him that. But I realized that as much as I was annoyed by what he did, I also found it kind of sweet. I liked that he wanted to protect me. I liked that he cared about me so much that he couldn’t think straight and that he’d literally punched someone in the nose.”

I smiled a little, remembering how I’d felt seeing Leo lay Nero out on the ground. I’d been horrified, angry, and yet…

It had also been quite hot.

“What she’s forgetting to say is that she finally stopped being so stubborn and ignoring my flowers and phone calls and desperate apologies enough to see that I was crazy about her,” Dad said. “Literally. I loved her so much I did crazy things, like punch dudes twice my size.”

“In the end, what I realized more than anything was that while it wasn’t the way I wanted the situation handled, it was how your dad showed he loved me. He didn’t punch that guy for his own satisfaction,” Mom said. “He did it because he saw someone touching me when I didn’t want to be touched.”

“I saw my girl being threatened,” Dad amended. “And I didn’t care about anything else but protecting her.”

“Ew,” I said with a laugh. “That’s so weird but also sweet?”

Dad beamed like I’d called him a superhero.

“Anyway,” Mom continued, turning to face me. “All I’m saying is that maybe in a weird, caveman way… this was Leo showing his affection for you.”

“He lost you once, remember?” Dad added. “Does it not make sense that, now that he had his chance with you again, he would be a little crazy at the thought of someone you trusted hurting you the way Nero did?”