Page 169 of Colliding with Ten

“She did.”

“And Ayla?”

“She isn’t here.”

His posture changed. He’d expected me to come with his sister as a shield, and her absence threw him off. I wasn’t sure if he knew we had broken up, but I wouldn’t bring it up. He leaned against the counter, arms folded, the tablet still playing in the background. It was Stallion’s film. He was studying my defense.

I nodded to the screen. “Doing some homework?”

“One needs to know their enemy.”

“Is that what I am?”

He held my gaze. “Maybe.”

I pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat without being invited. His eyes narrowed. In the training room, we’d sized each other up at eye level. Today, I wanted him to look down at me, giving him the upper hand. I wasn’t here to win an argument. I was here because loving Ayla hadn’t stopped the day she walked out my door.

“I’m not here to ask your forgiveness. I want that to be clear.”

His expression didn’t change. “Good. Because you wouldn’t get it.”

“I’m here because your sister is the most important person in my life outside of my family. And I think she’s the most important person in your life, too. And right now, she thinks she’s lost you.”

The arms folded tighter. “She hasn’t lost me.”

“She doesn’t know that.”

“That’s between her and me.”

“It is. I’m not trying to get in the middle of that. But I need you to hear something from me that you’re not going to hear from anyone else.”

He waited. The film still played behind him, the muffled snap count and collision of pads the background music to this confrontation.

“I know what it’s like to have people decide what’s true about you before you get a chance to speak. After my knee, the press had my career over before I left the hospital bed. They wrote the story, and I had to live with it for months while proving them wrong.” I paused. “The stories they’ve written about your sister are fabricated.”

“I know that.” His voice was tense.

“Then why is she still sleeping in a hotel?”

AJ’s jaw clenched, his gaze dropping to the counter before coming back to me. “She lied to me. Kept your relationship a secret.”

“Yeah. She did.”

He hadn’t expected me to agree. His arms relaxed a bit.

“She may have been wrong to lie, but she is allowed her own life. And she was going to tell you the day she came back to New York.”

“That doesn’t change what she did.”

“No, it doesn’t. But she kept us a secret because she was terrified. You’re her only family, AJ. The idea of losing you was bigger than being honest. It’s not an excuse, but it’s the truth.”

He was quiet for a long time. The tablet had gone dark due to the auto-lock. Without the film playing, the kitchen was still, with just the tick of the wall clock.

“How do I know this isn’t a play?” he asked, but his voice had lost its hostility.

“Because I left a game for her.”

“You quit a game for her?”