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“I don’t hate you, Joel,” she repeated. “I merely…despise you.”
He laughed.
She cracked a smile.
“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t see me being on the team as me trying to take Curtis’ place,” he added. “I would never do that, and I don’t want you to feel like I’m imposing. Julien even said that, had Curtis been alive, they would have still tried to recruit me for no other reason than to drive Gage crazy.”
The smile grew.
The pain in his chest dulled.
“It’s not easy to be around you,” she said. “Whenever I look at you, I see where Curtis used to be. Times like these, when everyone’s together and having fun, I miss him even more. Curtis used to love when everyone got together.”
The pain in his chest spiked again, but for less selfish reasons. He’d been so caught up in his divorce drama, he never once stopped to think about how difficult it probably was for Ayesha to see him and Sydney, who weren’t together, still acting as if they were. There they were, playing around with love like they had all the time in the world, when Ayesha knew firsthand how untrue that notion was.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He raised a brow.“You’resorry? For what?”
“For saying I didn’t care about you.”
“Ayesha, I was an asshole to you for absolutely no reason.I’msorry. You don’t owe me anything, and I was acting like I’m entitled to your attention.”
“Not for no reason. Sydney’s a reason.”
“I’m pathetic, aren’t I?”
“Not because of that.” She smiled. “But the argument could be made about whether you might be pathetic, in general.”
He lightly poked her arm. “Whatever.”
The smile softened her irritation, smoothing out the tightness that had been present on her face all day. Then a car horn blared behind them, not-so-subtlely letting him know the light had turned green when it felt like it had turned red only seconds ago.
“So, what happened?” he asked, pulling off. “What’s the cause of your shitty day? Talk to me. Get it off your chest.”
She leaned so far into the seat, he wondered whether she realized it couldn’t swallow her whole. “It’s Curtis’ family,” she said. “After he died, my relationship with them got worse. It wasn’t that great to start with, but it’s never been this bad.”
“They don’t like you?”
“Never have. They wanted someone different. A Samoan princess. At least, so they claimed. The two families were close, so Curtis marrying this ‘princess’ seemed set in stone. To them, she was the better choice for him—bronze skin, long jet-black hair, and honestly, much prettier than me on a good day.”
He scoffed. “I doubt that.”
“I’ll show you a picture sometime,” she insisted. “She’s seriously gorgeous. But, according to Curtis, the family focused so much on her looks that she never got to explore who she was outside of her beauty.”
“So, no personality.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Did Curtis defend you when his family said things about you?”
“Yeah. Since the beginning.”
“Is that what happened?” he asked. “They said something to you about her that got under your skin?”
“Oh, no.” She flicked her wrist. “I know Curtis loved me, so I never worried about her. What happened is…so, a little bit before me and the boys left Maui, I ran into one of Curtis’ sisters. I let her know we’d be in Malibu for a couple of weeks, so I asked if they wanted me to drop the boys off to spend time with them and Curtis’ grandmother before we left. She said yes, but only Josiah.”
“Why only Josiah?”
