Ryan watched me without looking offended or impressed, only steady enough to make my skin prickle.
“Hermano,” he said, his voice quiet and cutting without cruelty, “that is rich.”
My mouth opened, but nothing came out.
He leaned back in the chair, his jaw tight and gaze flat. “I’m not saying you had it easy. Losing your dad fucked you up. I know money doesn’t tuck you in at night or make grief tolerable. But food on the table? Heat in the house? A school that didn’t treat you like you were already a statistic? A mom who could keep you in gear, gas, and registration fees long enough for your scholarship to matter?” His mouth pulled slightly to one side. “That’s wealth where I come from.”
I sat back slowly.
Ryan looked at his hands. “I had nights when dinner was whatever I could lift from a corner store without getting caught. Nights when I slept in my clothes because the heat was off and taking them off felt stupid. I had coaches who liked my talent but not the mess that came with me. Foster houses where I learned which floorboards creaked and how lightly I needed to sleep before a door opened.”
I had known Ryan’s past was rough. Everyone knew the broad strokes: foster homes, no money, too many places that weren’t home, and hockey as his one clean exit.
Broad strokes were easy to carry. Details had teeth.
He rubbed one hand across his jaw. “That shit fucks with me. Still. I have nights when my apartment is paid for and my fridge has food, but some part of me waits for someone to take it away because that’s how my brain learned safety works. Temporary. Conditional. Don’t get comfortable.”
My anger had nowhere clean to land.
Ryan looked up. “So yeah, if I met a woman and felt anything that could touch my drive to succeed—that unquenchable thirst for success—or anything that could make me want to stand still when all I know how to do is climb, I’d be terrified.”
I stared at him.
“Aura’s shit isn’t my shit,” he continued. “I get that. Whatever happened to her in high school—getting fucked over, cheated on, or something worse—isn’t the same as sleeping with one eye open because the lock on your bedroom door is broken. I’m not comparing pain like we’re measuring scars at a bar.”
His voice roughened.
“But something fucks all of us up. Sometimes the thing that fucked us up makes us cruel in ways we swear are survival. I’m telling you, something big fucked that girl up.”
I hated how badly I wanted to reject it.
I wanted to throw it back at him and say Aura didn’t get a tragic pass because some high school asshole had hurt her. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t interested in understanding the architecture of her fear while I remained buried beneath the wreckage it left.
Ryan wasn’t giving her a pass, though. He was asking me to look at the wreckage and admit there had been a building before it fell.
“A little understanding of the thing fucking her up might change things,” he said.
I looked down at my bleeding hand. “Understanding doesn’t undo it.”
“No.”
“Doesn’t make me trust her.”
“No.”
“Doesn’t make what she did hurt less.”
“Never said it did.”
“Then what the fuck is the point?”
Ryan leaned forward again. “The point is deciding whether you want to keep bleeding just to prove she cut you.”
Somewhere across town, Aura was probably with Bliss and Charm or already home, pacing the ABC apartment with her sharp mouth pressed tight while she replayed the fight and pretended she didn’t care until she was alone enough to fall apart. Maybe she wasn’t falling apart at all. Maybe she was already convincing herself I had proved every ugly thing she believed about men who wanted too much.
I didn’t know.
“I can’t be the one who crawls back,” I said.
