“You had no reason to be,” Felix interjected. “He was the one being an asshole, not you.”

“Yeah, well it was still mortifying and I broke it off. Being with him was more stressful than he was worth. But he’s a persistent one. He assured me he was working on it and begged for another chance. Since I felt so committed already and both my dad and Memo liked him so much, I decided to give him another shot, and things were good for a couple of months. Then, just after my birthday, Gabe posted a video of a song on my Facebook wall. Grayson went apeshit. When I attempted to defend it, saying the video was an innocent birthday gesture, he once again suggested maybe I wanted to . . . sleep with the Gabe, only like the first time he used the uglier word again. So I was done.”

“But you’re trying to keep things amicable?”

Felix didn’t want to sound like Grayson; he was just trying to figure out why she’d want to stay in touch with a prick who would talk to her like that.

“Yes, I am,” she said without qualm. “Like the first time, he apologized profusely and very sincerely, and he admitted his temper was a weakness of his he’d been working on for as long as he can remember. He said I wasn’t the first girlfriend he’d lost to it. It’s something I can relate to because, even though I don’t think he’s as bad as Grayson, my brother has issues with his temper also. His reaction to Sonia’s rape will be an eternal reminder of it.”

Felix needed a break from this topic, and since he’d been curious about this before, he decided to ask now. “Did your brother actually see it happening or was she raped and he hunted the guy down?”

Ella explained again about the night her dad had people over to watch Felix’s fight and why Memo had missed the fight to begin with. Memo’s friend who lived in the same apartment building Sonia lived at called just before the fight to tell him he’d seen one of the other guys in the building harassing her, and, of course, her brother’s natural reaction was to bolt out of the house and rush down there.

“Sonia had told him earlier that she’d be over as soon as she was done doing her laundry,” Ella said, her voice going somber. “Memo made it to the laundry room in the back of her apartment building, just in time to hear her muffled cries, and lost it.”

Felix obviously knew about the story, but he’d never thought about the graphic details. Her brother had actually walked in during the act. Saw another guy attacking his girl? Raping her! That had to be brutal. No wonder he’d killed the guy. If Felix walked in on a guy raping any girl, he’d beat him senseless, but if it was his girl—Ella . . . The very thought had him squeezing his eyes shut. He’d lose his fucking mind.

Ella switched the subject back from Sonia’s rape to Grayson. “I’ll admit I am beginning to have second thoughts about keeping things amicable with Grayson.”

That pulled Felix out of the ugly visual he’d been having of someone attacking Ella.

“Really?” he asked, trying not to let on how instantly chipper that made him.

“Being persistent is one thing. But he’s starting to take it to a new level. Like now, for instance. Ever since I hung up on him earlier, he’s been calling every few minutes. And I haven’t checked any of them, but I can hear him blowing up my phone with texts.”

Felix swallowed back the irritation he knew could easily manifest into rage because he didn’t want her comparing him to Grayson’s dumb ass. So he took a deep breath and, as calmly as he could, asked. “You hung up on him?”

“Yes. He was rude.”

“What did he say to you?”

He sat up slowly in hopes that doing so would help him better enunciate. He’d tried so hard not to sound pissed at the thought of Grayson being rude to her again that his words had almost sounded robotic.

“The day I left with him at the gym he’d already asked me the same thing about you that he had about Gabe. Using the same language,” she added with a huff. “I already told you what he thinks your interest in me is. He warned me that day you’d only hurt me. So when he asked if it was you I had on the other line and I told him it was none of his business, he started going off again. I hung up before he could go on.”

One thing Felix could already tell he wouldn’t have to worry about with Ella was she’d never keep things from him for the sake of not upsetting him. But another thing he was picking up on from the “Mighty Little Ms. Ella” was she obviously didn’t think either Grayson or Felix had any say about which guys she kept in touch with, even if some of those guys were ex-boyfriends. Ex-boyfriends posting songs on Facebook.

Grayson had disrespected her more than once now. She’d just admitted he’d done so again tonight, he was blowing up her phone after midnight, and she was just having second thoughts about not keeping things amicable with the douche?

He suddenly remembered something, and before he opened up a can of worms by letting her know what he was thinking, he had to ask. “Curious. That video you said Grayson went apeshit over? The innocent birthday one your other ex posted on your wall. What song was it?”

To his surprise, she laughed out loud, breaking him slightly out of his tensed mood. “That’s actually the funny thing about it. It was supposed to be an inside joke. The last time I’d spoken to Gabe, the day we walked home from the market together, someone was blasting an old Spanish song out their front door. Something I’m sure you know is fairly common around these parts. That got us talking old Spanish classics and what some of my favorites are, like the timeless ones by Vicente Fernandez and Juan Gabriel. Obviously, Grayson doesn’t speak Spanish, so I assumed he copied and pasted the lyrics to Google translate, but when I tried doing that, it was so off the mark it had me cracking up.” She giggled. “Grayson later told me he’d asked someone he works with, and, of course, they made more of the meaning of the song than it was. It really was just an innocent inside joke. I would’ve explained it to him if he’d just asked me first, instead of assuming the worst.”