Page 43 of The Triple Play

She looked at me,reallylooked, and something in her shifted. Not away from me, but like she was guarding herself outsideandin. Like she was waiting for another shoe to drop or a punch that might knock her unsteady. “Has anyone told you that it’s extremely disconcerting when you’re serious?”

I huffed out a breath, trying to keep it light. “Yeah, actually. A few times.”

“Would you rather I do it?” Cole offered to her, pushing off from the counter behind him so he could stand at full attention.

Her gaze flicked from me, to Cole, to Xavi — then back to Cole. “Honestly? Yeah.”

Fair. Fine. That made sense.

“All right,” Cole sighed, stretching his neck back and forth as he took a deep breath in. He set his beer down on the counter and met her gaze, looking at her in that way that only Cole had mastered — gentle, but fucking serious. “Two things. The first one is the Elliot situation.”

Her mouth formed a hard line. “So it is an intervention.”

Cole didn’t rise to the bait. “Call it what you want, Annie, but we just want you safe.”

Annie looked away from him, glanced at me, at Xavi, and then off into the middle distance. “I’m fine. Honestly.”

“You’re not,” Xavi cut in, his voice a little strained.

“Xav’s right, you’re not.” Cole’s tone was firm, low, skimming that line between gentle and immovable that he lingered on so well. “You shouldn’t be having to block a new number every damn day. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not he’s lingering outside your apartment. That’s not fine.”

Her throat worked. “I’m not worried that he’ll show up?—”

“You asked me not to park outside,” I interjected. “It was obvious, sweetheart.”

She didn’t answer. Instead, her jaw shifted like she was chewing on the inside of her cheek, and she knocked back another sip of beer, her eyes lingering on the bottle as she placed it back down gently.

“We know Colton offered for you to come to the next away game,” Cole continued, not phased in the slightest by the difficulty of this. “We all think it’s a good idea. We’ll get you out of Atlanta for a few days, and you can be with us, around people who care and want you to be okay. Treat it like a mini-vacation.”

Annie’s head snapped toward him. “But that’s?—”

“It’s in LA. Start of the Pacific Division. We’re leaving Friday morning, the game’s Saturday night. You can be back home on Sunday if you want. We’ll cover your flights, but you’ll have to fly alone since we fly with the team,” Cole explained, his hands gesticulating as if this was the easiest conversation in the world. “You can stay with us. We always room together, so it’s not like there won’t be space.”

Her brows rose slowly as the words sunk in. “With all three of you.”

“Yeah,” Xavi said.

She leaned back a little on the stool, her eyes finding that middle distance again, her fingernail picking at the label on her beer. “That’s not going to be weird at all,” she muttered.

“It doesn’t have to be,” I said softly, and her gaze flicked to me in an instant.

“Except it kind of already is. I’m—Colton, we—” Annie cut herself off, her cheeks flushing, and shook her head a little. “Look, I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I haven’t…decided, and this feels messy. I guess it’s not a damn secret that I like you guys, all of you, when you obviously talk to each other about this kind of stuff.”

She swallowed, her throat working and turning pink like her face. I wanted to reach out and cup her cheeks, wanted to tell her that it’s fine and she doesn’t need to be worried about this, but we needed to let her process this before we moved on, even if it was hard.

“I feel like this is… I don’t know,” she muttered. “Crossing a line? I mean, what am I supposed to do, sleep with Colton in his bed since we already…? That feels wrong when I can’t stop thinking about… Christ, this is embarrassing.”

Cole’s gaze didn’t waver as he watched her. “That leads us to the second thing we need to talk about.”

She looked like she was about to crumble in on herself. “Please don’t make me decide,” she murmured, covering her face with her hands. “I’m not… I don’t?—”

“We’re not,” I cut in, something inside of me breaking to see her like this. I pushed up from the counter and stepped around the island, coming up behind her chair and wrapping my arms around her shoulders. I let my chin fall on top of her head, just holding her, and met Cole’s gaze. “Just tell her or she’s gonna fuckin’ spiral, man.”

Xavi opened his mouth to speak beside him but closed it half a second later, his hands flexing at his sides.

Cole exhaled slowly, his gaze flicking from me to her, clearly trying to find the words when I was the one who was meant to be handling this. He rubbed a hand along the back of his neck and leaned one hip on the counter. “We know Colton brought it up to you yesterday,” he said, quiet but certain, measured in the way he always was when something mattered. “He brought it up to us, too.”

She stilled in my arms, but her breathing was strong, fast. She looked right at him. “Brought what up?”

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