"You," I said, pointing directly at Rico. "Fight me."
The words landed in the middle of the park like something dropped from a height.
Everyone went quiet.
Cindy was the first one to find her voice, and even then it came out smaller than usual.
"Ryan?" She looked at me like she was checking whether I'd been replaced with someone else. Not angry, just genuinely thrown, trying to reconcile what she knew about me with what had just come out of my mouth.
She knew me well enough to know I didn't pick fights for the sake of it. I didn't posture, I didn't chest-thump, I didn't do the male performance of standing somewhere looking dangerous and waiting for someone to challenge it. That had never been me.
But this wasn't that.
