Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Maren
The apartment told me things about Ryan Lindqvist before he said a word.
Ryan’s half told me everything. Books shelved by subject, film notebooks with their edges lined up, the throw on the couch folded rather than left.
The kitchen clean not because anyone was watching but because disorder hadn’t occurred to him.
Or maybe he was a neat freak. I was pretty sure he just found comfort in order.
Everything about him suggested someone who had figured out a long time ago exactly who he was.
Griffin’s half, of course, was a total shitstorm.
Gear bag on the floor, shoes by the door with no system whatsoever. I recognized both immediately.
I fixed my hair and retouched my mascara, taking considerably longer than I needed to in Ryan Lindqvist’s very organized, very good-smelling bathroom.
It’s possible that I sniffed his cologne on the counter more than once, and then after catching myself in the mirror, put it down and finished getting ready.
When I came out, he was at the kitchen window with a mug of the tea he’d made for us both, looking at the parking lot.
He was polite. He’d made me tea, left me a towel I hadn’t asked for in his bathroom.
He was standing there with his shoulders set and I noticed he was broader across the shoulders than he’d seemed in any photo or on any ice, and I stared down at the tea.
We talked while Griffin was still at practice and it was easier than I’d expected.
A door already open. He talked about the pond with warmth that came through the understatement.
The way he answered my questions—really answered them, like he’d actually considered them—made me want to ask six more before he finished the first one.
He was tall in a way the roster photo hadn’t conveyed.
It showed the jaw. But there were other things about him I tried not to clock but couldn’t stop myself.
Definitely not the way he’d handed me the moose hat without making a thing of it and somehow had been the most quietly attractive gesture I’d witnessed in my eighteen years on this earth.
I was going to be sensible. He was Griffin’s best friend. He was going to the NHL in four months. This was a weekend.
Griffin’s arrival saved me from myself. I let him pick me up and set me down and tease me about the boots and I was glad he was there. Ryan had simply shifted, two steps back, arms crossed, easy.
Sal’s was everything Griffin had promised.
The bread basket alone justified flying north in February.
I ate most of it while Griffin made introductions—Petey, who stood when I arrived already certain the night was going his way; Jensen, quiet and watchful, content to let other people do the talking; Davo, who put his phone away when I walked in, caught and visibly aware of it; and Hartley, a freshman who called Griffin “sir” once by accident and spent the rest of dinner visibly angled away from the moment.
I sat across from Ryan.
Petey had a neutral zone trap theory. He’d been developing it for, based on the confidence with which he presented it, about his entire life.
I let him go for three minutes and then said, “The problem is you’re assuming the weak-side winger holds his lane, but if he’s a step slow on the backcheck, the whole structure collapses and you’ve handed them the middle for nothing. ”
Petey stared at me wide eyed.
“I grew up watching hockey. And, I mean, Griffin talks,” I said.
“That’s—yeah. That’s a really good point.”
Jensen refilled my water glass four times over dinner without a word about it.
Across the table, Ryan caught my eye and the corner of his mouth moved before he looked back down at his plate. He went back to his pasta, and I looked back at Petey and told myself I was not tracking Ryan’s expressions from across a dinner table.
I was absolutely tracking Ryan’s expressions from across a dinner table.
He was attractive in a quiet way. Not the first thing I noticed necessarily, then suddenly the only thing.
Sandy-blond hair he’d pushed back off his face at some point during dinner.
Blue-gray eyes that were more intent than warm until something struck him as funny, and then both.
The scar through his left eyebrow I had absolutely tried to stop noticing.
The way he sat—still, settled, taking up exactly the space he needed and no more.
He didn’t fidget at all. He was stone still.
The way the younger guys angled toward him without it seeming deliberate, the way people moved toward warmth.
The occasional dry line that landed and disappeared before anyone could react to it.
His hands were big. I noticed when he reached for his water glass and immediately started thinking about what they'd feel like before I picked up my drink and took a large gulp.
I caught his eye once. Half a second. The recognition passing between us was immediate. We’re both doing this. Then my pulse kicked up hard and I looked back at Petey.
I was going to need to be so much more careful than I’d been in the truck.
When we were alone on the drive, I’d let myself just notice things.
The way he answered questions. The way he drove with one hand and didn’t fill silences he didn’t seem to need to fill.
The way he smelled, which was heavenly, and I’d noticed right away and then spent the next thirty miles pretending I hadn’t.
That was the truck. Contained. Forty minutes, one direction, no witnesses. Just me and him.
Dinner was an hour and a half with his teammates watching and my brother six feet away.
Time to drag my attention back to everyone else.
I turned back to Petey and went back to dismantling his trap theory.
The bar after dinner had duct tape on the booth vinyl and the settled ease of a place the team had claimed long enough that it had stopped noticing. Ryan went to the end of the bar where he could see the full room. I clocked it and went to find Griffin.
He pulled me into a corner booth immediately.
“Real version. How are you?”
The goalie eyes. The ones that had been reading me since I was little.
I’d given him fragments over the phone—the friendship that went sideways in October, the professor who’d made me feel small in front of forty people, the general mud-walking of the fall.
I’d kept the real edges back because he was several states away and I didn’t want to be the thing he worried about from a distance.
“Better,” I said. “Really better. Not because you’re watching.”
He studied me the way he studied everything and then nodded once. “Good.”
“That’s it?”
“You’re not performing anything. So yeah, that’s it.” He knocked his shoulder against mine. “I’m glad you came.”
“Me too.” I meant it all the way through. “Even with the temperature.”
I looked at my brother in the low light—the easy certainty of him in a place he’d built. The watchfulness he carried everywhere was down for the night. I’d been missing this version of him for months.
“You get used to it,” he replied.
“I feel like that’s impossible.” I looked at my drink for a moment. “I’m proud of you,” I said. “What you’ve built here.”
He blinked. “For what.”
“This.” I gestured at the room. “It’s real.”
His face went quiet and warm, the way it did when he felt more than he was going to say. He tapped the back of my hand with his knuckle—the Callahan shorthand for everything that didn’t fit into words. “So did you,” he said quietly. “Down in Tempe.”
Across the bar, Ryan had taken his jacket off and rolled his sleeves, and I was looking at the opposite wall with great concentration.
“Your roommate,” I said.
Griffin’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “What about him.”
“Nothing. He’s quieter than I expected.”
“He talked to you for forty minutes in the truck. You guys were chatting when I got home.”
“He answered every question I asked. He just didn’t volunteer anything extra.”
Griffin was quiet for a moment. He turned his beer in his hands. “He’s my best friend.”
“I know.”
“He’s the first person I’ve ever played with who makes me want to be better without making me feel like I’m not enough. You know what I mean?”
I understood exactly what he meant.
“Most guys like that, the good ones, the real ones, they’re either trying to prove something, or they don’t notice you at all. Ryan just…” He shook his head. “He sees the whole ice. Every time. On it and off it.”
“That’s a good person to have in your corner.”
“Yeah.” He looked across the bar. “It is.”
He held my gaze for a beat and then stood. “Another round.”
I watched him cross to the bar and land next to Ryan. Something was said. Ryan looked my way. Griffin shook his head and laughed.
We walked back at midnight, the group strung out along the sidewalk. Ryan walked at the back. I was aware of it the way I’d been tracking where he was all evening. A low hum running without my permission since the truck.
Griffin unlocked the apartment and went directly to his room to grab what he needed to sleep on the couch. I changed in his room and lay in the dark in his bed, which he had insisted I sleep in.
I thought about the drive from the airport.
The forty minutes. The bar. The way his forearms looked when he rolled his sleeves, and the way something had crossed his face across from Petey, quick and contained, and the way he kept an eye on everyone—including me—like he was responsible for them all.
He was Griffin’s best friend. He was going to the NHL in four months. There was exactly one day of this weekend left. It was time to enjoy it. But…
You are going to be sensible about this.
I sighed heavily and attempted to go to sleep.
It took a while.