Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Ryan
I was up at six, which was habit. Kitchen by six fifteen. Coffee. The apartment quiet and the parking lot doing its Saturday morning thing.
I heard movement from Griffin’s room at six twenty. Lighter footsteps.
She came out in layers and socks, hair up, carrying nothing. She stopped in her tracks when she saw me.
“You’re already up.”
“Always.”
She took in the kitchen and then me, and I made myself drink my coffee and look normal about it because I definitely wasn’t checking her out. “Can I make breakfast?”
“It’s Griffin’s kitchen too.”
“You seem like the one who actually runs this kitchen. Do you mind?”
"Go ahead."
I moved out of her way and leaned against the counter with my coffee and when she bent to check the lower cabinets, dark jeans pulled tight across her hips, I gave myself exactly one second to be a twenty-two-year-old with a pulse before I turned to the window and took a very long sip and thought about literally anything else.
She came back up with the cast iron pan and set it on the burner like she'd known exactly where it was.
She skirted past me to get to the refrigerator, close enough I caught the scent of whatever she’d used in the shower, warm and clean, completely distracting—and opened it like she already knew what she was making.
Griffin Callahan’s little sister was making breakfast in my kitchen at six thirty on a Saturday morning.
I was fine with this. Perfectly normal. Standing in my kitchen at six thirty on a Saturday morning, completely at home in a space that wasn't hers, making eggs nobody asked her to make. Who was I kidding? It was fucking hot.
“You don’t have to—”
“I know.” She already had eggs and cheese and a pepper from the crisper. “How do you like your eggs?”
“However you’re making them.” Dream girl. That’s what she was. I was going to leave that thought exactly where it was.
She glanced at me over her shoulder with the expression she’d been deploying since the truck, the one implying she had more to say. But instead, she blushed. “Good answer,” she said as she turned back toward the stove.
I pulled down two plates and stood with my coffee and watched her. She knew where things were after one pass. The girl could chop. She hummed something low under her breath, just in it—completely unaware I was watching or not caring either way.
The morning light came in at an angle and caught the curve of her neck just below her ear, soft skin and the small dark strand of hair that had escaped her bun, and I wanted to put my mouth there so badly I had to turn back to my coffee. I was going to keep looking at it and nothing else.
I got out the third plate.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said without turning around.
“I know.”
There was a pause, and I heard a smile in it, and then she went back to the eggs and I went back to my coffee and neither of us said anything and the kitchen smelled like butter and it was six thirty on a Saturday morning and I was in big fucking trouble.
I couldn’t stop noticing things about her.
I was in sensory overload, but it was her. Only things about her.
Griffin emerged at seven fifteen, clearly expecting an empty kitchen, finding the smell of eggs and coffee instead. He stood in the doorway and blinked.
“Did you make breakfast?” he asked me.
I put my hands up in the universal “wasn’t me” gesture and grinned.
“Sit down,” Maren said.
He sat. He looked at the plate the way he looked at a shootout—like it mattered more than he wanted to let on.
“Maren.”
“It’s nothing. You gotta eat if you’re gonna be out there playing this afternoon.”
“These are excellent eggs.”
“They’re scrambled eggs.”
“Thank you. For making breakfast.” I had to say something, and as lame as it sounded, it was better than eating my eggs and saying nothing at all. They were excellent.
Griffin noticed the grocery bag by the door. “What’s in the bag?”
“Chocolate. Hand warmers.” She paused. “I didn’t know if people brought them but I figured it was better to have them since I seem to be perpetually cold here.”
He set down his fork and looked at his sister like she’d just scored on him. Pure shock. A little awe.
“You are the most—”
“If you say precious I’ll eat all the chocolate myself.”
“Thoughtful. I was going to say thoughtful.”
I laughed. They were honestly hilarious around each other, and their banter lightened the room every time they went at it.
“Oh.” She looked at her plate. “Thank you.” They shared a knowing smile.
I got up and washed my plate and left them to it. From the kitchen, I could hear Griffin telling her about the pond—Jensen’s property, the ice this season, how the cold holding through February made the whole surface dense and fast. She asked questions. He answered them with his usual enthusiasm.
She had taken up permanent residence at the front of my thoughts, and I was going to keep calling it something else for the duration of this weekend.
Fourteen hours. She’d been in my apartment for fourteen hours and she’d made breakfast in my kitchen without being asked and taken apart Petey’s trap theory in three sentences and laughed at Griffin’s worst story like she’d been in the room when it happened and stood on the other side of my counter and listened to us talk about a frozen pond like it was the most interesting thing she’d heard all week.
Somewhere in those fourteen hours, Griffin’s little sister had completely stopped being background.
I went to get my gear bag.
We drove out in the Silverado, all three of us across the front bench. Griffin called the window before we’d reached the building door— “dibs, obviously, it’s my team’s truck”—which put Maren in the middle. She was the smallest anyway, and it made far more sense for her to be in the middle.
Six inches between her shoulder and mine.
I was very aware of these six inches. They felt like two.
Griffin was in the middle of a story before we hit the highway, the one about Davo and the wrong hotel room in Detroit that had been getting longer every time he told it.
Maren was listening with her chin tipped slightly down, tracking it, and I could tell from the angle of her head exactly when she caught the part he’d embellished.
“That’s not how that works,” she said.
“It absolutely is.”
“Hotel security doesn’t just—”
“Maren. I was there.”
“You’ve also told this story four times, and the details keep changing.”
Griffin looked at me. “She’s been here one day.”
“I’m not involved,” I said.
She turned to look at me, and with her in the middle of the bench that was closer than I’d been managing all morning. “You’ve really just let this happen for four years.”
“Tried to intervene once. He kept going for eleven more minutes.”
“That tracks.” She turned back to the windshield, and I caught the edge of her smile in my peripheral vision and kept my eyes on the road.
The landscape opened up past the campus edge, flat farmland, fields still white in the low places, birch stands at the margins bare and pale against a gray February sky, everything stripped down. Maren went quiet and watched it the same way she had when I drove her from the airport.
I was watching the road. Mostly.
“It’s very flat,” she said.
“Minnesota,” I said with a chuckle.
“Griffin said it was beautiful.”
“It grows on you,” I said.
“Does it?”
“Yeah.”
She looked back out the window. I kept driving.
She turned to look at me instead of the window. “What are you looking at?”
“Thanks for letting me come with you guys. It’s nice to get a little break,” she replied with a shy smile.
I wanted to reach up and put my arm around her. Instead, I let a grin form and said, “Of course. You’re welcome anytime.” I turned back to the road; we were getting close.
Neither of us said anything else. Griffin was still talking. I’d stopped hearing him completely.
I turned onto the barely plowed lane toward Jensen’s property. The birch trees came up close on both sides, white-barked and bare. The sounds came through before I cut the engine—blades on ice, voices carrying clean and cold, the hollow knock of a puck.
Maren pressed both hands flat against the dash.
The low winter light came through the birches at an angle and caught her face, and her expression went completely open—nothing held back, pure response to the thing in front of her.
It was like watching a kid at Christmas.
It landed in my chest like a bruise I put directly into the category of not helpful.
“Griffin,” she said in a hush. “It looks exactly like the photo.”
“Told you,” he said.
I put the truck in Park. Sat for exactly one moment taking her in with the engine off. Then I got out and went around to get the gear and to give myself the walk and the space.