Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Maren
I heard him cross the snow behind me before I saw him, footsteps steady and unhurried, and then he was beside me at the waterline, looking out at the dark pond.
My heart rate spiked, sharp and immediate.
I’d known what was happening since he picked me up at the airport. That was the honest version. Not since the waterline, not since the sweatshirt—since we met and he handed me a hat with a moose on it without making anything of it.
I’d been managing it all weekend. Tracking where he was in every room, telling myself to stop, stopping for thirty seconds before starting again.
I had a list, which was bad. The set of his jaw when he was thinking, his forearms at the bar when he rolled his sleeves up—I’d had to look at the opposite wall, hard, for a full thirty seconds.
The way he’d laughed at something Griffin said and it had been genuine, a full-body laugh.
His voice in the truck, low and certain, talking about the pond.
The way he’d said both things are true at the same time and meant it.
The smell of his bathroom. The way he’d offered me tea and put a towel on the counter and hadn’t made a single thing of any of it.
The sweatshirt I was currently wearing, which smelled exactly like all of that and which I had been emphatically trying not to think about for three hours.
I was eighteen years old and I knew exactly what this was.
I also knew it had nowhere to go. He was Griffin’s best friend, he was four months from a draft that would take him somewhere else, and I was standing at the waterline of a frozen pond in the dark choosing to stay there instead of going back to the bonfire where there were other people and less of this inconvenient problem.
I had no good explanation for that last part.
“You’re cold again,” he said.
“I’m okay. You gave me your sweatshirt.” I turned back and smiled at him.
“You still look cold.”
The fire crackled behind us. The cold here was damper, more settled, the ice exhaling into the air just above the surface. From across the bank, I could hear Griffin’s voice, someone laughing. The pond completely still.
“The draft,” I said. “Are you not worried about it, or have you gotten good at not showing it?”
He turned to look at me. “What makes you think it’s one or the other?”
“Griffin gets quieter before big things. You got quieter at dinner last night when he mentioned April. And you’ve been skating harder today every time you come back out.”
I watched him process this. The fact that I’d been tracking it, that I’d read something he hadn’t been showing. He was quiet for a moment.
“I’m not not worried,” he said finally. “I just don’t see the use in carrying it around all the time.”
"Does that work? Just…deciding not to carry it?"
"Most of the time."
I looked at him. The fire was at our backs and the pond was dark in front of us and our breath came out in small clouds between us.
"What do you say when it doesn't?"
He turned to look at me. "What do you mean?"
"When something catches you off guard. What comes out?"
He was quiet for a moment, his jaw working slightly like he was deciding whether to answer.
"Swedish, usually."
"You speak Swedish?"
"Grew up with it. My dad's from Malmo."
"What would you say right now?"
He held my gaze. His shoulders shifted slightly. My heart was going faster than it had any business going.
"Nothing appropriate," he said.
The air between us went still.
I stood in his reply for a moment and let it sink in. He’d told me the truth; it seemed he always did, especially when it was the simplest answer available. I understood exactly what he meant.
“Nothing appropriate,” I said quietly, giving it back to him.
He held very still. The air between us was charged and neither of us was pretending otherwise. We both wanted the same thing and neither of us was moving to take it.
“In April you’ll be gone,” I said finally. Just a matter of fact.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Both of you.”
“Yeah,” he said slightly more wistfully this time.
We stayed quiet a moment, not uncomfortably, while the pond sat in front of us, dark and still, and the cold pressed in from every direction. I was standing next to someone I'd known for forty-eight hours who already felt like someone I would miss.
I shivered, not dramatically, just one involuntary thing my body did, the cold finding a gap in the layers I’d tried to bury myself in.
He noticed and snapped to attention. “I’ve got a blanket in the truck. If you want to sit for a while.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to go back to the party?
” I asked, hoping he’d say no, wanting to be alone with him a bit longer.
I enjoyed our conversation. He said things that mattered, and I liked that about him.
He held a quiet, a reserve, but there was more just under the surface and I’d hoped to get a piece of that too.
“I’m exactly where I want to be,” he replied softly. “Come on, let’s warm you up.”
The truck was twenty yards away; the tailgate facing the pond. Griffin was on the other side of the bonfire with his full attention elsewhere. Likely on a female.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. That would be nice.”
He put his arm around my shoulders to walk me over, just warmth, just practical—and even knowing that was all it was, my whole body registered it. The solid weight of his arm. The heat of him. I kept walking but relaxed into him for that brief moment.
He dropped the tailgate with one hand and grabbed a plaid blanket from behind the seat, that looked like heavy wool, worn soft from years of use.
I sat on the tailgate and he sat beside me, and he shook it out over both of us without asking, just did it, then pulled me closer against his side and scooted us to a position where we could both lean back a bit.
The wool blanket was thick and warm and his muscular torso was solid against me, and I was very aware how I wasn’t doing anything to create more space between us, and neither was he. Quite the opposite in fact.
The pond spread out in front of us, dark and flat and perfectly frozen.
Stars had come out, more than I’d ever seen in Tempe, more than I’d known were up there, the whole sky dense with them the way it only got far from city lights.
The birch trees stood white at the edges of the firelight and disappeared into the dark past it.
The air where we sat away from the group was quieter than at the fire, stiller.
So quiet I could hear the low crackle of the bonfire, and Griffin’s voice somewhere in the group, but mostly our own breathing.
His jaw was about eight inches from my eyeline, and I wasn’t looking at the pond anymore.
I was examining him as discreetly as I could, which wasn’t very discrete at all. I wanted to remember everything about him.
The scar through his left eyebrow. The line of his jaw in the dark.
The way he was very deliberately staring at the pond like it had done something interesting, which it hadn’t.
I knew his lack of movement meant he knew exactly what I was doing and was choosing not to acknowledge it, and then the muscle in his jaw ticced, which was its own kind of acknowledgment.
His hand moved to my knee.
It landed there. Over the blanket, warm and still, like it belonged there, like some quiet part of him had made a decision and the rest of him was catching up. Not a squeeze. Not a question. Just the solid, warm weight of his hand on my knee, and neither of us saying a word about it.
I didn’t move.
He didn’t move.
The fire crackling and the stars were everywhere, and it was so still around us I could hear my own heartbeat, which was hammering considerably faster than I wanted it to.
My heart was hammering hard enough that I was concerned he could hear it.
His shoulder was solid against mine. His thigh was against mine under the blanket.
His hand was on my knee and his jaw was right there, and I was aware of every single inch of distance between us that wasn’t distance at all.
Three inches. Maybe less.
His thumb moved. Just barely. A small, slow circle through the wool, like it had done it before his brain signed off on it.
I forgot how to breathe normally.
He turned.
I was already looking at him. We both knew that. There was nowhere to pretend to look.
His eyes were dark in the low light and very close and very steady. The full weight of his attention landed on me, like stepping into a warm room from the cold, or the first breath after being underwater—immediate and necessary and giving a little bit of a relief.
“Hey,” he said. Low. Quiet. His gaze dropped to my lips, then back to my eyes.
“Hey.” It was barely a whisper.
“You okay?”
The question was so careful. So precisely neutral. Like he was giving me an out and hoping I wouldn’t take it.
“Not particularly,” I said. “You?”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
He didn’t look away. Neither did I.
The air between us had changed again. It had been changing all weekend, degree by degree, and now it was something else entirely—thick and warm and charged, the pull between two people who both knew and were both holding still.
His body angled a bit more toward me. Just slightly. Just enough I could feel the shift, the warmth of him even closer, and I watched his eyes drop to my mouth again, just for a half-second.
I wet my lips without meaning to. A reflex. Completely involuntary and absolutely not helpful.
His jaw tightened. His restraint was visible, and my heart was about to beat right out of my chest.
There was a warmth pooling low in my stomach that had nothing to do with the blanket and everything to do with the fact he was right there and I was acutely, painfully aware of his lap and the very short distance between where I was sitting and where I wanted to be sitting, which was on it.
Not a thought I was going to do anything about—I couldn’t, could I? No—which didn’t make it go away.
He was close enough if either of us moved—if I leaned forward even slightly, if he closed even an inch of what was left between us—it would be over.
The whole weekend of careful distance, the line we’d both been holding, all of it would be over in one second, and I didn’t know if I wanted to stop it from happening or if I just wanted to stop pretending I did.
His hand moved from my knee to the side of my face and the warmth of his touch nearly knocked me sideways.
His touch was warm against my face and my brain went completely offline.
That was the problem with him—he was so deliberate about everything, even this, and it was doing things to me I had absolutely no business feeling on a tailgate in February with my brother thirty yards away.
Ryan brushed a bit of my hair behind my ear and stared down at me before licking his own lips.
Three inches of distance between us and I was aware of every millimeter.
Then I watched it move across his face. The want, clear and real, right there, and underneath it the thing that was bigger. The thing that had a name.
“Griffin,” he said on a breath. Just that. Just the one word, quiet and certain, like an answer to a question neither of us had asked out loud. I deflated immediately.
“I know,” I said.
I did know. I’d known all weekend. I’d known since the minute he picked me up in his truck and I’d been choosing it anyway, choosing to sit next to him and lean into it and let it be exactly what it was right up until the moment it couldn’t be anymore.
The pulling back was the worst part. Not because he’d done anything wrong, because he hadn’t, because he was doing the right thing, the only thing—but because my whole body had to be talked out of closing that last inch and it took considerably more convincing than it should have.
His hand stayed on my face for one more breath.
Then he lifted it, slowly, and brought his forehead down to rest against mine.
We stayed like that for a moment. His breath warm against my face. The stars above us and the pond in front of us and both of us holding very still, right at the edge of something we weren’t going to cross.
Then he pulled back.
I looked at the pond.
“I should find Griffin,” I said.