Peyton
Ryan shows up at my door with a grocery bag and approximately zero warning.
Eight-thirty on a Tuesday. I am midway through a transcript, hair pinned up with something that might be a pen and might be a chopstick, wearing leggings and a sweater that did not survive the previous winter in great shape.
I open the door and look at the bag.
“This is a working night,” I say.
“I’m cooking.”
“You cook?”
He looks at me like this is an odd question.
I step back.
The bag contains pasta, jarred sauce, two kinds of cheese, and one bunch of basil that looks like it made the trip under protest.
“The basil looks traumatized,” I say.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s wilted.”
“It has character.”
I close the door behind him. “Is this because of the pasta I insulted the other night?”
“You called it beige resignation.”
“It was.”
“I’m correcting the record.”
“That is either mature or petty.”
“Can be both.”
I go back to my laptop because watching him navigate my kitchen is going to be either charming or a logistical emergency, and I have work either way.
It becomes an emergency within six minutes.
The pasta water boils over before he has the lid fully off. He deals with it, gets the burner lower, then cannot find a strainer and opens four cabinet doors before I call from the desk, “Top left. Behind the mixing bowl.”
“You own a mixing bowl?”
“I own the idea of baking.”
He finds the strainer.
The cheese situation becomes complicated. He bought two kinds that do not work together and he is standing at the counter looking at them like they have personally betrayed him when I give up on the transcript and come to stand beside him.
“Which one were you planning to use?”
“Both. I had a plan that required both.”
“One of those is string cheese.”
“It’s cheese.”
“Ryan.”
He looks at me. Slightly defensive. Too endearing, which is a professional problem I will address later.
“Pick the parmesan,” I say.
“The other one—”
“Pick the parmesan.”
He picks the parmesan.
The sauce starts catching at the edges. I reach past him and turn down the heat without asking. He moves out of my way, which puts him directly behind me with about six inches of space between us, and my back is aware of him in a way that makes focusing on sauce temperature a minor achievement.
“You said you could cook,” I say.
“I can. I just don’t.”
“There is a gap in that logic.”
“Team has a meal service.”
I stir. “An NHL captain has never cooked pasta.”
“I have cooked pasta.” He leans against the counter beside me. “It just did not look like this.”
“What did it look like?”
He considers. “Fine. Less involved.”
“You boiled it and added sauce from a jar.”
“That is a version of cooking.”
The smoke alarm gives one chirp.
We both look at it.
“That was the sauce,” I say.
“I know.”
“It’s burning.”
“I know.”
I turn the burner off.
Ryan looks at the pot, then the sauce, then the basil.
The basil looks accused.
I pick up my phone.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Saving us.”
“I had a plan.”
“Your plan has smoke damage.”
“It is not that bad.”
I hold up the spoon.
The sauce clings to it in one dark, tragic smear.
Ryan looks at it for a long second. “Fine.”
“Chinese?”
He exhales through his nose. “Chinese.”
I order dumplings, noodles, fried rice, enough food to feed two adults and one failed recovery pasta. Ryan takes the pot to the sink with the expression of a man escorting a body from a crime scene.
“You do not have to look so grim,” I say.
“I came here to make dinner.”
“You came here to make amends to pasta. Pasta rejected the apology.”
His mouth moves.
Almost a smile.
While we wait, I move the coffee table with my foot and sit on the floor with my laptop beside me, still open to the transcript I am pretending I can finish. Ryan drops onto the other side of the table with two beers from my fridge.
“You have beer,” he says.
“I contain multitudes.”
He hands me one.
I look at the bottle, then at him. “Question game.”
His eyebrows lift. “Now?”
“Food is not here. Pasta is dead. We need structure.”
“That sounds like a deposition with alcohol.”
“Exactly. You’ll be fine.”
He settles back against the couch. “You first.”
I twist the cap off my beer. “Why did you come here tonight?”
“To cook.”
I stare at him.
His mouth tightens like he knows that answer is technically true and functionally useless.
“Try again,” I say.
“You said no follow-ups.”
“That was not an answer. That was a parking cone.”
He looks down at the beer in his hand.
The room gets quieter.
“Because I did not want the last real thing between us to be the sidewalk,” he says.
The answer lands heavier than I expect.
Outside, a car passes with music too loud, bass dragging along the windows.
I nod once. “Okay.”
“Your turn,” he says.
I take a sip of beer. “Ask.”
“What are you afraid the story will cost you?”
That one comes too fast and too clean. Like he has been carrying it around.
I look at the laptop. The transcript. The notes. The shape of a piece that keeps getting sharper the closer I get to people I do not want to hurt.
“My clean hands,” I say.
Ryan’s gaze does not move from my face.
I hate that he understands.
“I know the work matters,” I say. “I know the difference between harm and exposure. I know the ethics. But sometimes knowing the rules does not stop it from feeling like theft.”
“It isn’t theft if it’s true.”
“That is what people say when they want truth to excuse everything.”
Ryan takes that.
Does not argue.
The doorbell saves us.
Dinner arrives in two paper bags and one plastic container already leaking sauce. We eat on the floor with the muted game on television and the burned pot soaking in the sink like evidence.
The noodles are better than his pasta would have been. He knows this. I know this. We agree not to say it out loud.
His phone buzzes on the counter.
He does not reach for it immediately. He looks at it from where he is sitting, and something moves through his face that I cannot name.
Not neutral. Not nothing.
He reads it and sets the phone face-down.
Whatever it is, it closes something in him.
“Everything okay?”
“Team thing.”
“Anything I should—”
“It’s handled.”
He picks up his chopsticks again. The room has moved a quarter inch in a direction I cannot name, and we both let it sit there.
I let it go. Not because I believe it. Because he came here with groceries on a Tuesday and burned sauce badly and moved out of my way without being asked, and I want this to be what it looks like for twenty more minutes.
I choose the night.
After dinner we end up on the couch with the game muted on television, his arm along the back of the cushion not quite touching my head. I am pretending to read a transcript. His hand eventually settles in my hair.
I read the same paragraph four times.
“My turn,” I say.
“I thought we already played.”
“Second period.”
He looks at the television. “That is not how periods work.”
“It is in my apartment.”
His hand moves slowly through my hair. “Ask.”
“What happens inside the room when someone is hurt and nobody wants to say it?”
His fingers still.
For a second, I regret the question.
Then I do not.
Ryan looks at the muted game. The blue flicker of it moves over his face.
“The room gets closed in playoffs,” he says. “Not because we do not trust people outside it. Because everything inside it becomes a story outside it, and stories change things before the guys inside are ready.”
“That sounds reasonable,” I say.
“It is reasonable.”
“And when the thing inside the room is something that should be seen?”
He meets my eyes. “That is what makes it complicated.”
I want to press. I want to stop holding the story that could hurt both of us.
I choose the couch.
He kisses me later, in the kitchen while I am washing the one pan, and I turn in his arms and knock the basil off the counter. It hits the floor. Neither of us picks it up for a while.
The pan keeps running under the water behind me.
The basil lies beside Ryan’s shoe like a tiny green casualty. I don’t care about either.
I care about his hands.
One at the back of my neck. One low on my waist, fingers spread wide over the sweater I planned to throw away three times and never did. He kisses me like the night has been building under the ordinary things. Burned sauce. Bad cheese. The question I did not press.
I turn off the faucet without looking.
“Good call,” he says against my mouth.
“I am a safety professional.”
“You are a menace with dish soap.”
I laugh, and he catches it with his mouth. The ease undoes me more than the heat, and there is plenty of heat, rising fast and familiar. Ryan in my kitchen, takeout on the table, one bad conversation still breathing in the room and his hand steady at my back anyway.
He lifts me onto the counter.
“That is where food goes,” I say.
“Not currently.”
His mouth moves to my throat and my knees fall open around his hips before pride can review the decision. He notices. Ryan always notices. He steps into the space like he has been thinking about it through the entire dinner he pretended to cook.
His hands slide under the hem of my sweater, warm, palms flat against my ribs like he means to learn the whole of me by touch before he does anything else about it.
He does not rush. That is becoming a problem.
He turns patience into pressure, impossible to ignore, until I am the one coming apart and he has barely moved.
“You still working?” he asks, mouth at my jaw.
“Do I look like I am working?”
His gaze drops to where my hands have already found his belt.
“You look committed,” he says.
“I am thorough.”
The sound he makes is almost a laugh and almost not.
He keeps me there, on the edge of it, with his hand and his mouth and that maddening patience, until the careful part of me, the part that manages every room I walk into, simply stops showing up to work.
“Ryan.” My voice does something I did not authorize. “I do not want slow. I want your cock, I want you inside me, now.”
I hear myself say it.
I do not take it back.
It is the most honest sentence I have produced all night, blunt in a way I never let myself be in print, and I watch it land on him like a flat palm to the chest.
We do not make it to the bedroom.
That feels important later. In the moment it is the decision a body makes when the rest of life has gotten too complicated for rooms with doors.
He has a condom in his wallet. Prepared. Irritatingly responsible even while I am shoving his jeans down with one heel hooked behind his knee.
“You are enjoying this,” I say.
“Yes.”
“No shame?”
“Not currently.”
He kisses me until I stop diagnosing him.
When he finally pushes inside me, it is with one hand braced beside my hip and the other flat against my lower back, holding me to the edge of it. Close. Almost too close.
Nothing dramatic brought us here this time. No hospital. No story breaking in the next room. Just a Tuesday, and a man who showed up with groceries, choosing me in a kitchen that smells like basil and burned sauce.
I hold his shoulders and let myself be seen doing it.
He moves slowly at first, like he can make an ordinary night last on willpower alone. I do not have that kind of discipline. I hook both legs around him and pull him in, take all of him at once, and the restraint he was holding comes apart in my hands.
“Fuck.” It is barely a word, breathed against my jaw, and it undoes me faster than anything he could have said on purpose.
Ryan McAllister does not swear. Ryan McAllister is coming apart in my kitchen with his forehead dropped to my shoulder and his hips driving into mine hard enough to rattle the cabinet behind me.
“Harder, I am not glass. I won’t break.”
He gives it to me. One hand slides between us, fingers sure, and he works me higher while he moves, relentless and exact, the same focus he turns on everything, aimed now at taking me apart.
“Just like that.” The words keep coming, unedited, the one running commentary I cannot file or revise, and every blunt syllable of it drives him harder.
His breath breaks against my mouth. Somewhere behind him the basil lies unrescued. I come with my face turned into his neck and his name breaking apart against his skin, both of us long past the point of being quiet about it.
Ryan follows a few strokes later, my name muffled against my hair, both hands gripping my hips like he needs the hold to stay upright.
Afterward, neither of us moves fast.
He cleans up with the same grim competence he brings to everything, then comes back and stands between my knees, thumb tracing the hem of my sweater where it has fallen back into place.
Then he gives me a look I have seen exactly once before. The first day. Across a rink, after a shutout, when he turned away like he had won an argument I had not started yet. The same grin. Less an expression than a verdict.
I won.
On day one it made me dig my pen into the page hard enough to leave a mark.
Tonight I lean back on my hands and let him have it.
“You win,” I say. Day one, the shutout, all of it. The whole argument I never agreed to have.
He shakes his head. “Not tonight.”
“The basil is dead,” I say.
Ryan looks down.
“It had character,” he says.