Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Ryan
Loading coolers. Jensen and Petey and I moving them from the bank to Jensen’s truck bed in two trips each, nobody needing to say anything about where everything went. The fire was down to embers. The pond dark. The night colder.
My hands knew exactly what they'd been doing an hour ago and hadn't fully caught up with the part where that was over now.
Griffin appeared at my shoulder. “Good night?”
He said it like he already knew the answer, though the honest answer would have involved significantly more profanity.
“Yeah,” I said.
He read me the way he read everything, still and patient. Then he nodded and moved off to say goodbye to Jensen.
Nothing had happened. I'd held the line, and that was what you did.
The line was right. The line was the only thing that made sense given every relevant fact about the situation—Griffin, the draft, the four hundred miles between Minnesota and Arizona, the fact she was eighteen years old and visiting for a weekend and going home tomorrow.
All of those things were still true.
None of them were helping as much as they should have.
I’d done the right thing while sitting on the tailgate of my truck with the stars out and the pond in front of us and the blanket around both of us and her head tipping slightly toward my shoulder and my hand on her knee and her not moving away.
And then the back of my fingers against her cheek, one slow deliberate second, and the way she’d gone completely still for the length of it.
Line held. Even if I couldn’t stop replaying it over and over.
On the drive home, Griffin was out before we hit the main road, his head against the passenger window, completely gone. Maren was in the middle. She made the decision—the small shift of her weight, deliberate, leaning into my shoulder instead of his. Not asleep. Choosing.
I kept my eyes on the road and rested my hand on her leg the way I had on the tailgate. Just there. Still holding the line. Tight.
After a moment her pinky found mine, slow and deliberate. Inching over. Not asking exactly. Just arriving next to mine.
I turned our hands over and shifted them to my side of the seat, out of sight, fingers settling into hers. I rubbed my thumb slowly across her knuckles and kept my eyes on the dark road ahead.
We didn’t say anything. I didn’t dare look over either.
The heat ran and the roads were dark and empty and she was warm against my side and we held hands in the dark the whole way home with her brother asleep three inches away, and every single one of those forty minutes was spent with her fingers tucked into mine.
I kept my eyes on the road and tried to make sense of forty-eight hours that had somehow rearranged me in ways I hadn't known were possible, and I drove slower than I needed to because the night was ending and I wasn't ready for it.
I had absolutely no business being this wrecked by that; by her.
I pulled into the lot and cut the engine.
For a moment, nobody moved. Griffin was still out.
Maren lifted her head from my shoulder—slow, coming back from somewhere—and the absence of her weight was immediate, a cold where the warmth had been.
She sat up and looked at the building through the windshield and didn’t say anything.
I got Griffin moving, which took some doing. He managed the stairs with about ninety percent of the dignity he was going for. Maren came up behind us, quiet, her hands in the pocket of the sweatshirt.
At the top of the stairs, she stopped and glanced back out at the parking lot. The Silverado was below. The birch at the corner were still lit by the streetlights. The sky was black and clear, and the stars were out. I stood and waited.
She turned around. In the low light from the hallway, her eyes were dark and her cheeks still cold-pink from the bonfire and she looked at me for a moment without saying anything, which was its own quiet conversation.
“Good night, Ryan,” she said.
“Good night.”
She went inside.
I stood at the end of the hallway for a while after the door closed. The cold settled back in.
Helvete.
Then I went back toward my room, passing a snoring Griffin on the couch.
The apartment was quiet.
I’d held the line. I was going to be fine. It was just going to take a minute.
I was still awake at two.
I was usually good at putting things down. I’d practiced it for years on the ice. Bad periods on the ice, missed calls, decisions that went wrong. The technique was simple. You set it aside. You made the next play. You didn’t carry what didn’t serve you.
I’d put this down or set it aside five times since the drive home, but it kept coming back up with more detail each time. Each one came back sharper than the last.
The tailgate. The blanket around both of us, her thigh against mine under the wool, the warmth of her shoulder against my arm in the cold.
The way she smelled—woodsmoke and cold and underneath both of those something warm that was just her, just Maren, that I’d been aware of since she got in my truck on Friday afternoon and had not successfully stopped being aware of since.
The way her face had looked tipped up at the stars, completely open.
The way she asked questions like she really did want the answer.
She was attentive and noticed things other people didn’t.
She’d studied my scar, the one through my left eyebrow.
She’d been looking when she thought I wasn’t and felt something new and strange and warm about it.
The four seconds of not moving on that tailgate. The sustained effort of holding still when every nerve I had was trying to close the distance, and the fact she’d been holding still too? I’d felt it, the same effort from the other direction. She felt it too.
The back of my fingers against her cheek before we got off the tailgate. One slow second. The way she’d stopped breathing for the length of it. Her lips after her tongue had just barely wet them. I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes.
That was the one I couldn’t file away. The visual that kept coming back with the most detail.
Griffin’s little sister. Fuck.
I was four months from a draft that would put me in whatever city wanted me. Hopefully this one. I was pretty sure I did the right thing, even if I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The decision sat in my chest anyway, heavy, the way doing the right thing sometimes did.
Jag vet inte.
I don’t know.
Not I haven’t decided—I’d decided. The decision was right. She was Griffin’s sister and I was leaving in four months.
Even if she’d been at the waterline in the dark in my sweatshirt saying nothing appropriate back at me like she meant it, which she had, and then she’d leaned into my shoulder the whole drive home like it was the most natural thing, and I’d put my hand on her leg and she gave me hers, and now it was two in the morning and I was still lying here running the exact warmth of her small hand in mine on a loop.
I put it away.
I had to keep putting it away.
The line had a name now. A voice. And had sat beside me on the tailgate of my truck in the dark and understood me without me having to say what I was thinking.
I turned onto my side.
She would be in Arizona and in a couple months the draft was going to file the whole thing naturally into the category of things that had been what they were and were now over. Nothing happened. Not really.
I shoved the want down.
I kept shoving it down until sometime past three the apartment went quiet in a different way and my breathing evened out.
I slept.