Ryan
The apartment feels different when Peyton is in it without urgency.
No crisis. No slammed door. No grief waiting in a hospital hallway. No sex trying to outrun a thing neither of us can name.
Just Peyton on my couch with one foot tucked under her, hair clipped badly on top of her head, laptop open, a hockey broadcast muted on the television while she makes notes in the margins of a transcript.
I stand in the kitchen with a container of reheated pasta and watch her notice the play before the analyst does.
“Weak side,” she says without looking up.
Onscreen, Evan jumps the lane.
I set the container down. “You are getting annoying.”
“I learned from you.”
“I am not annoying.”
She looks over the laptop. “Ryan.”
“Focused.”
“Weaponized focused.”
I pull a plate from the cabinet.
Peyton looks at the pasta.
Then at me.
“Absolutely not.”
“It is food.”
“It is beige resignation.”
“It has protein.”
“That is not a defense. That is a cry for help.”
I look into the container. It does look bad. I was not going to say that out loud.
Peyton reaches for her phone. “I am ordering Chinese.”
“I have food.”
“You have evidence.”
“Of what?”
“A bachelor ecosystem in distress.”
I lean back against the counter. “You have been in my apartment twenty minutes and are already criticizing the habitat.”
“The habitat needs intervention.” Her thumb moves over the screen. “Do you drink beer?”
“I am Canadian-adjacent.”
“That is not an answer.”
“Yes.”
“Good. I am ordering wine too.”
“To my apartment?”
“Yes.”
“You are ordering wine and beer to my apartment.”
“And dumplings. Possibly noodles. Definitely crab rangoon.”
“I do not know what is happening anymore.”
“You are being hosted in your own home. Try to keep up.”
She puts the phone down and looks at me properly for the first time since I walked into the kitchen.
“You still smell like rink tape and violence.”
“I played hockey.”
“Recently.”
“That is usually how smelling works.”
“I cannot be expected to eat dinner next to that.”
I look at the food app on her phone. “The food is not here.”
“Excellent. Shower.”
“You are ordering me around in my apartment.”
“Yes.”
“This is going to become a problem.”
“Almost certainly.”
I should argue. I do not.
By the time I get out of the shower, she has moved my coffee table six inches with her hip, cleared three protein bar wrappers from the floor, and made a flat surface out of a stack of old game programs and one hardcover book I did not know I owned.
My old team hoodie hangs off one shoulder. Her hair is damp at the ends. Bare feet. Laptop open on the couch behind her. My charger near the outlet because she forgot hers and then blamed modern technology with suspicious conviction.
The place has changed around her anyway.
There is a hair tie on my lamp.
One of her pens in my drawer.
A wineglass on my counter.
I look at her. “You smell like my soap.”
“Your soap smells like a hotel for emotionally repressed men.”
“You used it.”
“Under protest.”
The food arrives ten minutes later.
Peyton sits cross-legged on the floor with lo mein balanced in one hand and a plastic fork in the other, like this is a normal place to eat dinner in a professional athlete’s apartment.
I sit across from her with beer, rice, and the sense that I have lost control of my own living room.
I do not hate it.
The broadcast stays muted. The apartment smells like soy sauce, fried dough, and her shampoo.
Peyton points the fork at me. “Game question.”
“Is this a date or a press conference?”
“Neither. There would be better chairs at both.”
I take a drink of beer. “Ask.”
“Why did you let Evan take the high lane in the third?”
She does not smile. That is how I know she wants the real answer.
“He saw it first,” I say.
“You do not usually like that.”
“No.”
“What changed?”
I look down at the carton in my hand. “He was right.”
Peyton’s fork stills.
“And I was tired of being the only one allowed to be right,” I say.
The room goes quiet around that.
Not bad quiet.
Useful quiet.
Peyton nods once, like she is filing it somewhere private instead of on paper.
“Good,” she says.
“That all?”
“For now.”
“That sounds threatening.”
“It is journalism.”
We eat on the floor until the cartons are half-empty and the beer has gone warm beside my knee. Peyton steals a dumpling from my carton even though she has her own, then denies doing it with the dumpling still in her hand.
“You are a criminal,” I say.
“I am a journalist. The distinction is mostly paperwork.”
“You have sauce on your thumb.”
She looks down.
Licks it off.
My body makes a decision my brain does not authorize.
Peyton notices because Peyton notices everything.
Her mouth curves. “Focused?”
“Weaponized focused.”
Her laugh breaks something loose in the room.
I take the empty cartons to the counter because if I stay on the floor watching her mouth, dinner is going to stop being dinner.
When I come back, she is at the kitchen island. Laptop open. Bare feet on the rung of the stool. My hoodie still slipping off one shoulder.
I come up behind her and put one hand on the counter, not touching. She still leans back into me.
“I am working,” she says.
“I can see that.”
“This is you respecting journalism?”
“This is me respecting the neck of a journalist.”
I kiss the side of her neck. Her typing stops.
Her laugh breaks when my mouth finds the spot beneath her ear.
After, I make bad coffee because it is the only kind I own, and Peyton drinks it with the grim loyalty of a woman who loves a doomed cause.
“This coffee is terrible,” she says.
“You keep drinking it.”
“I’m studying adversity.”
Her laptop is still open when I reach for the mug beside it.
I do not mean to read.
I tell myself that first.
Then I see the title line.
Silence and Pressure in Pro Hockey.
My hand stills.
Peyton sees it happen.
“It is a long-form pitch,” she says, measured now. “Not a hit piece. Not about one team. Not about you.”
I look at the screen. Pull quotes. Anonymous source notes. Research on injuries, mental health, roster pressure, the way players learn to make pain sound like professionalism.
Too close.
Too accurate.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.
“Because I was still figuring out what it was.”
“And now?”
“Now I think it matters.”
I know that tone. Peyton with her spine straight, her eyes steady, saying the hard thing even when it costs her comfort.
I love that about her.
I hate how exposed it makes me feel.
“Guys talk because they think the locker room is the only place they can be ugly,” I say.
Her face tightens, but she does not look away. “I know enough not to use what isn’t given. I know enough to protect sources. I know enough to understand silence is not the same thing as privacy when it is enforced by fear.”
I do not like how much that lands.
I turn the mug slowly against the counter. “This is complicated.”
“Yes.”
“For me.”
“Also yes.”
“For us.”
Something flickers in her eyes. Hurt, then restraint. “Especially yes.”
I want to ask her to close the laptop. I want to ask her to wait. I want to ask for a version of love that does not put me between Peyton and the team that trusted me first.
I do not ask.
Peyton watches me stop myself.
“I am not asking you for permission,” she says softly.
“I know.”
“I am telling you because I want this thing between us to survive what I know, not because I expect it to get smaller.”
I look at her then.
She is wearing my hoodie. Sitting in my kitchen. Asking me to love her without managing her.
“I do not love it,” I say.
“I did not expect you to.”
“But I am still here.”
Her mouth softens. “I noticed.”
I reach across the counter and close my hand over hers.
Not agreement.
A choice.
The broadcast stays muted. The laptop stays open.
The coffee stays bad.
For one ordinary night, we let all of it stay.