7. Ryan
RYAN
I did not sleep.
I lay in the dark of my apartment and stared at the ceiling and replayed the kitchen forty-seven times.
Her hair. The way it had slipped forward when she leaned toward me, dark and a little damp from the pool, and the way my hand had moved before my brain had fully signed off on it.
The warmth of her cheek against my fingers.
The look on her face when I’d tucked her hair back.
Open and unguarded in a way she wasn’t usually, just the right amount of not-sober, the careful professional distance gone for one undefended minute as her mouth fell open slightly.
I’ve been very professional about you.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes.
She’d been about to close the distance between us.
I’d known it with certainty. Nine years of reading bodies and momentum, the split-second before something happened.
She’d leaned forward and I’d made a choice.
The hair, the cheek, one point of contact that was still technically something a person could explain.
Because if I’d let her close that distance I wasn’t sure either of us would have stopped, and she’d had three drinks and I’d had none, and the gap mattered.
It was the only thing keeping me on the right side of a line I couldn’t uncross.
Well, that and the fact her brother and Cole had barreled into the kitchen at exactly the right moment. Or was it the wrong moment? Ugh.
I stared at my ceiling at two in the morning and did not sleep and was not certain the decision had been the right one, and that uncertainty sat in stomach like a stone.
I was at the facility at six-fifteen, early even for me. I needed the ice. I needed forty-five minutes of skating hard enough that my body had something else to concentrate on, and when it didn’t fully work I stayed another twenty and skated harder.
It helped. Somewhat. The way a cold shower helped. It didn’t solve anything but it gave me something else to feel.
I showered, got dressed, sat in the locker room with lukewarm coffee and thought about Griffin.
Over ten years. Since we were eighteen and freezing and sharing a dorm room the size of a parking space at Minnesota State, eating bad dining hall food and talking about hockey until two in the morning because neither of us knew how to stop.
Griffin had been at my side through bad seasons and the loneliness of building a life in a new city.
We were that for each other. He’d answered every call.
He’d shown up. He was the best friend I’d ever had, and the reason I’d said yes to Phoenix with something approaching excitement rather than just professional obligation.
I thought about how Griffin talked about Maren.
Warm, constant, not a hint of sibling angst in it.
My sister would say that. My sister did this thing when we were kids.
You’d like my sister. I had heard it for years and built a picture from the pieces and thought nothing of it because that was what friends did.
They gave you the edges of their lives and you filled in the rest.
I thought about what Griffin’s face would do if I told him what had almost happened in Cole’s kitchen. Not almost in the sense of something abstract. Almost in the sense of a hand on her hair and a moment that had lasted long enough to be a decision until we were interrupted.
I thought about the fact it hadn’t technically happened. I was not sure that made it better. I was also not sure it made it worse, which was its own problem.
The team had a rest day. I cleaned my apartment with excessive thoroughness, which accomplished nothing except a scoured apartment.
I called my mother, who talked for forty minutes about my cousin’s new house and my father’s ongoing opinions about the Swedish national team and asked twice whether I was eating enough, which was the question she asked regardless of my physical condition.
After I hung up I called Anna on video chat.
She answered on the second ring. “What’s wrong?” Her pale face and blond hair popped up dramatically.
“Nothing’s wrong. Calling to say hello.”
“Ryan.” I could picture her exactly. Sitting at her kitchen table in Stockholm with her coffee, looking at my face on her screen the way she’d been looking at it my entire life and reading it accurately against my will. “You have the look.”
“I don’t have a look.”
“You have the same look you had when you were eleven and you broke Mom’s lamp and didn’t want to say so.” She paused. “Tell me.”
I told her the shape of the situation, not everything.
Not the weight of seeing her again nine years later and wanting her as much as I did when I was twenty-two.
But the fact she was Griffin’s sister. She worked with the team.
And how something was happening I wasn’t sure was definitely happening or maybe I was constructing it all out of proximity and how badly I wanted her.
“The not knowing,” I said. “That’s the part I keep snagging on. I don’t know if she felt any of it or if I misread the whole thing. She’d had three drinks.”
“She also told you she’d been professional about you,” Anna said. “Sober people say things like that too.”
I didn’t answer.
“Griffin’s sister,” Anna said. Then, after a pause with a different quality, “The one from the bench. At the first game.”
“Anna.”
“How long have you been not dealing with this.”
“A month.”
Anna made a sound that contained her entire opinion. “And you’re going to do the thing.”
“What thing.”
“The thing where you decide what’s best for everyone and then suffer quietly and make yourself miserable while being extremely stoic about it and everyone around you gets confused.”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“You always do that.”
“Anna, this isn’t helpful.”
“I’m just saying.” A beat passed and when she spoke again her voice had shifted, less sharp, more like the sister who used to sit outside my door after bad games and wait.
“Ryan. You’ve been doing this your whole career.
Putting everything into the game and calling it a life.
It’s gotten you here, to being a captain, with an amazing hockey career.
But hockey doesn’t last forever and you know that better than anyone.
You’re allowed to want things. You’re allowed to actually be somewhere instead of performing being there. ”
I didn’t say anything, taking in her words. She wasn’t wrong. I was playing the part of the good captain, who did the right things, and everything that went along with the persona as necessary.
“Figure out what you actually want,” she said. “Not what’s convenient. Not what’s uncomplicated. What you want.”
I didn’t say anything, but whatever my face did made Anna laugh before she hung up.
I sat with the dead screen for a moment. Actually be somewhere instead of performing being there. I tried to remember the last time I’d done that. Been fully somewhere. Not managing, not leading, not running the version of myself the role required.
I thought about who Maren had been back in Minnesota.
Griffin’s younger sister, eighteen and sharp and impossible to look away from, someone I’d made myself file away because I had to.
I’d told myself it worked. But now I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
It was like I’d spent nine years pushing that weekend down, packing it tighter and tighter, telling myself the lid would hold—and the second she walked back into my life it had all come loose at once.
Everything I’d refused to feel then, every version of the thought I’d cut off before it could finish.
It had been waiting the whole time. I’d just been disciplined enough not to look at it.
I thought about who she was now. The woman who had walked into a building full of professional athletes and built a department from nothing.
She was not the same person. She was something else entirely, and I couldn’t stop thinking about her no matter how many other things I tried to think about instead.
I pushed myself off the couch and went to bed and stared at the ceiling for another hour before I finally slept.
I ran into her Monday morning. I’d known I would. She was there every day, and so was I, and I’d spent Sunday manufacturing a professional composure I was reasonably confident would hold.
She was in the corridor outside the treatment rooms with a tablet and a coffee, talking to Dr. Reyes.
She saw me at the same moment I saw her.
She was caught, just for a moment. It crossed her face before composure replaced it.
Then she was completely normal, finishing her sentence to Reyes without missing a beat, meeting my eyes with easy steadiness.
“Morning,” she said.
“Morning. Good weekend?”
“Great weekend.” Not a flicker. “Shoulder feeling okay?”
She wanted the subject closed. I let her close it. “Good.”
“Come in Thursday for the follow-up.”
“I’ll be there.”
She turned back to Reyes and I kept walking and made it to the end of the corridor before I stopped and stood there for a second with my hand braced against the wall.
She was going to pretend it hadn’t happened. That was one option. I could pretend it hadn’t happened. Two professionals in a building, completely fine, nothing to see.
I was aware, standing at the end of the corridor, that I did not particularly want to pretend.
I went to practice and spent most of it in my head, but my body knew what to do without me, ten thousand hours of muscle memory carrying me through cleanly enough that nobody said anything.
I was heading toward the coaches’ wing after practice when a hand closed around my arm and pulled me sideways.
What the—
I turned. Maren was already pulling me around the corner into the side corridor between the storage room and the equipment bay, glancing back over her shoulder like someone executing a maneuver she’d planned and was now slightly regretting.
She was in her work clothes, Sidewinders quarter-zip, fitted athletic leggings that showed off her perfect ass, and her hair was up in a high ponytail, a few pieces loose around her face, which is what it did every day by mid-morning.
She looked, I thought, completely too good for a Monday in a service corridor.
She let go of my arm and turned to face me.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“I just—” She shifted her coffee to her other hand. “Two seconds. I wanted to say something.”
“Okay. Are you all right?” She was incredibly fidgety, and all I wanted to do was tell her whatever it was would be fine. And drag her into my arms, but that was a whole other problem.
“About Saturday.” Oh no.
“Okay.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Stared at the ceiling briefly.
She was buying herself time, a tell I’d noticed weeks ago and noted alongside the way she tucked her pen behind her ear and the way she laughed with her whole face when something landed.
“I was—” A small hand gesture as if she were presenting.
“I’d had a lot to drink and I was being—” Another gesture, bigger this time.
She was flustered. It was cute as fuck, the color in her cheeks, words coming out in pieces, and I found it so endearing I had to work to keep my face neutral.
“You really don’t need to—”
“No, let me just—” She interrupted me and took a breath. “I said what I said and then I was clearly about to—” She stopped. “I just want you to know that I’m aware of how that probably looked and it’s not going to be a thing and we’re completely—”
“Maren.”
“Fine, we’re completely fine, I’m a professional and you’re Griffin’s—”
“Maren.”
She stopped and met my gaze.
I watched her. The coffee in her left hand, the color high on her cheeks, the way a strand of dark hair had fallen against the side of her neck and she hadn’t noticed. I wanted, with a specificity that was becoming a real problem, to tuck it back. I kept my hands where they were.
“Nothing happened,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I basically came on to you.”
“You told me you’d been professional about me.” I paused. “Those aren’t the same thing.”
She stared at me. “You know what I meant though.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.” I held her gaze ensuring she’d hear and understand every word carefully. “I didn’t exactly leave the room or put up any arguments, did I?”
She stared at me for a long moment. I watched her take that in, watched her decide what to do with it, the color still in her cheeks and her jaw set in a way like she wasn’t sure what to say, so I kept going.
“We’re fine,” I said. “You’re right that we’re fine.”
“Good.” She nodded. “Great.”
“Good.”
We stood there in the narrow corridor. Somewhere down the hall a door opened and the sound of the ice carried through briefly and shut again.
She was close enough I could smell whatever she used in her hair and the corridor was narrow and I was acutely aware of every inch of the distance between us and what it would take to close it. Again.
“I’m… Uh… I’m going to go do my job now,” she said. Clearly she was still flustered, but she also sounded relieved to have said her piece, which was fucking adorable. Everything she did was adorable. Or sexy. Or smart. Fuck.
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
“Okay then. Uh, have a great rest of your day.”
She went left. So I went right. I couldn’t even remember where I was headed when she grabbed me.
I made it to the end of the corridor before I stopped and braced my hand on the wall. I stood there for a long moment looking at nothing.
She’d pulled me around a corner in a service corridor and fumbled through an apology with her hands and her ceiling-checks and the color in her face, and I had stood there and said nothing happened like a man with functioning self-control.
Which I was apparently still capable of performing even when every instinct I had was pointed in a completely different direction.
I thought about Anna’s voice. Figure out what you want.
I stared at the ceiling. Jag vet vad jag vill, I thought. I know what I want. That had never been the problem.
I knew what I wanted. I’d probably known for longer than I was willing to say out loud.
The problem wasn’t knowing. The problem was Griffin, and the team, and the C on my jersey and everything that came with it, and the fact that wanting something didn’t mean you got to have it because you’d finally admitted you wanted it.
I thought about what she’d said in the kitchen at Cole’s house.
Griffin would lose his mind, and we work together.
Then it would be complicated. Three true things she’d laid out like evidence, not objections, and I’d said very to the last one instead of disagreeing, because it was true, it was all true.
I didn’t exactly leave the room.
I pushed off the wall and went to find someplace else to be besides this hallway. I thought about the strand of hair against her neck for the rest of the afternoon, and about the look on her face when I’d said it, and how she hadn’t glanced away.