9. Ryan
RYAN
The Rusty Nail was exactly what it sounded like.
The owner, Dee, sixty years old, who had seen everything and was impressed by none of it, treated us exactly like regular customers, which meant she brought our drinks and rolled her eyes at Cole and told Theo his face would look better if he smiled occasionally.
The team loved her for it.
Tonight the back patio held maybe a dozen of us. Thursday, postgame, loose enough to be out but not loose enough to be stupid about it. The win column had ticked up three in a row and the mood was easy, warm. The looseness that came from a team beginning to trust each other and feel it.
I was on my first and only beer, sitting with Eli at the far end of the table while Cole held court at the other end with the volume he brought to every room he’d ever walked into.
Theo leaned against the railing nearby, half in the conversation and half somewhere else, which was where Theo usually was.
Maren had come with Griffin after the game.
She’d shed her staff jacket somewhere in the first twenty minutes and now she was in a yellow sundress at the other end of the table, laughing at something Cole said with her whole face, and I was thinking about a boarding pass stub in a cracked paperback spine and it’s a date said in the low quiet of a red-eye cabin.
I took a drink and listened to Eli talk about Iris’s latest attempt to convince him that pasta counted as a vegetable.
Griffin found me around nine-thirty, appearing at my shoulder with an expression I’d known since college. The one that meant he had somewhere to be and was hoping I would silently agree whatever it was could be considered reasonable without requiring further explanation.
“Hey,” Griffin said. “So.”
I watched him.
“There’s a girl.” He tilted his head toward the interior of the bar. “We’ve been talking.”
“Go.” He didn’t need my permission.
“Maren’s here. She was going to rideshare home but—” Griffin had the grace to look slightly sheepish. “Can you just make sure she gets home okay? You don’t have to take her, but like maybe wait for her car with her? I’ll feel better.”
I kept my face completely neutral, excitement churning. “Yeah. Of course.”
“You’re the best.” Griffin clapped me on the shoulder. “Don’t tell her I asked, she’ll give me a full lecture about being a grown adult woman who doesn’t need—”
“A babysitter.”
“Exactly. You get it.”
“I have a sister. Go,” I said.
Griffin went. I watched him disappear through the back door of the bar and turned back to my beer, expression still neutral.
Eli had watched the whole exchange from two feet away without appearing to watch it at all.
The ask, the answer, the part where I had agreed to look after Griffin’s sister a beat too quickly for it to mean nothing.
He said nothing about any of it. That was Eli.
He didn’t ask questions or offer opinions uninvited.
He simply kept things in that quiet way of his and let them sit, and I had learned in two months playing alongside him that Eli’s silence was never empty.
I finished my beer.
I was at the bar waiting for a water when I heard Maren’s voice shift.
I couldn’t have explained how I knew. It wasn’t volume.
She wasn’t loud, but something in the register changed.
The warm ease of her usual tone was gone.
What replaced it was tighter and flatter, a careful evenness like she was managing a situation.
I was turning before she got to the end of the sentence.
She was at the bar, maybe twenty feet away.
A man beside her, late twenties, baseball cap, several empty drinks in front of him and acting like it, had his hand on her arm.
Not her shoulder. Her arm, fingers wrapped around it, and she’d angled her body away.
Polite, and also very clear, and he was not reading it.
“Come on,” the guy was saying, leaning in. “Just one more drink.”
“I’m good, thanks.” Maren’s voice was steady. She was handling it. She had clearly handled versions of this before and knew exactly how, and she did not need anyone’s help.
I crossed the bar in about eight steps anyway.
I came up on the guy’s other side. Not behind him, beside him, close enough that he turned and found me six inches from his face.
He blinked. Looked up. I had a few inches on him and was using all of them.
“Hey, man, I was just—”
“I know what you were doing.” My voice came out low and even and cold without any effort at all. My eyes dropped to his hand, still on Maren’s arm. “Take your hand off her.”
The guy dropped it immediately. Then he registered who he was talking to and went still. “Wait.” His eyes went wide. “Holy shit. Are you—you’re Ryan Lindqvist.”
I said nothing. I was fixed on the spot on Maren’s arm where his hand had been.
“Oh my god.” His entire bearing changed, the alcohol-fueled confidence dissolving into something embarrassingly close to awe. “I’m so sorry, I had no idea, I didn’t know she was—I mean, I wouldn’t have—I’m a huge fan, seriously, the game last week against Colorado, that assist in the third—”
“I don’t care.” My voice was low and about ten degrees below the temperature of the room.
I took one step closer, not aggressive, just close enough that he had nowhere to look but at me.
“When a woman says no, that’s the end of the sentence.
” Then I added, “She’s mine.” Quietly. Like a fact.
That’s probably going to bite me in the ass later.
I didn’t give a shit. I was burning with red hot rage.
“You had your hands on her when she didn’t want them there. Do you understand me?”
He swallowed. “Yeah. Yeah, man, I’m sorry—”
“Keep your hands to yourself.” I said it quietly, which somehow made it worse. “We clear?”
“Crystal.” He grabbed his drink and was gone before I finished all the things I wanted to say.
I watched him go until I was certain he wasn’t coming back. The anger was still radiating hot and clean. Not performed. Just real, and mine.
I took one slow breath and turned to Maren.
She was watching me. Startled, yes, but her eyes were wide, a flush high on her cheeks I was pretty sure had nothing to do with the heat of the bar.
“I don’t need a babysitter,” she said.
“I know.”
“I was handling it.”
“I know.” I held her gaze. “He still had his hands on you.”
A beat. She searched my face. “You said I was yours.”
I held her gaze and did not look away and did not qualify it and did not take it back. “Yeah,” I said. “I did.”
The flush deepened. She dropped her gaze to her drink, then brought it back to mine. Whatever she’d been managing to keep off her face, she wasn’t managing it anymore.
“Okay,” she said softly.
“Okay,” I said, letting out a breath to calm myself and resetting.
I put my hand on the small of her back as we turned from the bar and guided her back toward the patio.
She didn’t move away from it. I kept it there, my thumb tracing one slow circle against the fabric of her dress.
Griffin had asked me to make sure she got home safe.
I was pretty sure this wasn’t what he had in mind, but I wasn’t letting her out of my sight the rest of the night. That was for damn sure.
By the time we ended up back on the patio, the group had thinned.
A few of the younger guys had moved inside or left, and it was Cole and Theo and Eli and two rookies.
I pulled my chair close to Maren’s at the end of the table where the light was low and the conversation was easy, and when I sat I let my hand find the back of her chair.
She didn’t move away from it, and I left it there.
Cole was telling a story about a promotional appearance that had gone spectacularly sideways.
Voices, gestures, a dramatic pause before the punchline, and the table was laughing and it was a good night, and I was only half there because Maren was warm beside me and the fabric of her dress was thin and she kept leaning into me, a degree at a time, like she hadn’t meant to.
I held onto every bit of it—the weight of her shoulder against my arm, the way she laughed with her whole face, the small sound she made when something landed perfectly.
Cole landed the punchline. The table erupted.
Maren grabbed my arm and laughed against my shoulder, and I went completely still for exactly one second and then made myself act normal about it.
I laughed at Cole’s story, made myself be a person sitting at a table with his teammates, and not a man aware of every breath she took.
I raised my head. Cole was watching me. Not with the wide grin he’d had a moment ago, but with something quieter and more careful, and he raised an eyebrow at me by one millimeter before looking smoothly away and picking up his beer.
He said nothing. Not speaking was, I thought, the most alarming thing Cole Westbrook had ever done.
Across the table Theo took in the exchange with his usual careful patience, and Eli was looking at the middle distance with no expression at all, which with Eli meant he’d seen everything and had decided to stay out of it.
I took a drink.
The night wound down around eleven. The rookies headed out first, then Theo, then Eli, who paused beside me on his way past, said nothing, and put a hand briefly on my shoulder. One beat, enough, and left.
Me and Cole and Maren, and then Cole stretched and announced he had an early morning and was getting too old for weeknights, which was a complete fiction because Cole Westbrook had never voluntarily left a social situation before it was over.
He said goodnight to Maren with a hug, gave me one last look I was going to ignore, and left.
Just the two of us on the patio under the buzzing lights, the mister putting up a faint cool haze, the bar noise a low hum through the glass door.
“Thank you,” Maren said. “For earlier. Even though I didn’t need it.”
“Even though,” I agreed.