10. Maren
MAREN
Friday night I was on my couch in sweats with a glass of wine and a book I wasn’t reading when my phone lit up.
Ryan: You’re not at The Rusty Nail.
Maren: Traded it for wine and a couch. Significantly better deal.
Ryan: Debatable. Cole’s doing impressions.
Maren: Of who?
Ryan: Everyone. Yours was surprisingly accurate.
Maren: I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.
Ryan: You should. Long day?
Maren: Long week. Early morning tomorrow or I’d probably be there.
Ryan: Everything okay?
That one landed quieter than the rest. Underneath the easy back and forth, just that.
Maren: Yeah. All good. Just tired.
Ryan: Get some sleep.
Maren: You too. Good game tonight.
Ryan: Thanks. Get some sleep, Maren.
Maren: Bossy.
Ryan: You have no idea.
Maren: Goodnight, Ryan.
Ryan: Goodnight, Maren.
I set the phone on the cushion beside me and looked at the ceiling for a moment, smiling at nothing in particular, then picked my book back up and read the same paragraph four times.
I woke up at six-fifteen and stared at the ceiling for eleven minutes before I admitted I wasn’t going back to sleep.
This was Ryan Lindqvist’s fault.
Not the waking. I’d always been an early riser, had learned it from my mother, who treated sunrise like a personal offense if you weren’t awake to witness it.
The ceiling-staring was new though. The ceiling-staring was a direct result of having kissed Griffin’s best friend in his truck in my own driveway and then lying awake replaying the sound I’d made against his mouth, which was not a sound I had any intention of having made and which I absolutely could not stop hearing.
I’d kissed him back. That was the part I kept returning to.
Not the fact he’d leaned in, not the fact I’d felt it coming and hadn’t moved.
I’d kissed him back. I’d grabbed his shirt and kissed him like I’d been waiting to, which I had been, and was its own problem.
Then I’d come inside and sat on my couch in the dark and thought about Griffin and the team and the look on Ryan’s face when he’d pulled back, like stopping had required something from him, and then I’d picked up my phone and scrolled back through two days of texts until I found the one I’d sent Thursday at 11:47.
No. No, I don’t hate you at all. I put the phone face-down and went to make coffee.
The facility on a Saturday was quieter than a weekday. Reduced staff, no full team practice, a handful of players coming in for optional skates or treatment. I had a nine o’clock patient, a light-duty afternoon, and a firm plan to be professional about everything.
The plan lasted until Ryan walked past my open office door at eight fifty-three.
He wasn’t looking for me. He was heading toward the ice in full gear, helmet under his arm, talking to Eli about something, and he glanced through the open door the way I glanced at things in my peripheral vision. Our eyes met for exactly two seconds before he looked back at Eli and kept walking.
It was only two seconds but also so much more.
I turned back to my computer screen and read the same intake note three times without retaining a word of it.
My patient arrived at nine, which was a mercy.
He found me at eleven-thirty, after my last appointment had cleared out.
I was restocking the supply cabinet with my back to the door when I heard him in the frame.
I knew his quality of stillness by now, the way the air in a room shifted slightly when he arrived in it, and I kept my hands moving through the supplies and said, “Don’t forget to ice that shoulder. ”
“I iced the shoulder.”
I turned around. He was leaning in the doorway in a gray T-shirt and sweats, post-skate, post-shower, hair still damp.
I had treated this man’s body professionally for weeks and apparently none of that had prepared me for him standing in my doorway twelve hours after I’d had my fingers in his hair looking like a real life book boyfriend.
Shit, that lean in my doorway is fucking hot.
“Good,” I said, and turned back to the supply cabinet because I needed three seconds to get my face together.
“The bookstore,” he said.
My pulse jumped and I was refusing to acknowledge it. “What about it?”
“You promised.”
“I promised to take you sometime, yes.” I kept my back to him, straightening a row of tape rolls that did not need straightening. “That was an open-ended commitment. Sometime could mean any number of—”
“I have this afternoon free.”
I did too. He probably knew I did because he’d seen my calendar when I’d pulled it up to schedule his Thursday appointments, and this was the thing about Ryan Lindqvist. He paid attention to everything, held onto it, produced it later at exactly the wrong moment.
Or I guess the right moment, if you’re him.
I turned around to face him, feeling my cheeks heat. “It’s in Tempe. Or did you want to go to the one that’s closer?” I asked. “Tempe is forty minutes.”
“I know where Tempe is.” His smirk was almost more than I could handle. He knew what he was doing.
“That’s a significant commitment of an afternoon.
” Trying to sound coy, I was stalling and he knew it and I knew he knew it.
The back of my neck was warm. I was having a one-sided internal argument with myself about the fact that the correct answer here was obviously let’s go, had been since the plane, and every word out of my mouth was the gap between knowing that and letting myself have it.
“You’ve never even been. You might not like it. ”
“I’ll like it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Maren.” His voice dropped. I closed my eyes briefly.
He said my name low and slow, taking his time with the second syllable, and it was designed to make reasonable people unreasonable.
“I’ve been here three months and the only things I’ve seen are this building, your parents’ backyard, like you said.
Well, and The Rusty Nail. You told me about this place and I’ve been thinking about it since. ”
He was still in the doorway, not pushing, waiting with that patience of his I found maddening, and the morning light from the window was catching the scar through his eyebrow and I thought about what I’d almost said last night in the truck after he’d pulled back.
The thing I’d swallowed. The thing that had come out sideways at eleven forty-seven as I don’t hate you at all, which we both knew was not about hating him.
I wanted to go, enough that I was still standing here having a conversation about Tempe’s distance from Glendale instead of saying so, because wanting it that much was terrifying on its own.
“Give me twenty minutes,” I said. “I need to wrap up a couple of things here.”
The line at the corner of his eye deepened. Not a smile, just the shape of one, warm and private, and he pushed off the doorframe.
“I’ll pull the truck around,” he said.
The bookstore was called Bound, which I’d always thought was either a clever bit of branding or a complete accident, and it occupied the ground floor of a converted warehouse in downtown Tempe with exposed brick and ceiling-high shelves and the smell of old paper and good coffee I’d been coming here for since college.
The owner, Ruth, seventy years old, opinions about everything, shared them freely, had given me a staff discount three years ago on the grounds that anyone who came in as often as I did deserved it.
Ryan walked in behind me and stopped.
I turned to find him with his head tilted back, taking in the shelves, an expression I hadn’t seen on him before, something open and slightly undone, like encountering something he hadn’t expected to want this much.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
“It’s big.”
“It goes back further than it looks.” I nodded toward the rear. “Small town is in the back left. Romance is back right. Fantasy takes up the whole east wall.”
“You have a map?”
“I’ve been coming here since I was eighteen.” I started walking. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
I took him through the fiction stacks first. The good stuff, the section I always lingered in, pulling out spines and reading him first lines the way I would with anyone I trusted to have opinions, because I’d learned on a red-eye flight that he had them.
He took each book I handed him with both hands and read the back copy with real attention, not the polite version. He put two in the crook of his arm.
In the small town section he found a Cal Beckett I hadn’t read and held it out to me. “You need this one.”
“I have a list.”
“It should be on your list.” He turned it over. “Trust me.”
I took it. Our fingers brushed in the transfer and neither of us commented on it and I added it to my stack, which was getting unwieldy, and I didn’t care even a little.
We spent forty minutes in the stacks. Not browsing in the vague, directionless way, but talking—arguing, actually, about whether a book’s cover was a reliable indicator of its quality.
Me, yes, always, and I had data to support this.
Him, categorically no, delivered with the flat certainty he brought to everything, which explained the catastrophic state of his copy of The Innkeeper’s Terrible Idea.
We debated a sequel I’d loved and he’d found disappointing, the argument going in circles the way good ones did, neither of us convincing the other and neither of us trying very hard.
When we discovered we’d had the exact same reaction to one author’s third book I laughed, and he looked at me when I did it—not at the joke, at me—and I had to turn back to the shelf and find something to do with my hands.
At one point I rounded a corner looking for a title and stopped.