11. Ryan #2
That was the thing I kept not letting myself examine directly even though it was always looming around the edges of this thing with Maren.
Griffin had told his parents about me before training camp ended.
He’d given me a key to his parents’ house, the casual trust that most people took years to build, and he’d done it in six weeks because that was who he was—all-in, no half measures, the most wholehearted person I’d ever known.
He’d told me once, after a bad loss our sophomore year, that I was the kind of person worth building something with.
He’d been twenty years old and completely serious and he’d been right, and I’d spent the last eleven years trying to deserve it.
What I was doing now was not that.
Every day I didn’t tell him how I felt about his sister was a day I was deciding, again, that my own comfort mattered more than his right to know.
I’d been dressing it up as protection—protecting the team, the season, the friendship itself—but standing in a Nashville street with his arm around my shoulders, I knew the name for what I was actually doing.
I was a coward about the one thing that should have made me brave.
I stayed for one drink. I was watching Cole charm a table of women without appearing to try while Eli nursed a soda and checked his phone, his thumb hovering over the screen.
I watched Griffin laugh at something across the room, easy and unguarded, how he always was when the team was playing well, and the familiar pull of gratitude for this group of people I still hadn’t found the right words for arrived and settled in my body.
Then I put my glass down, said my goodnights, and went back to the hotel.
The room was on the fourteenth floor and overlooked the city, the Cumberland River a dark ribbon below the lights.
I stood at the window for a moment. Two cities in two nights—a loss and a win, a woman I’d thought about for every waking hour of both.
I sat on the edge of the bed and picked up my phone.
The team wouldn’t be back for hours. I had no reason to call her. It was late and she had work tomorrow and I’d texted her earlier. I had no reason to call her.
I called her anyway.
It rang twice.
“You won,” she said.
“We won.”
“I saw. 4–1.” I heard shifting in the background, the quieting of a room at the end of a night. “Theo got his fifth.”
“He did.”
“He looked very unhappy about the celebration.”
“He always looks unhappy about celebrations. It’s how you know he’s enjoying himself.” I lay back against the headboard, phone against my ear, and stared at the ceiling. “Where are you?”
“Couch. I was reading. It’s almost eleven. Why aren’t you out with the team?”
“I was. I left.”
“You left to come back to your hotel room alone?”
“I left to call you.”
Then, quieter. “Ryan.”
“I know.” I did. I knew exactly what it meant that I’d put down a drink and walked out of a bar full of celebrating teammates to sit in a hotel room in Nashville and hear her voice, and I wasn’t pretending otherwise. “How was your day? Tell me about it.”
She let me change the subject and conceded to my request. She told me about a difficult intake session, a defensive prospect with a hip labrum tear that was going to require a longer rehab timeline than anyone wanted to hear.
She filled me in about a scheduling dispute with the team physician that had eaten forty minutes of her afternoon.
Then she told me about dinner, a new recipe from Paige that had turned out better than expected.
I listened with the full attention I gave things that mattered, and the empty hotel room stopped feeling empty.
“Griffin tried to set me up at dinner last night,” I said, when she’d finished like a word vomited confession. “In Dallas. There were two women at the bar. He wanted a wingman.”
Silence.
“I stayed twenty minutes.”
“And then?” I couldn’t tell what her reaction was, and I was blurting things out.
“I’m telling you,” I said. “Not reporting in. I don’t do that. I just—I wanted you to know how that went. That I left. That I’ve been back in my room, planning to go over tape and thinking about a parking lot in Tempe.”
There was a pause. Then the small exhale that meant she’d considered what I said and was smiling and trying not to let it be obvious. At least that’s what I was telling myself while I waited for her reply.
“You don’t owe me—” she started.
“Let me stop you right there.” I cut her off.
“I meant what I said at the bookstore, and I know we haven’t…
sorted anything out, but the seedling here…
what’s blooming between us? It matters to me.
It’s not about owing anything, it’s about being decent and honest, which is the absolute least you deserve.
I’m not that guy, the one who picks up women at bars on the road. ”
I heard a long sigh. “Thank you for telling me,” she said. Like it was a question. Like she wasn’t sure she was allowed to be glad about it.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “For the record, the steak in Dallas was good. The company at my end of the table was not.”
She laughed. Warm and real, the laugh that came out when she’d stopped managing herself, and I lay in the dark of a Nashville hotel room and thought about how much I wanted to be wherever that laugh was.
The quiet between us settled. Outside the window the city hummed and glittered, indifferent and alive, and I thought about how strange it was that this room had been every other hotel room until about four minutes ago.
“What are you wearing,” she said, and then immediately, “I cannot believe I said that.”
I smiled at the ceiling. “Say it again.”
“No. I’m blaming the wine.”
“You’ve had wine?”
“One glass. It was a long day.” A beat. “I’m not saying it again.”
“You don’t have to.” I let a moment pass. “I’ll answer anyway. Sweats. Minnesota State shirt. Socks I should have replaced six months ago.” Another pause. “Your turn.”
She made a startled sound, half laugh. “Ryan—”
“You started it.”
“I—that’s fair.” A rustling, the soft sound of her shifting on the couch. “Sleep shirt. It’s gray. Very unsexy.”
“That’s not what I’m picturing.”
The silence on her end went a degree warmer. “What are you picturing?”