12. Maren #3
He gave me everything I asked for and more, and I took it and asked for it again.
He moved with that same deliberate focus he had on the ice.
Reading me, adjusting, not rushing, not letting the want overtake the attention he was paying to me, and I stopped holding anything back.
I told him what I wanted in terms I’d never used with anyone, and his response each time was to give me exactly that, and more.
When I came the third time, it hit differently than the others.
Not sharp and sudden but deep and rolling, a slow crest that built until I couldn’t tell where it started and couldn’t find the end of it, my back off the mattress and his arm holding me, his hand between us working me through it, his mouth at my throat saying my name against the thin sheen of sweat between us.
He followed me a moment later with his forehead pressed to mine and his breath gone completely and something low in Swedish I couldn’t parse but understood anyway.
The tone of it, the roughness, the way it came out like he hadn’t planned to say it all.
I lay with my arms still around him while the room came back into focus. The lamp. The ceiling. The sound of my own breathing slowing down.
The lamp was still on. I had no idea what time it was.
Ryan came back from the bathroom and I went, and when I came back he was lying on his back with his arm out for me and I curled into his shoulder without discussion, like we’d been doing this for years.
He had a purplish mark on his collarbone I was fairly sure I was responsible for and felt no guilt about whatsoever. His hair was completely wrecked. He looked, otherwise, entirely composed, which was objectively unfair and also extremely him.
I reached up and traced the scar through his left eyebrow with my thumb. He went still under the touch.
“High stick,” I said.
“You read my file.”
“I’m thorough.”
He turned his head to look at me, wearing the quiet settled expression I’d been learning to read. “How’s the assessment?”
I considered this. “The tissue mobility is excellent,” I said. “Strength metrics are very strong. Overall prognosis—” I paused. “Very favorable.”
He smiled, brief, real, gone again before I could quite catch it. “Good to hear.”
His hand found my hip and he pulled me closer, his thumb moving slow against my skin.
“You’re addictive,” he said into my hair. Not a compliment. An observation.
I absorbed that for a moment, lying in the warmth of him with the lamp on and the house quiet around us. I thought about the parking lot and the phone call, and the way he’d looked at me at the foot of the bed with the restraint entirely gone, and min said low against my skin.
He reached his arm around my waist, and I let him pull me back against his chest without making anything of it.
“I’ll sleep better wrapped around you,” he said, low, like he was telling himself as much as me.
I didn’t answer. I just let myself settle into him—the warmth of his skin, the steady weight of his arm, the smell of him that I’d been trying not to let myself notice for three months.
My shoulders dropped. My breath slowed. I let out a long exhale and felt his arm tighten around me, just slightly, just once, like he’d been waiting for it.
He kissed my exposed shoulder softly and exhaled against me. I leaned back against him. Outside, Scottsdale was dark and indifferent, and inside my lamp threw its small warm light and Ryan Lindqvist was in my bed with his arm around me, solid and present and not going anywhere.
I stared at the ceiling with the quiet, certain, entirely inconvenient understanding that nothing about this was going to be simple, and that I didn’t want it to be. Nine years. I’d waited too, and him savoring me the way he had was more than anything I’d ever experienced in my life.
I’d spent eight months since Josh making careful decisions. Choosing dates who were uncomplicated, keeping myself out of situations that I might have to change myself to be a part of. I’d told myself I was being smart. I’d told myself I’d learned.
What I hadn’t accounted for was Ryan Lindqvist, who had walked into this building in August already too many things at once.
Too careful and too attentive and too steady, too consistent and present to make keeping a professional distance feel possible without actively working at it every single day. I’d been working at it. Mostly.
I wasn’t working at it anymore.
His thumb was moving slowly against my hip.
I could tell from his breathing that he wasn’t asleep.
He didn’t fall asleep easily. I’d noted it months ago, before any of this, when he was just a patient and he told me about his sleeping habits.
He was lying here thinking the same way I was, and neither of us was saying it, and that meant something.
“Hey,” I said, into the quiet.
“Yeah.”
“Nothing.” I pressed my face briefly against his shoulder. “Just checking you were still here.”
His arm tightened around me. Just that, no words, no explanation, just the weight of it settling.
I closed my eyes and let myself have it.