16. Maren
MAREN
I spent every minute of the ride home building a case against a man who hadn’t done anything wrong.
Now I was on my couch in an old ASU T-shirt and shorts I’d had since college, my feet tucked under me, a glass of wine on the coffee table that I’d poured and hadn’t touched because I didn’t want wine. I’d needed something to do with my hands when I walked in the door.
I knew it wasn’t his fault.
I’d known it the entire drive home, both hands on the wheel, going through it over and over, checking and rechecking an answer I already had and did not want.
Woman approaches. Ryan moves her hands. Ryan shuts it down.
Ryan looked trapped and miserable and was not enjoying a single second of it.
I’d watched him from across the table. I’d watched everything, because apparently I was a person who did that now, and I’d seen all of it.
The rigid set of his shoulders. The way he’d taken her wrist and relocated it to her own lap like she’d wandered somewhere she had no business being.
The almost imperceptible exhale when she finally turned toward Cole.
I’d seen all of it and it didn’t matter because I still felt like this.
That was the real thing I was mad about. Not Ryan. Not even her, just a woman in a bar making a reasonable assumption about a ridiculously hot and relatively famous hockey player. I almost couldn’t blame her. I was living the impulse myself.
What I was mad about was the fact that I’d had to sit there with a smile stapled to my face and make jokes and act like I was having a perfectly normal Wednesday while a woman draped herself over a man I had been sleeping with for weeks and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, I could do or say.
Not a hand on his arm. Not a look. Not even the silence that said we’re together without requiring words.
I was invisible. By agreement. My own agreement, which I had made with full information and zero coercion, which made it worse somehow.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and exhaled hard through my nose. This was so dumb. I was being so dumb. I had a graduate degree and a title and I was sitting alone on my couch at eleven-thirty on a Wednesday feeling sorry for myself over a situation I had chosen.
My phone buzzed on the cushion beside me.
Ryan: I’m sorry about tonight. There was nothing to see—I need you to know that.
I read it. Set the phone face-down. Picked it up again. I read it one more time. I knew there was nothing to see. That was not the problem.
I wanted to text back I know and also wanted to throw my phone across the room, and both of those impulses were embarrassing, so I set it face-down again and pulled my knees to my chest and stared at the ceiling.
The AC hummed. Outside, a car went past on the street, its headlights dragging briefly across the ceiling.
I was not going to cry about a puck bunny.
I pressed my lips together. I was probably going to cry about a stupid puck bunny who wanted my man. My man. He was mine, right?
The tears were stupid and I knew they were stupid, which made them worse.
The indignity of being a grown woman who ran a sports medicine program for a professional hockey team, weeping into my college T-shirt because a stranger had put her hands on a man I had no public claim to.
He was still mine though. I knew he was.
I sniffed, wiped my face with the back of my wrist, and took a deep breath. The tears stopped.
The knock at the door made me go completely still.
I knew before I opened it. Three patient knocks.
It was him. Of course it was him. I left without saying a thing to anyone but Paige, and we’d had something close to plans for the evening.
Okay, we totally had plans. But I wasn’t feeling saucy and flirty anymore. I was pouty and mad and disgruntled.
I didn’t move for a moment. I looked down at myself. The T-shirt, the ancient shorts, my face blotchy and swollen from crying, none of it flattering. I considered not answering. I considered being a reasonable adult.
I got up, rubbed my face with both hands, accomplished nothing, and opened the door.
Ryan stood in my doorway in the same clothes from the bar, jacket gone, sleeves pushed to his elbows. He read my face. Steady.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m not mad,” I said.
He waited.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
“If I say no are you going to camp out on my doorstep?”
“Yep.”
I stepped back from the door. “Well then you might as well come in. But I’m not very good company right now.”
“Okay.”
He stepped past me and I caught it immediately.
Soap and cedar and him underneath, warm and clean and his, and I hated that I’d clocked it, hated how much my whole nervous system registered his presence like a shift in pressure.
I was supposed to be annoyed. I was annoyed.
I was also hyperaware of exactly where he was standing in my living room, the fact that he wasn’t pushing into the space but wasn’t retreating either. Patient.
“I texted you,” he said.
“I know.”
“You didn’t answer.”
“I was—” I waved a hand. “Composing myself.”
“How’s that going?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. He held it without flinching, and his eyes did that quiet warm thing that was its own giveaway, and I pointed at him before I could stop myself.
“Don’t you dare find this cute.”
“I’m not finding anything.”
“You have a face right now.”
“I’m just standing here.”
“Ryan.”
“Maren.” He said my name low and even, and it landed in my heart in the annoying way it always did. “Can we sit down?”
I sat. He took the other end of the couch, close but not crowding, angled toward me. The untouched wine glass was still on the coffee table between us. He glanced at it and said nothing.
“It wasn’t what you thought it was,” he said.
“I know that.”
“She came up behind me. I didn’t—”
“Ryan.” I said his name more sharply than I meant to.
“I know. I came out of that bathroom and watched you move her hand off you and tell her no. I watched your face the whole time and I know exactly what happened. I saw how uncomfortable you were.” I exhaled.
“I’m not upset about what happened. I’m upset because I had to sit there and I couldn’t say a single thing.
Couldn’t look at you, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything except make jokes to Cole while she had her hands on you and I had to sit across that table and pretend I didn’t feel anything.
That it didn’t matter.” My voice went slightly uneven at the end. “I know it’s dumb.”
“It’s not dumb.”
“It’s a little dumb.”
“It really isn’t.” He said it plainly, no performance, no softening. “And I’m sorry. Not for what I did, because I did try to stop it right away. But I am sorry for what you felt because of me. It wasn’t fair.”
I studied him for a moment. “Was she nice? She seemed nice. That almost made it worse.” I was pouting now.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t listening.”
“You weren’t—” I stopped. “She was talking directly into your ear.”
“I was looking for you.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. I pulled at a loose thread on the hem of my shorts and did not say anything for a moment because if I said anything it was going to come out wrong.
“That’s a really good answer,” I said finally. “I hate it.”
“?lskling,” he started. The word softened me, warmed my skin a bit and I didn’t even know what it meant. It was said with such affection though, I took a deep inhale.
“I was perfectly fine until she touched you,” I admitted, ignoring whatever he’d just called me. I heard myself and winced. “I’m aware of how that sounds.”
“How does it sound?”
“Unhinged. Jealous—”
“So you were jealous.” His voice had a teasing lilt to it that wasn’t quite a smirk but was adjacent to one, and I pointed at him immediately.
“Don’t.”
“I’m just—”
“Ryan.” I really didn’t want to admit the longer he sat here patiently, kindly, warmly listening to me with his usual calmness, I was realizing I may have overreacted.
“You were a little jealous.” Now he was teasing me and enjoying it.
“I was not—” I stopped. Pressed my lips together. “I was reacting to a situation that was uncomfortable given the—”
“Jealous.”
“I was experiencing a completely understandable emotional response to—”
“Maren.”
I exhaled hard through my nose. “Fine. I was infinitesimally jealous. The smallest possible amount. Barely measurable. It would not show up on any standard assessment tool.”
He smiled—brief and real and devastating—and I groaned and dropped my face into my hands.
I groaned and lifted my head. “You’re very charming. And hot. And it’s frustrating. Don’t look so pleased with yourself.” I cracked a smile. A very small one.
He smoothed his expression back to neutral, which helped nothing because his eyes still gave him away completely.
“I’m not mad at you,” I said, redirecting before I said something else I couldn’t take back.
“I want to be really clear about that. I’m mad because I couldn’t do anything.
I’m mad because I had to sit there and be fine and I’m very good at being fine in front of people, I’ve had a lot of practice, but that was—” My voice went slightly uneven.
I pushed through it. “That was harder than I thought it was going to be.”
Ryan leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and watched me directly. “Can I say something?”
“You’ve been saying things.”
“Something else. Something we’ve been avoiding.”
I nodded.