16. Maren #3
I immediately felt stupid about it and didn’t take it back because it was true.
Ryan: See you soon, solsken
He showed up with his bag still on his shoulder, straight from the airport.
By now we had a rhythm—evenings that ended with one of us staying.
I heard his knock and crossed the room without thinking about it, the small domestic move of letting him in, like he belonged here, because by now he did—and then he was in my doorway in his going-home clothes, bag over one shoulder.
“You’re still up,” he said.
“Of course I am.”
He dropped his bag inside the door, toed off his shoes, and crossed to where I was on the couch. His eyes moved over me—not concerned exactly, but checking.
“You’re still up. You okay?”
“Of course.” I smiled at him. “I wanted to be here when you got home.”
He went still for half a second. Then, quiet, almost to himself, “Home.”
He’d thought I hadn’t caught it, and I didn’t say anything.
He kissed me, slow and warm, one hand coming up to my jaw, and I leaned into it, and it started to go somewhere and then I pulled back.
“Eat. You must be starving.”
“I’m fine.”
“Ryan.”
He glanced at the takeout container on the coffee table. I started to get up. “Let me heat it—”
“Stay right here.” His hand caught my wrist, easy, and I settled back. He reached for the container and sat beside me, close, our legs touching, and ate without ceremony. I knew he was hungry.
I watched him. The loose set of his shoulders, the way he asked between bites what I thought about the third period. Easy. Unhurried. Like this was just what the end of the day looked like now.
It was the most natural thing in the world. Debriefing after work. I smiled at our natural domesticity.
We’d watched the tape. Together, two nights ago at my kitchen table, Ryan running the opposing goalie’s save patterns on his laptop while I ate cereal and pointed at things I noticed from a body mechanics standpoint and he’d gotten that look—the lightbulb going on, a crinkle at the corner of his eyes—and rewound everything I said three times.
I didn’t mention that. I just pulled the blanket up and leaned into his shoulder, and he lifted his arm and let me settle against his side, his chin dropping to the top of my head, his hand resting on my arm.
Outside, Phoenix was doing its November thing.
Warm enough that the windows were cracked, the AC off for the first time in weeks.
I meant to stay awake. He was leaving for the road trip in a few days and I was clocking every hour of it, counting down against a good thing that had a deadline on it.
But the game had been long and I was warm and his breathing had slowed, and I registered, dimly, sometime in the first forty-five minutes, that the rhythm of his chest under my ear had gone to the deep, even cadence of actual sleep.
I lifted my head slowly.
He was out. Completely out, his head listing slightly toward where mine had been, one arm still loose around my shoulders, his face—usually so composed, so controlled—slack and open in a way I’d only seen a handful of times.
Not the look of a captain. Not the look of a man carrying an expansion franchise on his back.
Just a person who had needed sleep and trusted the place he was in enough to let it happen.
I sat very still and looked at him.
I’d heard Griffin talk about Ryan for years before I’d met him.
The guy who led by doing, who ran the early morning skates nobody required him to run, who stayed to watch film after everyone else had gone home.
The guy who took the press conferences after losses so the younger players didn’t have to.
I’d heard all of it and thought I understood what kind of person that described.
I hadn’t understood what it meant to be that person, what you carried with it. That it lived in his jaw and shoulders and just the quality of stillness he held in public—the effort of it, all the time, every day. There was a weight to it that didn’t really end.
He was putting it down right now. Here. On my couch.
The tight place in my chest went very quiet.
I reached over carefully and turned off the lamp. Pulled the blanket up over both of us. Settled back against his side and felt his arm tighten slightly, reflexive, even in sleep.
I knew what was happening to me. I’d known it longer than I’d admitted to myself. I just lay there in the dark and let it be true without doing anything about it.
The city was quiet on the other side of the blinds and he was warm against my side, his breathing slow and even, finally unburdened of whatever he’d been carrying all day.
I lay there listening to it and understood, with the bare clarity that comes at two in the morning when you stop pretending, that I didn’t want to be anywhere else but with him.
He couldn’t do this anywhere else. Not at the rink, or the locker room, and not with his best friend. The only place he got to set it down was at a house nobody was supposed to know he was in.
I’d been telling myself the secret was the easy part.