18. Maren #2
I’d seen him skate before. I’d watched games all season, knew his habits and his timing from the treatment table, but there was something about watching him with nothing else to do that let me track what he was doing, and what he was doing was operating about two beats ahead of everyone else on the ice.
The play hadn’t developed yet and he was already where it was going.
The defenseman hadn’t committed yet and Ryan had already decided the answer.
Three times in the first period I watched him do it.
The subtle shift of his weight, the head fake that cost him nothing but the opposing center paid for it, and I sat there on my couch in the Scottsdale dark thinking oh.
He was extraordinary. I’d known this abstractly, at arm’s length so it didn’t have to land. Watching him play let it land.
Late in the second period he took a hit behind the net.
Not dirty, just hard, the kind that rattled, and I watched him come up out of it and immediately locate the puck and make the pass, clean and controlled, like the hit hadn’t happened.
I knew his right shoulder. I’d had my hands on it.
I knew exactly how much hurt and I watched him not show it to a single person on that ice, and my heart ached with it for him.
The Sidewinders won 4–1. Ryan scored twice. The second off a faceoff win in the offensive zone he’d engineered himself, and by the third period the building had stopped being tense about it.
I sat with the TV off afterward and thought about the headline I’d named in Ryan’s kitchen months ago. She slept with Lindqvist. That’s how she keeps her job.
I’d meant it when I said it…at the time at least. I still meant the fear of it. Holding myself to a different standard because that’s what the position required, I knew people would look for the story before they looked for the work and it scared me. That was real and it wasn’t going away.
Yet I was sitting here in the dark having watched sixty minutes of hockey that left me breathless, and the idea that I was the story, that anyone watching him play would spare a thought for the woman who taped his shoulder, felt, for the first time, a little bit absurd.
He was too good. The work was too visible.
The fear had been of other people’s perception and I was starting to understand that other people weren’t watching what I was watching.
They were watching number seventeen pick apart a penalty kill.
They were watching the captain of an expansion franchise play like the whole city had already decided it was his.
I pulled my knees up on the couch and sat with that for a while.
I picked up my phone.
The bracelet on my wrist caught the glow of the screen. Alltid din.
I put the phone back down without texting him. I didn’t need to say anything. I needed to sit with the fact that the careful distance I’d been maintaining was starting to hurt more than it protected, and I was the one who’d built it, which meant I was the one who could take it down.
I went to bed thinking about overtime assists and rotator cuffs and two words engraved on the inside of a gold bracelet. We had texted briefly, but he was exhausted, in a different time zone, and I was too. He’d be home soon.
Two more days.
The jersey arrived on day eight.
This one came to my house, left on the front porch, a flat package I didn’t find until after work. I opened it on my kitchen counter and shook it out and stood there holding it.
Number seventeen. LINDQVIST across the shoulders in the Sidewinders’ burnt orange and black. A home jersey, the real one, not a fan replica. The actual thing, the weight and quality of it unmistakable in my hands.
I held it for a long time.
I thought about what it meant to have his name on my back.
I thought about the professional calculus.
The questions it would invite, the conversations I wasn’t ready to have in public.
I thought about sitting next to our parents at home games, moderating every reaction, and performing the careful neutral version of myself.
I thought about the team wives and partners who had started to become my friends, and what they might think.
I thought about how none of that was what I was feeling right now, standing there holding Ryan Lindqvist’s jersey, and how what I was feeling was warm and certain and not remotely manageable.
I hung it in my closet carefully next to my own staff jacket.
I texted him a photo of it hanging there. No words.
His response came twelve seconds later.
Ryan: Next home game you’re not working, you wear mine.
I looked at the text for a long moment.
Maren: People will ask questions. And you’re bossy.
Ryan: Let them.
Ryan: You like it when I tell you what to do.
I put my phone down. Picked it back up and thought about a snarky response but what he said landed.
I set the phone back down. I mulled over the certainty in those two words.
Let them. And the fact that he’d sent me a jersey so soon into our relationship, or whatever this was, without making it a conversation or asking for my opinion on what it meant.
He knew. And he wanted me to know he knew.
I went back and picked up my phone.
Maren: Sometimes I do.
Ryan: I want to see you wearing my name.
Maren: Okay.
He called me from Vancouver that night. Late, after the game, after the media, after whatever the team did in hotel bars after road wins, and I was already in bed, which I had not planned on admitting to him.
“Hey, baby,” he said. His voice was low and warm. The version of him nobody else got, the one that lived underneath the captain and came out only in the dark and only for me. The soft Ryan who was mine.
“Hey.” I settled back against my pillow. “You won.”
“Three-two. Theo scored the winner.”
“I watched.” I had. I’d sat on my couch in his jersey, just to see what it felt like, in my own house, nobody around, and watched him play and tried to be objective about it and failed completely. “You had a good game.”
“You watched in the jersey.”
I went still. “How do you know that.”
“The photo you sent. It was on the hanger when you took it. You moved it.”
I held the jersey, now back on the hanger in the open closet, and thought about how nothing got past him. “I was just seeing if it fit.”
“Does it?”
“It’s enormous. You’re enormous.”
“You love it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Maren.” The low quiet register of his voice shifted, just slightly. “I can hear you smiling.”
“And I can hear you being smug from Vancouver, pleased with yourself.”
His laugh was low and brief and real. I pulled the blanket up and thought about nine days and how eight of them were already gone and how the last one felt like it was going to be long.
“I miss you,” I said. It chirped out of me without forethought, but it was true, and being honest about my feelings with him was important to me.
He was quiet for a beat. “Say that again.”
“I miss you. The arena is too quiet and Jordan Holt is impatient and someone keeps sending me things that make it very difficult to concentrate.”
“Terrible,” he said. “Sounds awful.”
“It’s been a lot.”
“The jersey or the bracelet?”
“The book.” I paused. “How do you have a signed first edition of book two? It only came out four months ago.”
“I have my ways.”
“You come home soon and I can’t wait to kiss you,” I admitted.
He sighed. “One more day, baby.”
“I know.”
Another pause. I heard him shift, the sound of him settling back against the headboard, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped into the register that did things to my concentration.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.
“You’ve been sending me things. I noticed.”
“Not like that.” A beat. “I mean—yes, like that. But not only like that.” He paused. “Turn your lamp on.”
I went very still. “Ryan.”
“The lamp, Maren.”
“Is this the architecture conversation?”
“Turn the lamp on.”
I turned the lamp on. Looked at myself in the dark window.
My reflection pale, my hair up, my expression doing something I was glad he couldn’t see yet.
Then I picked up my phone and switched to FaceTime, and there he was.
Rumpled and postgame and looking at me with his usual full steady attention that still caught me off guard every time like I was the only thing in a room he’d bothered to see.
“There you are,” he said.
“Here I am.” I pulled my knees up. “You look tired.”
“I’m not tired.” His voice was warm and low and certain. “Take your hair down for me.”
I reached up and pulled the band out slowly, watching his face on the screen as my hair fell around my shoulders. His jaw tightened slightly. His attention reached me across two thousand miles like a physical thing.
He was quiet for a moment, just looking at me.
“?lskling,” he said, barely above a whisper.
“What does that mean.”
“Look it up later.” His eyes stayed on me. “What are you wearing.”
I dropped my gaze. His Sidewinders T-shirt, a soft one I’d borrowed weeks ago and never returned. I hadn’t done it on purpose. Okay, I had absolutely done it on purpose. Stealing his clothes was my favorite hobby.
“That’s mine,” he said.
“Is it.”
“Take it off.”
I reached for the hem. “You first.”
He watched me for one beat, then reached behind his collar and tugged his shirt off over his head. I inhaled. His chest was bare and I thought, not for the first time, that it was unfair how he looked. I wanted to put my hands on him, trace the lines of his chest, follow them with my mouth.
“Your turn,” he said.