20. Maren
MAREN
I’d been awake since six.
Not because I had anywhere to be. The facility was closed, the team had a four-day break, and my first appointment wasn’t until the twenty-seventh.
But it was Christmas morning and my body had never learned to sleep past sunrise on Christmas morning, which was an inconvenient habit I’d carried since I was seven years old and had long ago accepted as permanent.
I was on my second cup of coffee, my feet tucked under me on the living room couch, when Griffin texted at nine-fifteen.
Griffin: Merry Christmas
Griffin: Also heads up Ryan’s parents are in Sweden so I invited him to mom and dad’s
Griffin: Hope that’s cool
Griffin: Actually I already told him yes so
I read it three times. Set the phone face-down on the cushion beside me. Picked it up again. Ryan hadn’t told me, and somehow we’d avoided talking about the holidays other than using it as a timeline for when to come out in the open with at least Griffin that we were seeing each other.
Maren: Of course it’s cool
Griffin: I knew you’d be fine with it
Griffin: He doesn’t have anyone here
Maren: What time
Griffin: Three ish.
I set the phone down and stared at my coffee.
Outside, the Scottsdale morning came in pale gold, the kind that came in sideways this time of year, longer and warmer than anywhere I’d lived, the saguaros throwing long shadows across the street.
I’d grown up with Christmas in the desert and had never wanted anything different.
My mother put lights on everything. My father watched football and burned at least one batch of something every year without fail.
Griffin came home from wherever he’d been easy and loose the moment he walked through the door, like the house reset something in him.
Ryan’s parents were in Sweden.
I thought about him in his apartment this morning. The kitchen I’d started to know, the shelves, the quiet of a space that didn’t have anyone else in it. I thought about what it felt like to be somewhere people knew you were coming, and what it felt like when they didn’t.
I picked up my phone.
Maren: Merry Christmas
Ryan: Merry Christmas.
Ryan: Griffin told you.
Maren: He did
Maren: For what it’s worth the thing my mom is making is extremely good
Ryan: What’s the thing
Maren: If I tell you it ruins the experience
Ryan: I’m Swedish. I have strong opinions about Christmas food.
Maren: Then you’re going to want to have a snack and maybe get drunk when you get here
Maren: I’m happy you’re coming
Ryan: Me too
Ryan: Also…
Maren: Yes?
Ryan: Do you know what I want for Christmas?
Maren: For the Sidewinders to win the cup?
Ryan: Okay, yes, that. But also…you.
Ryan: So my Christmas wish already came true.
Maren: Have you been drinking already?
Ryan: Of course not. I’m already drunk.
Ryan: On you.
Maren: That was so cheesy, I might sneak you a kiss under the mistletoe.
Ryan: Jackpot.
I was smiling at my phone in my empty living room at eleven-thirty in the morning and today I didn’t care. Not on Christmas.
He arrived at three on the nose, about ten minutes before my brother. When I spotted him, he was coming through my parents’ front door holding a bottle of wine and a small poinsettia.
“Ryan.” My mother materialized from the kitchen with the velocity she always had for people she was glad to see. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, Linda.” He let her hug him and even hugged her back warmly. “I brought wine. And I wasn’t sure what you needed, so.”
He held out the poinsettia.
My mother’s face lit up. “Oh, that’s—you didn’t have to do that.”
“My mother always brings one to holiday gatherings since it’s tradition. It seemed right.”
Mom took it and beamed at him with the same warmth she used for anyone who had done something that moved her without knowing it, and I watched all of this from the hallway doorway, arms crossed, leaning against the frame, my heart thumping, and thinking that this was going to be a very long afternoon.
I caught his eye over my mother’s shoulder. He looked at me, brief, warm, contained, and I looked back and gave him absolutely nothing because that was what this was, that was the agreement, and I was a pro at our arrangement.
He exhaled through his nose. Almost a laugh.
“Come in, come in,” Mom said. “Tom is in the kitchen arguing with the oven.”
“He does that every year,” I said.
“He wins eventually. Maren, take Ryan’s coat and get him a beverage.” My mother disappeared back the way she’d come.
Ryan moved through the entry toward the living room. He passed close to me in the hallway, close enough I could smell the cool air he’d brought in with him and underneath it, cedar, him, and said quietly, “Hi.”
“Hi, solsken,” he whispered. He stared at my mouth for a fleeting moment before saying, “Nice house.”
I laughed. “You’ve been here for Sunday dinner several times.”
“I was always focused on the food.” I stayed where I was for a moment, watching him. “And the pretty woman sitting across from me.”
The blush overtaking me was undeniable, and the knowing smirk from Ryan made it that much worse. I took his coat, hung it up with the rest of ours, and led him into the living room where we would have to proceed to act like coworkers the rest of the day.
My mother made the ham. She made it every year, slow roasted with brown sugar and cloves, the whole house smelling of it by noon, and every year it was the same and every year it was exactly right.
Ryan ate two portions without comment, which was the correct response to win her favor. My father noticed and approved. My mother started refilling his glass before he’d finished asking. Hockey players could eat.
“You’re easy to feed,” my mother said, pleased.
“I grew up with a mother who cooked,” Ryan said. “You learn to appreciate it.”
“What does your mother make for Christmas?”
“Julbord.” He said it the Swedish way, which was not the way I had been pronouncing it in my head since September when I’d first read it in a profile piece I had absolutely not been searching for.
His accent when speaking Swedish was fucking sexy and I was trying not to look like a heart eyed emoji every time he spoke.
“It’s a lot of things at once. Herring, meatballs, rice pudding.
My sister puts a whole almond in the pudding and whoever gets it is supposed to have luck for the year. ”
“Did you ever get the almond?”
He was quiet for a beat. “Once. I was twelve. Made the regional team that spring.” He kept his eyes on his plate. “It’s probably a coincidence.”
“Probably,” my father agreed, in the tone that meant he didn’t think it was a coincidence at all.
I watched Ryan talk to my parents the same way I had for months.
With the attention I’d developed for all the ways he showed up in a room without trying to.
He asked my father a question about the eighty-three Oilers and my father was still answering ten minutes later.
He helped my mother carry the bread basket without being asked and came back to the table and sat down and picked up his fork and didn’t make anything of it.
He listened when Griffin talked about the defensive changes Calloway had been drilling, nodding at the right moments, adding two words when he had something to add and otherwise staying quiet, because he understood listening was its own presence.
My mother asked him if he missed Minnesota.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Less than I expected.”
“Phoenix grows on you,” my mother said.
“It does.” He glanced across the table. Not at me, toward me, the way attention moved without announcing itself. “Faster than I thought it would. There are a lot of things about this city I love.”
I reached for the bread basket and did not look at him.
The thing I hadn’t expected, the thing I kept being surprised by, even months in, was how natural he was here.
I’d spent the fall managing the separation between the facility and this other thing, keeping them in their correct containers, treating him like a patient during work hours and treating him like my secret everywhere else.
I’d gotten practiced at it. I could sit across a treatment table from him and be precise and professional, and I could also lie in his bed at two in the morning and feel like myself in a way I hadn’t felt in years, and I’d kept those two things from touching each other so carefully that I’d started to believe they lived in entirely different worlds.
Except here he was at my parents’ Christmas table, passing the ham to my father and asking my mother about the glaze and being himself.
The same version of himself he was in his apartment at midnight.
The same steadiness, the same economy, the same dry attentiveness that made every person he talked to feel like the only person in the room worth talking to.
I hadn’t prepared for him to be exactly the same everywhere. I should have.
He found me in the hallway between the kitchen and the living room, which was not a private place at all, and was probably why he’d chosen it. Plausible deniability. Just two people talking in a corridor.
“Hey,” he said, low.
“Hey.” I glanced toward the kitchen. My mom was in there. My dad and Griffin were in the living room, Griffin’s voice carrying over all the other noise of the day. “We should probably—”
“I know.” He didn’t move. “One minute.”
I looked up at him. His expression didn’t negotiate anything.
The low lamplight caught the planes of his face, the faint line through his left eyebrow, and I thought, not for the first time, that it was profoundly unfair that he looked like that in my parents’ hallway on Christmas, the glow of my mom’s decorations illuminating his eyes as he bore his gaze into mine.
“I needed you to know,” he said, “that this isn’t nothing. For me.”
I went still.