20. Maren #2
“I know we can’t—” He paused. Glanced toward the living room over my shoulder, then lowered his voice further.
“I know what tonight looks like. And I know what the next couple weeks are probably going to look like. But I didn’t want you to sit at that table and think that the way I’m behaving means what it looks like it means. ”
“Ryan—”
“Jensen’s pond,” he said. His voice was quiet, but rushed, like he needed to get this out.
I stopped breathing.
“The truck. The blanket. That bonfire.” His eyes stayed on mine as he whispered.
“Griffin had disappeared somewhere and you were cold and we sat in the bed of my truck and watched the stars come out and I had my hand on your knee and there was a moment—” He stopped, then started again.
“There was a moment where I almost did something I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to do.
And I didn’t. Because of Griffin. Because the timing was wrong.
Because I was twenty-two years old and I didn’t know how to want something and also do the right thing at the same time. ”
The hallway was very quiet. The television murmured from the living room. My mother’s voice drifted from the kitchen, warm and ordinary, and I was standing in the corridor of my childhood home having the conversation I’d spent nine years pretending I didn’t want to have.
“You remember that,” I said. It came out barely above a whisper.
“I remember all of it.” He said it simply, like it was a fact he’d long since made peace with. “The laugh you gave when something landed and you tried to hide it. The exact weight of the blanket. Your hair in the firelight. I’ve been filing it away for nine years, Maren. That’s not nothing.”
The weight of his words landed deep in my heart, warm and inconvenient, given that we were a room away from my mother.
“I’m not telling you this to—” He stopped and exhaled slowly.
“I just needed you to know that whatever this looks like from the outside, to me it’s always been real.
You were always—” He stopped. His jaw shifted, fractional.
He looked at me with an expression that was older than wanting, older than this season, older than Phoenix.
“You were always mine. Even when I couldn’t say it. Even when I had no right to.”
“Ryan.” My voice had gone somewhere I didn’t entirely recognize.
He reached out. Just his hand, covering mine where it rested against the doorframe, his thumb pressing once, warm and deliberate, before he let go.
“Alltid,” he said. Quietly. The way he said things he meant in his core.
I looked at him and swallowed. “What does it mean? Alltid.”
“Always,” he said. “In Swedish. No matter what happens. No matter how it looks from the outside or how long this takes or what I have to carry to get there.” His eyes held mine. “Don’t forget that.”
He looked at me the way he’d looked at me in that truck bed nine years ago. Steady. Unhurried. He had decided this nine years ago and had not changed his mind since. “Say it again.”
“Alltid.”
The line at the corner of his eye deepened. Not a smile. The thing before a smile, the one he kept on a short leash.
“Don’t forget it,” he said again.
My mother called my name from the kitchen. Neither of us moved for one full second. Then I pushed off the doorframe and went to see what she needed, and I carried the word with me the rest of the night like something I could hold in my closed hand without anyone knowing it was there.
Alltid.
After dinner, Griffin and my father took the argument about the eighty-three Oilers to the living room, which was where it belonged.
My mother started the dishes with the cheerful efficiency she brought to everything in her own kitchen.
She’d say she didn’t need help, accept it from whoever showed up, and never mention it either way.
Ryan showed up with a dish towel.
I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched him dry plates beside my mother and chat about Anna, his sister, Stockholm, the fact that Anna had married a man named Johan who was a chef which Ryan found both convenient and intimidating, and I thought, clearly and with nowhere to put it, that I was in love with him and he was drying my mother’s dishes on Christmas and nobody in this house except me knew what that meant.
My mother said something that made him laugh, low and brief and genuine, and she looked pleased with herself as she sent him home with a mountain of leftovers some time later.
He showed up at my house at nine-thirty with a new bottle of wine and a small, wrapped box. It was beautifully wrapped, brown kraft paper, a red ribbon tied in a bow on top and fit in the palm of my hand.
I let him in. He set the wine on the counter and held out the box without preamble.
“Ryan—”
“It’s small,” he said. “Take it.”
I unwrapped the kraft paper carefully, aware of him watching, and found a small white box inside. Lifted the lid.
The necklace was delicate. A thin gold chain, and on it a charm so small I had to tilt the box toward the kitchen light to see it clearly. A skate. Tiny, perfectly rendered, no bigger than my fingernail.
I went very still.
“Ryan.”
“You can wear it whenever you want,” he said. “Nobody has to know what it means.”
I studied it for a long moment. The skate caught the light, small and certain and already feeling like something I’d been missing without knowing it.
I thought about the rink, the dim amber glow, his knee on the concrete floor, the careful focus he’d brought to lacing up my skates like it was the obvious thing to do.
“Help me put it on,” I said, and turned my back.
His hands were as steady as they always were. The clasp caught. The small weight of it settled at my throat.
I turned around. He kissed me in the cold light of my own kitchen, quiet and certain, and I kissed him back and thought next Christmas will be different.
He stayed.
We opened the wine and found something on television—an old Christmas movie, the kind neither of us had to pay attention to—and ended up on my couch the way we always did, my feet tucked under me and his arm around my shoulders and the low flicker of the screen the only light in the room.
The necklace was warm at my throat. Outside, the desert had gone quiet the way it only did on holidays, and in here there was just him and the movie neither of us was watching and the smell of the wine and the fact that he was gently playing with the ends of my hair without either of us remarking on it.
"About the hallway at your parents'," he said.
I sat up and turned to look at him.
"I've been thinking about it all night." He shifted so he was facing me, one arm along the back of the couch.
"I put all of that on you in a corridor with your mother barely twenty feet away and Griffin in the next room.
You couldn't have answered me if you wanted to.
That wasn't fair and I knew it when I did it. "
"Ryan—"
"I did it anyway." He said it plainly. "Because I watched you sit at that table all afternoon being everything but what you are to me, and I could not stand it for one more hour without you knowing what was actually true."
The refrigerator cycled on in the kitchen. I did not know what to do with my hands and my lips fell open, just barely while I tried to summon the words.
"I'm not asking you for anything tonight, and there’s no pressure to change what is going on between us, or anything else," he said. Stopping for a moment, he took a deep inhale. "We’re already planning to tell your brother after the new year, and…I told Anna about you this morning.”
“What, uh…did you tell her?” The words felt like stalling.
I had a million things to tell him, but none would come out.
I am obsessed with you. You’re mine. It’s always been you for me since I was eighteen?
None of the things I felt for him were coming to me, but they were all there, begging to be said.
“Your name, that we’ve been seeing each other for months. She asked me if it was serious."
I swallowed thickly. “What…um…was your answer?” I knew, but knowing I was about to hear him say it was huge.
"I told her it was serious. No hesitation. I want you to know I didn't have to think about my answer. That's all. You don't have to do anything with it."
Slowly, I crawled into his lap, placing one hand on his chest, and he reached up, running a hand gently against my throat where his thumb ran gently against my necklace.
I wasn’t quite ready to say anything, the magnitude of my feelings for him were more than I could express yet, but I licked my lips and smiled, staring into his beautiful blue-gray eyes.
His hand moved from my throat to the back of my neck and he pulled me in for a kiss.
Deep, passionate, our tongues tangling, I hoped my movements as I pressed my body to his spoke for me.
Ryan lifted to his feet, carrying me with him down the hall to my bedroom where I continued to show him how I felt in lieu of the words I wasn’t ready to say.