21. Ryan
RYAN
We lost in Vegas on a Tuesday.
I said the right things in the postgame interview and walked out to the bus. My dad had texted somewhere between the locker room and the parking lot.
Dad: Tough loss. You’ll get them.
I pocketed my phone.
The bus was quiet the way buses got after bad road losses—not sullen, not fractured, just wrung out.
Guys with headphones on, heads back, the exhaustion of men who’d given everything and come up short.
I took my seat and looked out the window at the Vegas strip sliding past, all that light, none of it landing.
Griffin dropped into the seat next to me about five minutes out.
“God,” he said. “I’m glad that game is over.”
“Yeah.”
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “The second period bounce. I saw it the whole way and couldn’t do a thing about it.”
“I was already calling for the coverage shift.”
“Half a second.”
“Half a second,” I agreed.
We sat with that for a minute—not picking it apart, just letting it be what it was. The bus hummed. Someone’s music bled faintly from three rows back.
Griffin opened one eye and looked at me sideways. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” I meant it mostly. “Wiped out.”
“Same.” He closed his eye again. “Same.”
He was asleep before we hit the hotel. I sat next to him and looked out at the city going by and thought about Maren.
I’d been thinking about Maren through the whole postgame, through the handshake line, through the interviews—like a current running underneath everything else.
Not distracting me from it. Just there. She’d been there for weeks, always in the background of whatever else was happening in the foreground, a frequency I’d stopped noticing because it had become constant, and comforting, and entirely hers.
I wanted to call her. That’s all there was to it. After a bad loss in a city I didn’t know, surrounded by people who had my back completely, the thing I wanted most was to hear her voice. Not to debrief the game or fix anything. Just her on the other end of the line saying whatever she said.
Back in my room I sat on the edge of the bed, the game film open on my laptop, room service on the desk I wasn’t going to touch and called her.
She’d watched the game on her TV at home, sound up. She knew the score. She knew which period had gone wrong. She answered on the second ring.
“Hey.” Already warm, already in it. “I watched the third.”
“I know.”
“The coverage miss.”
“I know.”
A beat. “Is something wrong with the room service?”
I looked at the desk. How did she know I wasn’t eating? “No. Just feeling shitty.”
“About the loss or something else?”
I lay back and stared at the ceiling. “I just wanted to hear your voice. It’s one of those days where being the captain felt impossibly hard and I didn’t want to debrief it or fix it. I just wanted—” I stopped. “This.”
She went quiet for a moment, not the quiet of working out what to say, but the quiet of having already worked it out and deciding whether to say it.
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. When you get back, you’re coming over for a nap date.”
“A nap date.”
“Yes.”
“What is a nap date?”
“You come over,” she said, like this was self-evident.
“We get into bed. We watch something completely mindless. We fall asleep. When we wake up, I make you food and we don’t talk about hockey for at least half a day.
Mostly because I don’t think either of could actively avoid hockey talk longer.
” She let out a small laugh which made me smile.
“That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know why that’s not just called a nap.”
“Because it’s intentional,” she said. “You have to mean it going in. That’s what makes it a date.”
I laughed. “Okay. Fuck yeah,” I said. “It’s a date.”
“Get some sleep,” she said.
“I will.”
“Good.” Her voice went warm and low. “I’ll see you when you get home.”
“Maren?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
“Anytime, baby. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, solsken.”
I lay in the dark after she hung up and thought about the word home and where I’d started to feel it the most lately. The answer was obvious. It was with her. Anywhere she was felt like home, and I couldn’t wait to get back there.
Griffin fell into step beside me on the walk over.
I’d picked him up on my way to the Rusty Nail for New Year’s Eve, and I’d be a liar if I said I was excited to go.
All I really wanted was to cozy up with my girl and ring in the new year between her legs, and then wrapping my arms around her the rest of the night.
“How’s the apartment?” he asked.
“Good. Finally put things on the walls.”
“Yeah?” He glanced over. Griffin had seen every place I’d ever lived—the freshman dorm, the rookie apartment, the one after that—and the question wasn’t small talk.
I had to park pretty far away with the crowd being so big that night. We walked without talking for a stretch, the easy quiet we’d had since we were eighteen, neither of us needing to fill it.
“The speech,” Griffin said. “Back in San Jose. I was thinking about it. You said the thing nobody says out loud and the room shifted.” He paused. “People will run through a wall for someone who’s honest with them.”
I looked at the bar ahead of us. “Let’s hope so.”
“It’s already working.” Griffin held the door. “I watched their faces.”
I went through and the noise of the bar came up around us, and Griffin clapped me once on the back—brief, solid—and went to find a drink.
I stood there for a second in the doorway noise and let it land. Griffin didn’t say things he didn’t mean and he didn’t say them to make you feel better. Eight years apart and he still read a room the same way I did, maybe better. If he said the room shifted, the room shifted.
I went to find my girl.
The Rusty Nail smelled like spilled beer and cedar and the bright citrus of whatever Dee had put in the punch bowl that nobody was going near yet.
By nine-thirty every table was taken. The speaker in the corner was running a playlist someone had clearly curated with intent.
Something with a low pulse underneath it, music that said we’re not leaving early without saying it.
Streamers in burnt orange and black hung from the exposed ceiling beams. Cole’s work, obviously.
The man had no restraint and zero shame about it and I had learned to find that useful.
Maren was across the room.
She’d come in at eight-thirty with Paige, both of them in good spirits that meant the evening had already started somewhere else, and in the first twenty minutes I’d found myself next to her at the bar and I’d said hi to her like I’d say hi to Griffin’s sister at a team event.
She’d said hi back. She’d asked if I’d confirmed my travel window for the road trip.
I’d told her. She’d made a dry comment about Jordan Holt treating rest as a theoretical concept, and I’d laughed, and she’d smiled at me, the professional version, warm and precise and giving me absolutely nothing, and then Paige had materialized and that was that.
Thirty seconds passed between us, completely unremarkable to anyone watching.
I was standing near the end of the bar with a whiskey I’d been nursing for forty minutes, which was the right drink for a night where I wanted to be functional at midnight and also needed something to do with my hands.
I was still thinking about my brief interaction with Maren two hours later. She was the only person I wanted to hang out with and it was making me irritable.
It wasn’t our conversation I was thinking about though.
There was nothing to think about there, it had been twenty words about logistics and one joke.
The way she’d been standing. The angle of her shoulder toward me.
The skate necklace at her throat catching the bar light.
The way she’d smiled at me with the professional version and I’d felt it in my ribs anyway, because my body had stopped caring about the distinction months ago.
Danny was at the pool table attempting to teach Kasperi a technique Kasperi had clearly already mastered and was pretending otherwise out of basic human kindness.
Eli was in the corner booth with his beer, present and self-contained, doing what Eli did at social events.
Surviving them with dignity while he’d rather be at home with his kid.
Theo had found a woman I didn’t recognize and was doing the thing where he listened like she had his complete focus, which with Theo was either genuine or strategy and probably both.
Griffin was in the northeast corner, and had been for quite some time, talking and flirting with a brunette I wasn’t familiar with.
I’d noticed the shift around eleven. Griffin’s posture going deliberate, the dark-haired woman beside him laughing at something, Griffin leaning in with the same full-attention expression he brought to the ice except this wasn’t the ice and wasn’t hockey.
I recognized it as Griffin deciding he was not going anywhere for the rest of the evening.
I stared at my whiskey.
I thought about Christmas. The hallway, the string lights, her unwrapping the box.
The way she’d gone still when she saw the necklace.
Not a performance of being touched, just the real thing, which was the only version of her I’d ever gotten and the only one I wanted.
The way she’d said help me put it on and turned her back and I’d worked the clasp with hands that were steadier than they had any right to be given the situation.
I was watching her now across the room. She was talking to Paige, one hand around her drink, and she said something that made Paige laugh hard enough that she grabbed Maren’s arm for balance, and Maren’s face in that moment was open and easy and lit up and I wanted her so badly it was difficult to think around.
I picked up my drink. Put it down.
Waited.
At eleven forty, Cole materialized at my elbow.
“Griffin,” Cole said, without preamble, “is not coming back from that corner.”
“I noticed.”