21. Ryan #4
“I just—” He stopped, then started again. “Look. I’m going to say something and I need you to know I know it’s none of my business and I have mentioned it before but I’m going to say it anyway and you gotta know it’s coming from a good place and I’m not trying to be a pain in your ass.”
My heart rate, which had been dropping steadily for the last four minutes, reversed course.
“It’s obvious,” Cole said. “Whatever’s going on between you two is more than a flirtation. Anyone paying attention can see it.” He glanced at me sideways. “I’ve been paying attention.” He grinned. “And, I mean most of us saw you kiss her at midnight on New Year’s.”
I kept my eyes forward. That kiss was downright chaste.
If only he knew what else we did that night.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I didn’t care. But I did care.
Mostly I cared what she would think of this situation.
I knew she was caring less and less and her feelings toward me were growing.
But being outed? This wasn’t good. We had our own timeline. It would be taken care of soon.
“I think it’s great,” Cole said, snapping my attention back to him, and the thing about Cole was that he meant it completely—no angle, no performance, just a guy who wanted good things for the people around him.
“You seem…happy. She seems happy. It’s honestly kind of wonderful to watch.
I love love.” He paused, and the warmth in his voice shifted to something more direct.
“But she’s Griffin’s little sister. Your best friend.
The guy who has your back every single night.
” He looked at me. “He doesn’t know.” It wasn’t exactly a question.
“No,” I said.
“How long?”
“Since October.”
He exhaled slowly, letting a beat pass before he spoke again and rubbed a hand down his face. “So it’s serious.”
“It is.” No hesitation.
Cole nodded, his expression settling into quiet certainty, his read confirmed.
“He’s going to find out,” he said. “And when he does, it won’t be finding out about Maren that breaks him, and the team.
It’ll be finding out you said nothing—every dinner, every practice, every time he told you something real about his life while you were sitting on the truth of yours.
” He paused. “That’s the part that’s hard to come back from. ”
I stopped pedaling and sat with his words, the bike winding down under me, the way I’d been refusing to sit with it for months. He wasn’t wrong; a fact I’d known for some time.
“Not to mention the sister rule.”
Defensive, I finally spoke up. “That’s a fucking stupid rule. We’re adults.” Cole pursed his lips at me and shrugged. I let out a belabored sigh and admitted, “I get it. You’re right.”
I’d told myself I was protecting the team and the season and Griffin from a complication he didn’t need mid-season, and all of that was true, but none of it was the whole truth.
I’d been protecting myself too—from the look on Griffin’s face, from the moment I couldn’t take back, from being the person who had done this to his best friend even for the right reasons.
I’d wanted to tell him from the beginning.
It was Maren who’d needed time, who’d come into this with her own caution and her own calculation of what she stood to lose, and we’d agreed together even if it wasn’t what I’d wanted exactly, but I’d have taken her any way she’d let me in.
But the agreement had a shelf life and I was the only one still hiding behind it, and the reason wasn’t uncertainty about her.
The reason was that I was afraid of what the conversation would cost, and I’d been calling that something else for three months.
“Maybe it is a dumb rule. But it is a courtesy, at the very least. And don’t you think that maybe Griffin deserves that courtesy? I’m not saying permission, you do whatever you want, but I’m concerned how this will affect the team if it comes out before you tell him yourself.”
I let out another long sigh and told him everything. Oddly, it was cathartic to get some of it off my chest, even if it was to Cole.
“When this started, Maren didn’t want anyone to know.
She wants to be respected at work, and I don’t want to put her in a position where she feels she has to defend her ability to do her job or anything.
She’s amazing and she’s worked hard to get here.
You know how much easier it is for us.” Cole nodded.
“The agreement to keep it quiet was mutual,” I said.
“But the timeline is definitely mine now.”
Cole looked at me for a moment, silent. Then the warmth came back fully, easy and uncomplicated, the Cole who gave everything to the people he’d decided mattered. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”
He stood, clapped me once on the shoulder—solid, brief—and headed for the door. “I’ll see you out there, Captain.”
The door swung shut behind him and I sat alone with the hum of the bike fading out, thinking about all the ways a person could mean well and still be an asshole of a friend and a coward about the one thing that actually meant something.