23. Ryan #2
I crossed the room in an instant, and she let me pull her in, her forehead dropping against my chest. I held her tight and didn’t say anything because there was nothing useful to say yet.
Griffin was gone. The thing we’d been carrying had put itself out there, messily, ahead of schedule, in the worst way it could have, and I stood in the wreckage of it with Maren in my arms and understood, without question, that I would do it again.
All of it. Every week of the secret and every Sunday dinner and every careful performance of indifference.
I would do all of it again to have this. To have her.
I’d expected guilt, and there was guilt, plenty of it. Underneath the guilt though, was something that didn’t waver at all.
“He was so mean,” she said into my shirt. Her voice was thick. “That was a cheap shot.”
“Yeah.” I pressed my mouth to the top of her head. “It was,” I said into her hair before inhaling deeply.
I couldn’t believe I had let it come to this.
“He doesn’t do that. Griffin doesn’t go for the throat like that.” The hurt in her voice made mine ache.
“He’s hurt.” I tightened my arms around her slightly. “People go low when they’re hurt. He didn’t mean it.”
She pulled back and I let her go reluctantly. She moved to the couch and sat down, drawing her knees up, and I followed and sat beside her, close enough that our shoulders touched. Neither of us reached for the wine. Neither of us glanced at the pasta going cold on the counter.
“I’m the problem,” she said. There was a resolute tone in her voice, and I sensed her spiral coming.
“No.” I’m not going to lose her over this. I love her. I just…
“Ryan.” Her voice was tired, not argumentative.
Just honest. “I’m the variable. You and Griffin were fine before me.
The team was fine. You had a best friend and a locker room that trusted you and a season going somewhere, and now—” She stopped.
“Now you’ve got a starting goalie who won’t look at you and a locker room that’s going to feel it and a playoff push that needs everyone pulling in the same direction. That’s because of me.”
“That’s because of us,” I said. “There’s a difference.”
“Is there?” Her eyes watched me steadily. “Because from where I’m sitting, as it turns out, you actually had a lot more to lose than I did. And when this all started? I thought the opposite. I was so worried about my reputation with the team…” She sighed heavily and trailed off.
I turned it over carefully. She wasn’t wrong about the math.
The team, the season, the locker room, all of it was real and all of it mattered.
I’d been mapping it since the moment Griffin walked out the door.
I knew what the next few weeks were going to look like.
I knew how much harder my job had just gotten. It didn’t change what I wanted though.
Then I looked at her. Sitting in my shirt on my couch with her knees drawn up and her eyes steady and tired, trying to give me an exit I hadn’t asked for, and the doubt I was supposed to be having never arrived.
“Do you know what I was thinking,” I said, “when Griffin walked away?”
She waited.
“I was thinking I’d do it again.” I held her attention.
“All of it. Every part of it. The whole messy, badly-timed, should-have-handled-it-differently thing. I’d do it again without changing a single piece, because every piece of it led here.
” I paused. “To you, sitting on my couch, telling me you’re the problem.
You’re not the problem. You’re the reason. ”
Maren held very still for a moment. The braced quality in her face finally eased.
“That’s a lot to put on a person,” she said quietly.
“Yeah.” I reached over and took her hand, turned it palm up, ran my thumb across the inside of her wrist where the bracelet sat. Alltid din. Always yours. I’d meant it when I sent it and I meant it more now. “Worth every bit of it.”
“The team—”
“The team will be fine.” I said it with the same certainty I used on the ice.
The captain’s voice, the one that didn’t leave room for catastrophizing.
“Griffin and I are going to have a hard few weeks and then we’re going to fix it, because that’s who he is and that’s who I am, and what I’m going to do.
The locker room will follow whatever the two of us put on the ice.
That’s how it works.” I held her gaze. “That part is mine to handle. Not yours.”
She exhaled slowly. “You can’t just decide it’s going to be fine.”
“I’m not deciding it’s going to be fine.
I’m deciding I’m going to make it fine. There’s a difference.
” I squeezed her hand once. “I’ve skated toward harder plays than this.
” I didn’t tell her I was pretty sure Griffin was going to make me suffer for this longer than I’d hope, but that I’d take whatever he had to dish out so long as it meant I got to be with her.
That I didn’t lose her. I should have talked to him sooner.
I should have owned up and told him how I felt about her.
Outside, the city moved through its ordinary Friday night. Distant traffic, the pulse of it, the wide indifferent hum of Phoenix at eleven o’clock. Inside, the two of us on my couch with the lights still on and the evening around us in pieces.
“Maybe I should go back to my place,” she said. “Give you some space to—”
“No.” I said it before she’d finished the sentence. Quiet, firm, no argument in it.
She met my eyes.
“Don’t shut me out.” The steadiness in my voice had something underneath it now. Not desperation but want. Real want, the kind that had nothing to do with the physical. “Not tonight. Not after that.”
She opened her mouth.
“Maren.” I turned toward her on the couch and took both her hands in mine. “I know what you’re doing. You’re pulling back because it’s easier than staying in the middle of something hard. I know that move.” My thumb traced over her knuckles. “I’m asking you not to make it tonight. Not with me.”
She sat with my words for a long moment. I could feel her working through it, the pull between the instinct to retreat and the part of her that didn’t want to. I waited. I’d learned to wait for her.
“Okay,” she said finally. Soft, a little rough around the edges.
I brought her hand up and pressed my mouth to her knuckles. “Stay.”
She leaned sideways and put her head on my shoulder. I brought my arm around her and we sat like that for a while, the kitchen light still on, neither of us moving. I felt her breathing slow and even out against me. Not asleep. Just present, letting herself be held without managing it.
After a while she lifted her head and our eyes met. Hers tired and honest and full of something she hadn’t said yet. I knew the shape of it. I was carrying the same thing.
I kissed her.
Not urgently. This was slow and deliberate and quiet.
My hand coming up to her jaw, my thumb at her cheekbone, the soft unhurried press of it.
She made a small sound against my mouth and leaned into me, her hand finding my chest, and I kissed her like she was something I was allowed to have. Like we had all the time we needed.
“Come to bed,” I said against her mouth before pulling her up with me.
Leaving the dishes, the pasta, the wine all for tomorrow, we went to my bedroom.
It was different than it had ever been.
Not desperate, not urgent. No frustration underneath it, no nine days of distance driving it.
Just the two of us in the low light of my room, taking our time with each other because the time was ours, and how we felt about each other was out there.
Well, almost. I undressed her slowly, my hands slowly pushing up her T-shirt, every inch of her revealed like a gift.
She did the same to me. Her palms flat against my chest, my shoulders, tracing me in a quiet way she’d never quite spent as much time on.
I laid her down and stayed over her, taking my time.
I kissed her throat until she tilted her head back and made a soft sound into the dark.
Then, her collarbone where the skate necklace sat, the curve of her shoulder, the inside of her wrist where the bracelet glistened in the low light.
I pressed my mouth there too, felt her pulse against my lips, steady and quick.
She had her hands in my hair, fingers gripping at my scalp, and her eyes closed and her whole body open to me. Not urgent, trusting, warm…and mine.
I worked my way down her body without rushing any of it. Her ribs, the soft skin of her stomach, the inside of her thighs. I felt her breath change as I moved lower, felt her fingers tighten in my hair.
“Ryan.” Not a command. Just my name, on a breath, broken in the middle, and it stirred up my need for her even more and my cock was now painfully hard.