24. Maren #2
He opened the door in sweats, his hair slightly damp, and I could read him the moment I saw him.
The careful, composed stillness he wore in public, the one I’d spent months watching him shed when we were alone together.
It was back. He’d put it on without noticing, I was fairly sure, which was almost worse than if he’d done it deliberately.
I came inside. The apartment was tidy in the pointed way it got when he was in his head. Everything put away, nothing out of place, the kitchen clean and spare. No wine glasses. No evidence of a shared evening in progress. A lamp on low, Ryan standing in his own living room, composed and rehearsed.
“Please, sit down,” he said.
“I’ll stand.” I crossed my arms. “Say what you need to say.” My anger was building.
He hesitated. “I know I’ve been distant.”
“You have.”
“I’m not doing it on purpose.” He ran a hand through his hair.
The one tell he had when something was costing him.
“I need to fix things with Griffin before I can be present the way I want to be. While this is unresolved I can’t—it’s not fair to you to bring all of that in.
I need to get it right first and then I can—”
“You’re doing it again,” I said.
He frowned. “What?”
“Deciding what I need without asking me.” I kept my voice level. “You’re managing the situation and you’ve decided the right way to manage it is to put distance between us, and you haven’t once asked me how that feels or what I want.”
“That’s not what I’m—”
“You told me not to shut you out.” I let that sit between us for a moment. “Four nights ago. In this apartment. And then you spent four days doing exactly that, and I don’t think you even noticed you were doing it.”
The silence that followed had an edge. The discomfort of a true thing landing.
Ryan’s jaw worked. He wasn’t defensive. He was absorbing it, running it back, checking it against the evidence. It all happened in his face.
“You’re right,” he said.
“I know.” I dropped my arms. “Ryan. I understand what you’re trying to do.
You want to fix things Griffin before you come back to me.
You don’t want to bring the mess with you.
That’s—” I exhaled. “That’s very…you. And I love that about you…
well, your intent, at least. But you don’t get to put me on pause while you do it. ”
“I’m not putting you on pause—”
“If you want us to be something,” I said, “you have to include me. And if you don’t—”
“You know I do.” He said it immediately. No hesitation except he was holding himself back from coming closer, I could tell by the tic in his jaw and his stance, like he was ready to run to me. It broke my heart a little, but he needed to hear what I had to say.
I held his gaze. “I don’t know that. When you go quiet on me, I don’t know anything. That’s the problem.”
The last of his restraint gone, he crossed the room in two strides and stood in front of me, and I let him take my hands, and I looked up at him and saw it.
The genuine cost of the past few days written in his expression, the exhaustion of carrying it, the misery of having caused pain he hadn’t meant to cause.
“I’m going to talk to Griffin,” he said. “This week. I’m not waiting for the right moment anymore. I’m going to make the moment. And I’m not going quiet on you again while I do it.”
I nodded. I believed him. I also knew, with the bone-deep certainty that came from several days of managing my own feelings alone, that an apology and a promise weren’t quite enough tonight.
“Stay,” he said. Low. His hands tightening on mine slightly.
I studied him for a long moment. I wanted to. That was the honest answer. I wanted to stay more than I wanted to make the point I was about to make, and I made it anyway because I’d spent enough of my life giving ground when I should have held it.
“I have an early morning,” I said.
His jaw tightened. “Maren—”
“I need a little space to think.” I said it gently, because I meant it gently. This wasn’t punishment, it was truth. “I’m not going anywhere. I just need tonight.”
I could see him working through it. The urge to ask again, to make his case, to fix this the way he fixed everything. I watched him choose not to.
“Okay,” he said.
I reached up and put my hand against his jaw briefly, and he turned his face into it the way he sometimes did when he was tired, and the warmth of him under my palm met the complicated ache of wanting to stay and knowing I shouldn’t.
I dropped my hand and stepped back.
“Ryan.” I picked up my bag from the chair by the door.
“I want this to be a relationship. A real one, where we’re both in it and both making decisions about it.
” I met his eyes. “But if putting distance between us is what you need to fix things with Griffin, then you need to really think about what you want. Because I’m done not being included in decisions about my own relationships. ”
His expression didn’t change, but his body changed. A stillness settling into him that meant he was taking it seriously. “Are you giving up on me?”
“No.” I said it without hesitation. “But I’m giving you the space you seem to need to figure out what you want.” I reached for the door handle.
“Maren.”
I turned.
“I want you.” His voice was low and certain. The plainness of it sat between us. I could see it, the way it sat in his chest, the way he held himself around it. “Solsken.”
I knew what it meant. I’d known for weeks. I felt it move through me now like something irreversible, hearing it said out loud, to my face, in this light, after this week. Sunshine.
I did the hard thing.
“Then take care of this,” I said quietly. “And we can talk then.”
I left before either of us could say anything else. Before I couldn’t contain my emotions any more. I had come to his apartment straight from work and I was tired.
I made it to my car. Sat in the parking garage with my hands on the wheel and the engine off and the keychain hanging from the ignition. The little enamel logo, The Ashby Letters, the thing he’d taken off his own keys and left on the counter for me and let myself feel all of it.
The tears came before I’d decided to let them, which was annoying, because I’d wanted to at least get out of his building first. Preferably, make it to my own couch.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and sat with the full weight of the evening.
The treatment table with Griffin, Ryan standing in his living room in that careful composed stillness, solsken said out loud like he was begging me.
I knew he wanted me. I’d never doubted that.
What I didn’t know, what the past few days of shorter texts and canceled dinner and fine had made me question in the small hours of the night when I was least equipped to argue myself out of it, was whether wanting me was going to be enough to make him choose me.
Openly. Fully. Without Griffin’s blessing as a prerequisite.
I was furious at Griffin for making this complicated.
I was furious at Ryan for letting it be.
I was furious at myself for insisting on secrets. So there I was, sitting in a parking garage crying about it instead of being home in my own house, in my own bed, not doing this.
My phone lit up on the passenger seat.
Ryan: I know what you said. I know what you need me to do. I’m going to do it. I just need you to know that there is nothing to figure out. I already know what I want.
I stared at it as the tears kept coming. Then a second message.
Ryan: Jag vill fortj?na din k?rlek.
I sat with his words for a moment, then opened my browser and typed it in with one hand.
I want to deserve your love.
I set the phone face-down on the passenger seat and massaged the spot his words affected me the most. My heart. I wasn’t ready to deal with it in a parking garage at ten o’clock at night.
I knew he meant it. That was never the question.
I started the car.
I drove home through the warm Phoenix dark thinking about all the ways a person could mean something and still not do enough with it, and about Griffin sitting across from me on the treatment table saying this clearly isn’t that, and about a key on a The Ashby Letters keychain taken off his own ring.
I wasn’t done. I wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t need a grand gesture.
His every day actions—outside of the last few days–—outside of the last few days—were proof he loved me.
But I needed him to act, and I needed to matter enough to him that he did it now.
While things were fucked up and messy. Not when the moment was convenient, not when Griffin had fully recovered, not when everything was tidy.
Now, while it was hard and inconvenient and required something real from him. That was the thing I needed to see.
I pulled into my driveway and sat with the engine running for a moment.
He’d sent me two texts before I’d even cleared the parking structure.
I picked up my phone and studied them again.
I already know what I want.
I want to deserve your love.
I turned the engine off and went inside.