27. Ryan #2
“She makes me better,” I said. “Not the captain version. Not the guy who holds everything together so nobody else has to. The actual version. The one I don’t let most people see because most people don’t need to and it’s not useful.
” I paused. “With her I don’t have to perform anything.
I can sit in her kitchen and fix a cabinet hinge and eat two portions of dinner and be a person who enjoys her company, the calm that she brings me, not a C on a sweater.
I don’t know when I stopped being able to do that with everyone else, but I know that with her, I never have to think about it.
She just—-” I stopped. “She sees me. All of it. And she stayed.”
Griffin said nothing. He was listening.
So, it was time for my full confession. “I would give it up for her.” I met his eyes.
“The C. The season. Any of it. All of it. I’m not saying I’d want to.
But if it came down to it, if someone put it in front of me and said choose—-I’d choose her.
Every time. Without thinking twice.” I held his gaze.
“She doesn’t know that. I haven’t said it to her yet.
But I need you to know it, because you’re the person who matters most to her. ”
Griffin held it. His jaw worked.
“I don’t need your blessing,” I said. “I want it. Those are different things. And I want it because she loves you and because you matter to her and because this friendship—” I stopped and steadied myself.
“She’s everything. If I have to choose, I’m choosing her.
Every time. No hesitation.” I inhaled deeply before continuing.
“I’m going to spend every day becoming the man she deserves.
I’m going to take care of her. I’m going to make sure she never once wonders where she stands with me or whether she’s asking too much.
I’m going to earn her trust. Every single day. Forever.”
The room was quiet.
“And she loves you,” Griffin said. Not a question.
I answered it anyway. “Yeah. I think she does.”
“I saw her at the arena,” Griffin said. “She shut the treatment room door and let me have it.” A ghost of something crossed his face. “In case you’re wondering where stood on the topic.”
“At least she didn’t reassign you to a different therapist.”
“Jesus Christ. She did that?” His eyes widened.
“Yep. So this conversation couldn’t wait any longer, Griff. She’s it for me. She’s the one. She always has been.”
“We talked a lot of it out. She wanted us to talk. It was important to her. She didn’t ask me to forgive you.
She didn’t make it about you at all, actually.
She just—” Griffin inhaled a breath. “She owned her part of it. Told me she should have said something from the beginning. And she was right.” He looked at me.
“She was also still furious at me, which she had every right to be.”
“You know what actually made me maddest, but opened my eyes?” Griffin said finally.
I didn’t respond. “Not the lying. Not even the relationship.” He looked at me.
“When you stepped in front of her. At the apartment. When I said what I said about Josh—and before you get defensive, I know, I know I shouldn’t have—you just moved.
Like you didn’t even think about it. Just put yourself between me and her without blinking.
” He shook his head slowly and breathed out a humorless laugh.
“That’s when I knew it wasn’t casual. A guy who’s just sleeping with someone doesn’t do that. A guy who’s in love with someone does.”
“You said something you shouldn’t have.”
“Yeah.” Griffin’s jaw tightened. “I know. That’s—I’ve been carrying that.” He turned to me directly.
I thought about the apartment. Griffin in the doorway, the six-pack, the moment when he’d taken the cheap shot about Josh and I’d moved without deciding to.
I hadn’t thought about it. I’d acted. And it had told Griffin everything he needed to know about what I was to Maren, more than any conversation could have, because you didn’t think in those moments.
You just acted from whatever you were made of.
I was glad Griffin had seen it. I was glad it was the truest thing in the room that night.
“She’s my little sister,” Griffin said. “I’ve spent twenty-seven years making sure that meant something to people.
That she wasn’t someone you could pick up and put down or use when it suited you.
I’ve watched guys treat her like that.” His eyes came up to mine.
“I cannot watch someone I actually trust do that to her.”
“You won’t.” I said it without heat, with the same certainty I carried onto the ice.
Not loud, not heated, just certain. “I’m not going anywhere.
I handled the timing badly and I was wrong for the lying and I’ll carry that.
But I know what I have with her and I know what I’d be losing if I walked away, and I’m not walking away.
” I paused. “I’d rather lose our friendship honestly than keep it by pretending I don’t feel what I feel.
But I’d rather have it, Griff. I’d rather have both.
I’m just not willing to give her up to keep things comfortable. ”
The silence after that had a different quality than the ones before it. Not the silence of unresolved things. Something more like an exhale. The sound of a room letting go of something it had been holding.
Griffin’s posture changed. The arms uncrossing, the set of his shoulders coming down a fraction.
“You hurt her,” he said, “and I will make sure you never hold a stick comfortably again.”
“Understood.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you mean it. I’d expect nothing less.”
The ghost of a smile crossed his face, brief and real, the kind that appeared when someone was trying not to let it and lost. Griffin turned toward the kitchen. “You want a beer?”
The tightness that had lived in my chest for weeks released. Slowly, enough. “Yeah,” I said. “But I can’t stay.”
Griffin turned back. “Why not?”
I looked at him.
Griffin held my gaze for a moment, reading it the way he read everything. Then his face changed. Not softening exactly, more like arriving somewhere. He’d figured it out.
“Right,” he said. “Does she know you’re coming?”
“No.”
Griffin sat with it for another moment. I watched him work through it. The fact of me standing here having done the thing, and where I was about to go next, and what that said about all of it. About whether this was real. About whether I would show up.
“Go,” Griffin said. Not fine or whatever. Just go. A word that meant he’d already decided.
I was moving toward the door. I stopped with my hand on the frame and turned back one more time.
Griffin standing in his kitchen, backlit by the warm light of his apartment, water bottle in hand, the same way he’d been standing the first time I’d met him and understood immediately that this was someone worth trusting.
Some people I knew within minutes. Griffin had been one of those.
“Thank you,” I said. “For hearing me out.”
Griffin’s expression settled into something dry and familiar. “Don’t thank me. Don’t screw it up.”
“Working on it.”
“Lindy.”
I turned back one more time.
“She’s been in love with you since September,” Griffin said with a hint of a smile. “In case you needed to know that.”
I stood in the doorway and let myself absorb the fact she’d been carrying this since September, the same as I had.
I thought about driving home from Jensen’s pond nine years ago with Griffin asleep against the passenger window and Maren’s hand in mine in the dark, her pinky finding mine slowly, like a question she wasn’t sure she was asking.
I’d been choosing her in some form since before Griffin knew to watch for it.
Maybe some part of him had always known.
Then I went.
I took the stairs two at a time.
In the parking garage I sat in the car for exactly thirty seconds.
Engine running, hands on the wheel, the tick of the cooling city around me.
She’s been in love with you since September.
I let his words sit, the full weight of them.
The months of both of us carrying something enormous between us, all that careful distance wasted, and underneath that the fact that it had led here anyway.
That we’d found our way to this night regardless.
I pulled out of the garage and headed east toward Scottsdale.
The desert was cooling around me, the air coming through the windows dry and clean, carrying sage and the faint mineral smell of warm earth giving up the day’s heat.
February in Phoenix. Still weeks before the heat turned tipped everything over, the air still soft enough to drive with the windows down at eleven o’clock, the sky holding that deep bruised blue at the edges long after dark.
I’d been told by everyone I knew I would hate the heat. I hadn’t hated it once.
Instead I’d gotten Griffin and the team and the city with its stubborn insistence on existing even after being abandoned, and Maren Callahan in my flannel shirt on a Tuesday morning making the coffee she drank instead of the coffee she forgot about.
I drove to her house thinking about what I was going to say when she opened the door.
The conversation with Griffin was done. Necessary, finished, the foundation cleared.
What was in front of me now was the thing I’d been carrying since somewhere over the Rockies in October and hadn’t said yet because the timing was wrong and then worse and then a disaster, and now it was eleven o’clock on a Thursday night in February and I was done waiting for right.
The lights of Scottsdale came up ahead of me. Her street. Her house, the lights still on downstairs, which meant she was awake. I pulled up to the curb and sat for a moment looking at her front door with the porch light on.
I knew what I wanted to say. I’d known for a while.
I got out of the car. It was time for Maren to know exactly where I stood.