28. Maren
MAREN
I was on the couch with a book I was only sort of reading when I heard a knock on my front door just past midnight.
I knew who it was. I opened the door.
He was standing on my porch in casual clothes like he’d been out.
I was pretty sure he’d come straight from Griffin’s.
Dark jeans, a gray henley, the sleeves pushed to his elbows the way he wore everything.
He was still and composed, just Ryan on my doorstep just past midnight, having driven straight here from Tempe without announcing himself.
“Hey,” he said.
I hadn’t expected him. I didn’t know how it had gone, didn’t know what his face was going to tell me before he said anything, and for a second I just stood in the doorway reading him.
He looked okay. Better than okay. I wanted to throw myself into his arms and bury my face in his chest. Instead, I stepped back from the door.
He came inside and I closed it behind him and we stood in the entryway for a silent moment.
The same one he kissed me in the last time he showed up unannounced.
A chill came over me, and I waited as neither of us said anything yet.
I was still catching up to the fact of him being here, at midnight, which meant something, but I was trying to figure out what exactly before he told me.
“Solsken,” he said. And then he closed the distance. His hands came up to my face, both of them, his palms warm against my jaw and his thumbs at my cheekbones, and he held me like that for a moment.
Staring into my eyes, he said, “I’m sorry.
” His voice was low and certain, as if he’d come to realize the distance had done nothing for either of us.
Something I was realizing my actions had a part in too.
“For this past week. For going quiet on you. For not telling you everything I feel while I figured out how to handle Griffin and the team and…” His thumbs moved against my cheeks, wiping away a tear.
“You deserved better than that from me. You’ve deserved so much better and I am so sorry I didn’t take care of you the way I should have. ”
I opened my mouth to tell him it was fine.
That I understood, and we’d all be okay, and his team and the guys and the friendship he’d built with my brother were important.
But he wasn’t finished. He’d come here to say something and the hard set of his jaw with the softness in his eyes told me he needed to get it out. He shook his head slightly.
“I’m not done.” His eyes held mine. “Griffin and I are okay. I went over there tonight and I told him everything, and we’re going to be fine.
I need you to hear that part first, because I know what you did this week and I know why you did it.
And while I appreciate it, God, I can’t tell you how much it means to me, but I’m not letting you fall on some sword that isn’t real so we can all coexist here. ”
My breath caught. He saw it.
He motioned to my couch. “Can we sit?”
I nodded, and he took my hand and led me to the couch, sitting close to me and not letting go of my hand in his.
As he rubbed small circles with his thumb, he continued.
“You pulled back because you decided you were the problem,” he said, then let out a humorless chuckle.
“You looked at me and Griffin and this team and you decided the kindest thing you could do was take yourself out of the equation before you cost me anything else.” He sighed and met my gaze again, and the intensity in his expression was mesmerizing.
He wanted my full attention, and he had it.
“You’ve got it exactly backward, and I’m not leaving this house until you understand that. ”
I couldn’t say anything. My eyes were burning.
“You are not the cost of anything,” he said.
“You’re not a complication I have to manage around or a risk to the team or the reason my best friend and I had a hard week.
Griffin and I had a hard week because I lied to him.
I made that choice. Not you.” His voice stayed low and certain, no give in it anywhere.
“Let me be as clear as I know how to be.” He paused, and my heart was about to beat right out of my chest. “If it came down to it—if someone put it in front of me tomorrow and said it’s her or the team, the C, all of it—I’d hand back the letter and clean out my stall and not think about it twice.
I waited my whole career for this season, for this team, and I would walk away from it for you and never once wonder if I’d made the right call. ”
Now I had to interrupt. What was he saying? “Ryan, you can’t say—”
“Wait. I’m not saying I’ll have to. Nobody’s asking me to.
” His mouth moved, almost, then he schooled his features before continuing.
“I’m saying you’ve got it all backward. You’re not the thing that costs me the team.
You’re the thing I’d give the team up for.
You’re the gift I never thought I’d have the chance to have, and I’m not letting this second chance with you go.
Those are not the same and I need you to feel the difference. ”
The tears came loose in a flood now. He brushed them off my face with his thumbs again and kept going, because he wasn’t finished and he wasn’t going to let me hide in the middle of it.
“Baby, please don’t cry. You spent far too long learning to make yourself smaller.
Learning that needing things or wanting things for yourself made you a burden, that wanting more than you were handed made you difficult, and the safest thing was to want less.
” His jaw tightened. “I have watched you do it. Watched you call what we have borrowed. Watched you wait for it to expire. And I am telling you, in your living room, at midnight, with nothing left to hide behind—you are never too much. You were never the thing that cost me something. You are the thing I would pay anything to keep.”
“Ryan—”
“I told you I’d fix it. I fixed it. Griffin knows, and tomorrow the team knows—I mean a lot of them figured it out, and apparently there were bets, but whatever—that’s a whole other thing—and I’m done hiding and done waiting for the right moment and done letting you believe for one more day that you’re something I have to be talked into.
” His thumb moved along my jaw. “I want to sit next to you at your parents’ table and put my hand on yours in front of your mother.
I want to stand next to you at Cole’s parties and let people think whatever they want.
When I score I want to look up and find you, not look away.
I want every person in that building to know exactly whose you are.
” He held my face like it was the only thing in the room.
“You are never going to feel less than again. Not with me. I won’t allow it. ”
“Really?” I sounded meek and didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t believe the declaration he was making.
“Maren, I’ve known since you were eighteen years old standing at the edge of a frozen pond in my sweatshirt.
I held the line then because of Griffin and I would have kept holding it for the rest of my life if you hadn’t walked into me at the arena in September.
You were always the one I was comparing everyone else to without letting myself know that’s what I was doing.
Nine years, Maren. And I’m not doing that anymore. ”
The last of the careful distance I’d been maintaining cracked open.
I reached up and took his wrists, not to move his hands away. Just to hold on.
“Okay,” I said. My voice came out slightly wrecked.
“Okay?” he asked, as if he were almost surprised.
“Yeah. Okay. I’m yours… For real.” And I was. Whether or not I was the problem didn’t even matter. I was always his.
A huge grin spread across his face.
“You’re goddamn right you are.”
He kissed me.
It wasn’t soft. It was two weeks of distance and the long stretch of everything we’d been careful about, finally given somewhere to go.
I got my hands in his shirt and pulled and he pulled me onto his lap, his body solid against mine, his mouth moving with a focused intensity that made my brain go quiet.
My fingers gripped at his shoulders before moving into his hair, where I gripped the strands, eliciting a moan from him.
I could feel his hardness beneath me, and I rocked my hips for just a little friction.
He kissed my neck, licking and sucking as he breathed me in, and I leaned back, groaning.
“I need—” he started.
“I know,” I said. “Me too.” I pulled at his shirt. “Take me to bed.”
He stood, holding me in place, and my legs instinctively wrapped around his waist and he carried us to my bedroom.
In my room he stopped in the middle of the floor and put me down on my feet gently.
He reached up and tucked my hair back from my face with both hands, deliberate and tender, then he kissed me again.
Slower this time, thorough, a kiss that was saying something.
His hands moved down my arms to my waist, gathering the hem of my shirt and pulling it over my head.
He dropped it. His palms flattened against my ribs and I felt the warmth of them on my skin.
“You’ve been patient with me,” he said, against my jaw. “More patient than I deserved.” His mouth moved to my throat. “I’m going to spend a long time making that up to you.”
“Ryan—”
“Don’t argue with me.” He unclasped my bra and let it fall. He stepped back slightly and took me in. Not hurried in any way, looking at me in the low light of my bedside lamp with the quiet intensity I’d come to recognize as him deciding something, and I felt heat climb my skin. “Get on the bed.”
I sat on the edge. He dropped to his knees in front of me.
The surprise of it. His size, his steadiness, the complete unhurried intention of him, made my breath catch. He put his hands on my thighs and slid them up slowly, his palms gentle against my skin and pressed a kiss to the inside of my knee.