29. Ryan
RYAN
The Sidewinders left for the road trip on a Tuesday morning, a charter out of Sky Harbor at seven-fifteen, and for the first time in the seven months I’d been doing this I didn’t spend the drive to the airport thinking about the team.
I was thinking about the night before, and the morning after, and having Maren in my kitchen again.
Her coffee made and consumed this time, her hair up in the messy knot she used when she wasn’t thinking about it, wearing my flannel shirt with nothing underneath because she’d stayed and her clothes from the night before were on my bedroom floor.
I’d watched her eat toast standing at my counter and talked about the road trip itinerary and the ordinary domestic ease of it all settled into me deep.
Like I’d been missing it without knowing what I’d been missing.
I’d kissed her at my door before I left. Not a quick see-you-later kiss. A real one, unhurried, both hands on her face, because I could now and I was going to keep doing it until it stopped feeling like something I’d gotten away with.
“Ten days,” she’d said against my mouth.
“I know.” I’d pressed my lips to her forehead. “But… You’re coming Thursday.”
She was. That was the other thing. Maren traveled with the team for extended road trips.
Director of Sports Medicine, two weeks out, multiple players with ongoing treatment needs.
She’d always traveled with us. The difference was that now, when she walked into the hotel lobby in Vancouver or Seattle or wherever, she wasn’t going to be performing careful distance from me in front of twenty people who had recently found out we were together anyway.
The idea of being with her in the open gave me hope our domestic bliss was permanent.
Cole had texted me at six-thirty in the morning.
Cole: So Maren’s coming Thursday?
Cole: Just confirming
Cole: Asking for the boys
Ryan: Yes
Ryan: Why would the boys care?
Ryan: Wait, why are you asking?
Cole:
I’d put my phone in my bag and smiled at the wall of the departure terminal for a moment before I could stop it.
The first two days of the road trip were in Los Angeles.
Two games back-to-back, a grueling schedule that left no room for anything except hockey and recovery.
We won the first and lost the second on a last-minute power play goal that I replayed in my head through the entire postgame shower.
Theo scored twice in the first game. Eli was quietly immovable all series, a six-foot-three wall in front of the net that the other team’s forwards kept discovering they couldn’t move.
Griffin made thirty-five saves in the second game and held us in it long enough to matter even when we lost.
In the locker room after game two, Griffin found me by my stall.
“Power play coverage,” Griffin said. “Third period. Theo’s angle.”
“I know.” I pulled my pads off. “We fix it before Vancouver.”
“Yeah.” Griffin paused. “Good game otherwise.”
It was three words. It was also the first time since the apartment that Griffin had voluntarily brought me a piece of game analysis rather than waiting to be asked.
I heard what it was. Not absolution, not everything back to normal, but a door opening.
I took it and got up and did not make a production of it, which was all anyone needed from me.
“Vancouver’s got a new winger on their second line,” I said. “Fast. Cuts left every time.”
Griffin nodded. “I’ll watch the film tonight.”
We watched it together. My laptop open on the hotel room bed, both of us in the chairs, rewinding the same clip four times until we’d mapped the winger’s tendencies and had a plan.
Like September. Like training camp. Like two men who understood each other’s game and knew how to be useful to each other.
By the time we turned the laptop off it was midnight and we’d been talking for two hours about hockey and nothing else, and I understood this was how Griffin was going to do it.
Not a formal conversation, not a staged moment of reconciliation.
The slow resumption of what we were to each other, rebuilt one film session at a time.
I could work with that.
I texted Maren before I went to sleep.
Ryan: Film session with Griffin tonight. Two hours.
Her response came almost immediately. Still awake, then. I liked that more than I needed to. Past midnight and she'd been sitting up with her phone, waiting to hear how it went.
Maren: Yeah?
Ryan: Yeah. He came to me.
A pause.
Maren: I’m glad.
Ryan: Me too. Sleep well, solsken.
Maren: You too. Win tomorrow.
I did. We both did.
Maren arrived on Thursday afternoon.
I was at the facility running through a light skate with Theo and two of the younger forwards when my phone buzzed on the bench.
Maren: Landed. I’ll be at the hotel in an hour.
I kept skating. I had a practice to finish. But Theo caught my expression. Whatever my face had done in the half-second before I controlled it. He raised an eyebrow across the ice.
“Callahan?” Theo asked.
“Focus on your crossover,” I said.
Theo smiled. Brief and dry, an expression he used when he was finding something funnier than he wanted to let on and went back to his crossover.
She was in the hotel lobby when the team bus pulled in, standing near the front desk with her bag and her lanyard and the same professional composure she wore at work.
I stepped off the bus and she turned and our eyes met across the lobby and I watched her intentionally avoid indifference in front of everyone for the first time as her face lit up, warm and direct and entirely unhidden.
I crossed the lobby.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” She tipped her chin up and I pressed my lips to hers, right there in the middle of the hotel lobby with three dozen teammates and staff pulling their bags through the doors behind me.
Someone wolf-whistled. I was fairly sure it was Cole.
“About time,” someone else said. Danny, I thought. Or possibly Kasperi.
Griffin, passing us on his way to the elevator, stared at the ceiling, visibly exercising restraint. “I’m not seeing this,” he said.
“Yes you are,” Maren said, teasing him, the way only a little sister could.
“I’m absolutely not.” But his jaw had given him away. He kept walking.
I put my hand at the small of Maren’s back and steered her toward the elevator. She was smiling. The one that reached her eyes and landed in the center of my chest.
“So,” she said, as the elevator doors closed. “That’s what it feels like.”
“Being public?”
“Being chosen in public.” She turned to face me. “It’s different than I expected.”
“Good different?”
She considered me for a moment. It was a measured look, but lighter now, unguarded. “Yeah,” she said. “Really good different.”
I kissed her again in the elevator because I could. Not holding back my affection was my new favorite thing.
The Vancouver games were good. The team was playing with the cohesion that had been building since before the Griffin situation and had only sharpened since.
The playoff push concentrating everyone’s attention, the standings close enough that every point mattered.
Theo had found a gear in the last month I hadn’t been sure he had.
Eli was playing the best hockey of his career, quietly and without making anyone notice he was doing it, which was entirely in character.
I was playing well too. I knew why. I’d been carrying something heavy since October and I wasn’t carrying it anymore, and the difference was visible in my game the way it had been visible in my distraction. Only now it was all going the right direction.
After the second Vancouver game, a 4-2 win that pushed us to within three points of a playoff berth, the team went to a bar near the hotel.
A low-lit, wood-paneled place that smelled like cedar and good beer, a dive bar that had probably been there for forty years and had no interest in being anything else.
We took over the long table near the back.
Maren sat next to me and I put my hand on her thigh under the table and didn’t move it, and nobody pretended not to notice, and nobody made a thing of it either.
That was what I hadn’t fully anticipated.
How easy it would be once it was just out in the open.
Cole had clocked it the moment Maren arrived Thursday, had given me a look of such profound vindication that I’d almost laughed out loud, and then had gone back to being Cole.
Theo had noted it with the flat observational precision that was Theo’s baseline, giving a nod and saying nothing.
Kasperi had opened his mouth and Danny had elbowed him before anything came out, which I appreciated.
Griffin, across the table, was on his second beer and deep in conversation with Theo about the power play rotation. He glanced at me once. At my hand on Maren’s leg. And glanced away without comment. Not warm yet, not fully. But not cold either. Holding to a decision he’d already made.
I appreciated that too. More than I could have said.
Maren got into an argument with Theo about defensive zone coverage that I found deeply attractive.
She was sharp and direct and completely unbothered by arguing with a professional hockey player about hockey.
Theo, for his part, had the same expression he wore when he was interested in what someone was saying and too proud to let it show, but I could see the slightest upturn of his lips like he wanted to smile.
“She’s right,” I said.
Theo turned. “You’re biased.”
“I’m always right,” Maren said pleasantly, then sipped her drink.
Cole was telling a story about a Nashville hotel incident I was fairly certain was at least sixty percent fabricated. Danny was hanging on every word. Kasperi was attempting to look unimpressed, which he wasn’t.