30. Maren #2
Ryan’s hand found mine under the table at some point during the main course and he intertwined our fingers.
It stayed there. Mom saw it. I caught the moment my mother’s eyes moved down and then back up, and said nothing, but her face did several things in rapid succession I was going to think about later.
Dad put his arm around Mom’s shoulders and resumed his analysis of the penalty kill.
Griffin, across the table, was quiet. Different from his earlier guardedness.
Not shut down. Just watching. The goalie processing the play.
When Ryan made me laugh at something Dad said, Griffin’s gaze moved to my face and then away, and his expression moved toward acceptance. Not warm yet. But moving.
After dinner, Griffin found me in the kitchen while Ryan was helping our father carry chairs back to the dining room.
“I should have seen it,” Griffin said. “I didn’t. Which I’m choosing to believe says something good about how careful you were and nothing about me losing my edge.”
“I just wanted to say it.” He leaned against the counter beside me. “You look—” He stopped. Started again. “You look like yourself. More than you have in a while.”
I tilted toward him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He picked up a dish towel and started drying without being asked, the way he had when we were kids. “He’s good for you.”
“You don’t have to say that.”
“I’m not saying it because I have to.” He set a dry bowl in the cabinet. “I’m saying it because it’s true and I should have been able to say it a long time ago. I’m working on getting there.”
“I know you are.” I bumped his shoulder with mine. “That’s enough.”
He bumped me back. We finished the dishes in the warm kitchen of our parents’ house, the sound of Ryan and Dad’s voices carrying from the other room.
Something about the playoff bracket, Ryan’s laugh, my father’s satisfied commentary, and I stood at the sink next to my brother and the ease of things going back to where they were supposed to be moved through me.
Griffin headed out after the dishes. Mom and Dad drifted to the living room, the television low, the comfortable end-of-Sunday sounds of a house settling in. Ryan stayed.
He turned his wine glass in his hands. I’d been quiet for a moment, watching the kitchen the way I sometimes watched rooms. Taking inventory, noting what had changed.
He looked at me. Steady, warm, and unhidden. “Maren.”
“Mm.”
“Thank you for tonight.” He said it simply. “For letting me be here.”
“You were always going to be here,” I said.
He drove us home. The city going past, the stars visible now that we’d left the neighborhood lights behind.
In my room he undressed me slowly, his hands unhurried, taking his time with every button and clasp like he had all night and intended to use it.
He kissed my shoulder, my collarbone, the curve of my throat.
I turned off the lamp so only the moonlight came through the curtains.
Silver and soft. I lay back on the bed and pulled him down to me.
“Hey,” he said quietly, over me.
“Hey.” I put my hands on his face. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Alltid,” he said. Always. He turned his face into my palm and pressed his lips there.
He moved down my body with his mouth. My throat, the hollow of my collarbone, the inside of my wrist where the bracelet sat, the soft skin at my ribs.
I had my hands in his hair and my eyes closed and let myself be taken care of, which was not something I’d been good at for a long time and was getting better at, slowly, with him.
When his mouth found the inside of my thigh I exhaled his name.
“I’ve got you,” he said against my skin. “Stanna hos mig.”
Stay with me.
He was thorough and entirely focused on me.
Reading me how he always did, and I understood now this was the same thing, just Ryan paying attention, and I let myself be the thing he was paying attention to without managing it or minimizing it.
I came apart quietly, my hands fisting in the sheets, his name on my breath.
He moved over me and I reached for him, pulling him close.
We moved together in the silver dark with nothing urgent underneath it, no distance to close, no hiding to undo.
The two of us in my bed in the house I’d built my life in, the moonlight moving across the ceiling.
Mitt hj?rta breathed against my hair when he thought I was almost asleep.
I wasn’t almost asleep.
I was wide awake and present and entirely, completely here.
When I came the second time it was slow and deep and I pressed my face against his throat and felt him follow me, his breath warm on my skin, Swedish I knew and Swedish I didn’t, all of it landing like something true.
Afterward I lay on his chest with his heartbeat under my ear and the moonlight moving across the ceiling and his hand in my hair, and I thought about my mother’s eyes going bright over tulips, and my father’s quiet certainty, and Griffin at the sink with a dish towel.
You look like yourself, more than you have in a while.
I was myself. Fully and without qualification, in my own house with my own person, in the city I’d grown up in and chosen to stay in, with the desert outside and the stars above it and everything I’d been managing myself away from finally, completely, and mine.
“Mitt hj?rta,” Ryan said quietly, against my hair.
I pressed my lips to his chest and closed my eyes.