And then yesterday. The sponsor event in the lobby after the game. A woman from the sportswear company, tall and striking and openly flirtatious, had put her hand on Lex's arm and leaned in close and said, "We should get dinner while I'm in town. Just the two of us." And Lex had glanced across the room at Mara, who was watching from beside the trophy case with a glass of sparkling water and an expression that was perfectly, devastatingly neutral. Mara couldn't walk over. Couldn't claim her. Couldn't do anything but stand there and watch a stranger touch the woman she loved, because doing otherwise would have been far too open. Lex had smiled at the woman and said, "I appreciate the offer, but I'm seeing someone," and the woman had said, "Lucky person. They should bring you to nicer events," and walked away. Mara had turned back to her conversation with the assistant coaches without acknowledging a single thing that had just happened. They hadn't discussed it. They would never discuss it. That was the deal.
That was the deal, and Lex was done with it.
She had come to Phoenix Ridge to stop hiding, and she could not, would not, go backward. Not even for the woman she loved.
"I can't do this in secret anymore," Lex said. Her own voice was breaking now, cracking along the same fault line that ranthrough the center of her chest. "I love you, Mara. But I won't be your secret. I won't be a secret you're ashamed of."
"I'm not ashamed of you." The words were fierce, desperate, torn from Mara's throat. "I have never been ashamed of you."
"Then stand next to me. In the light. Where everyone can see."
Mara's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. No words came out. Her face was a ruin: tears, anguish, the desperate, silent plea of a woman who wanted to give Lex what she was asking for and could not move past the wall of fear that stood between wanting and doing.
The silence stretched. Five seconds. Ten. An eternity compressed into the quiet space between Mara's desk and the chair where Lex sat with her heart breaking.
Lex stood up. Her legs felt hollow. Her chest was a cavity filled with broken glass. She looked at Mara, at the tears on her face, at the anguish in her expression begging Lex not to go, and she loved her so fiercely that the love itself was a wound, deep and bleeding and impossible to stitch closed.
"When you're ready to stop hiding," Lex said, "you know where to find me."
She turned and walked out of the office. Her hand found the door handle and she pulled it open and stepped into the corridor and the door closed behind her with a soft click that sounded like a gunshot. She walked. Down the corridor. Past the locker room where her gear bag sat in her stall. Past the gym where she'd told her friends about the woman she loved. Past the banner that read PHOENIX RIDGE VALKYRIES — INAUGURAL SEASON in gold letters on a purple background. Through the lobby with its trophy cases and its posters and the front desk where the receptionist said "Have a good evening, Lex" and Lex said "Thanks" in a voice that sounded like someone else's.
Out the front doors into the Phoenix Ridge afternoon. The salt air hit her face. The sun was blinding. Her vision blurred with the tears she hadn't let fall in Mara's office.
She made it to her truck in the parking lot before she broke. She sat behind the wheel with her forehead pressed against the steering wheel and her hands gripping the leather and she cried. Not the quiet, controlled crying of someone managing their grief. The ugly, body-shaking sobs of someone whose heart had just been ripped out by the roots, and the worst part, the absolute worst part, was that Mara hadn't done it. Lex had done it to herself. She had walked away from the woman she loved because the woman she loved was too afraid to love her back in the open, and the righteousness of the decision did nothing, absolutely nothing, to ease the devastation of it.
She sat in the truck and cried until the tears ran dry and the afternoon light shifted from gold to amber and the parking lot emptied around her. Through the windshield the ocean stretched, grey-blue and indifferent, the waves breaking against the shore in the same rhythm they always did, as if nothing had changed. As if the world hadn't just cracked down the middle.
Her phone buzzed. She looked at it through swollen eyes. A text from Elise:How did it go?
She couldn't answer. She set the phone face-down on the passenger seat and pressed her forehead back against the steering wheel and closed her eyes and thought about Mara. About the tears on Mara's face. About the way Mara's mouth had opened and closed without producing the words that would have changed everything. About the way Mara had looked at her while her mouth stayed silent.
She had done the right thing. She believed that with a certainty that lived in her bones. She had asked for what she deserved and refused to accept less. That was strength. That was self-respect.
It was also the loneliest feeling she had ever known.
21
The door closed and Lex was gone.
Mara sat behind her desk and stared at the space where Lex had been sitting. The chair was still angled from where Lex had pushed it back to stand. The air still held the faint trace of her soap, clean and sharp, the scent that had become the most familiar thing in Mara's world over the past two weeks. Goldie lifted her head from her bed by the filing cabinet and whined, a soft, questioning sound, as if she could feel the wrongness in the room.
Mara's hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against the desk and willed them to stop and they didn't. Her vision was blurred. Her chest was a compression, all the air squeezed out, her lungs working in shallow, ineffective gasps that delivered oxygen to her blood but not to her brain. She couldn't think. She couldn't move. She sat in her office chair in the arena she had built from nothing and stared at an empty chair and felt the most important thing in her life walk away from her because she had been too afraid to hold it.
I won't be your secret.
The words played on a loop. Lex's voice, cracking. Lex's eyes, wet and fierce and heartbroken. Lex, who was brave enough to ask for what she wanted. Lex, who had laid herself open and asked Mara to meet her there and Mara had stood on the other side of the gap with her mouth open and her heart screaming and her feet cemented to the ground by years of layered fear.
She pressed her hands over her face. The tears came, hot and silent, streaming through her fingers and dripping onto the desk. Goldie stood up and padded over and pressed her warm body against Mara's legs, her golden head resting on Mara's knee, and Mara dropped one hand to the dog's ears and gripped the soft fur and cried.
She didn't know how long she sat there. Long enough for the light through her office window to shift from afternoon gold to the flatter, cooler tones of early evening. Long enough for her laptop to go to sleep, the screen fading to black. Long enough for the sounds of the building to change as staff left for the day, doors closing, cars starting in the lot, voices receding down the corridor until the only sounds were the ice plant and her own breathing and Goldie's patient, steady presence against her legs.
She couldn't stay here. She couldn't sit in this office where Lex had told her she loved her and Mara had said nothing.
She stood up. Her body felt disconnected from her brain, operating on muscle memory. She clipped Goldie's leash to her collar, pulled on her sunglasses to hide the damage, gathered her bag, and walked through the building. The corridors were empty. The receptionist had gone home. The lobby was dim, the lights on their evening timer, and Mara pushed through the front doors into the salt air and the fading afternoon and started walking.
She didn't have a destination. Her feet carried her along the sidewalk toward the park, the one that overlooked the ocean, three blocks from the arena. The streets were busy with theafter-work crowd, people heading to restaurants and gyms and home, and Mara kept her head down and her sunglasses on and walked with the purposeful stride of someone who had somewhere to be, even though she had nowhere to be, even though the only place she wanted to be was wherever Lex was.
Goldie trotted beside her, tail low, occasionally glancing up with the worried expression of a dog who could read emotional weather systems better than any meteorologist. The leash was taut, Goldie pressing close to Mara's leg, her golden body a warm anchor against the cold emptiness that was spreading through Mara's chest. The ocean was visible between the buildings, grey and churning under a sky that had gone the color of pewter. A wind had picked up, carrying the smell of brine and seaweed and the approaching cold of evening, and Mara pulled her sweater tighter around her body and kept walking.
