Page 105 of Offside

Nine days. Seven games. Four wins, two losses, one overtime that had gone the wrong way in San Jose but still counted as progress because the team had played sixty minutes of real hockey before losing it, which was a different thing than losing it in forty. I had logged forty-three minutes of ice time in the final three games. My shoulder had held.

I was in a car by eleven-forty, bags in the trunk, my phone already in my hand.

Ryan: Just landed

The response came before I’d cleared the airport.

Maren: I know. I’ve been tracking the flight.

I read her text twice and smiled.

Ryan: Have you now

Maren: Don’t make it weird

Ryan: I’m not making it weird

Maren: You’re making it weird with your ellipses

Ryan: I don’t use ellipses

Maren: There were three dots

Ryan: Those are thinking dots

Maren: That’s being very pleased with the fact I was tracking your flight

I was grinning at my phone in the back of a car at eleven forty-five at night, and I couldn’t help myself. I fucking missed her so much.

Ryan: Are you home

Maren: Yes

Ryan: I’ll be there in twenty minutes

She took longer than usual to respond.

Maren: Okay

I pocketed my phone and watched the Phoenix lights slide past the window. The wide flat grid of the valley at night, the mountains dark against a darker sky, the quality of desert air I’d stopped fighting somewhere around month two and started to like. The city looked different than it had in September. Either it had changed or I had. Probably both.

The drive was twenty-two minutes, accounting for traffic.

I let myself in.

She’d been waiting. She hadn’t tried to look like she hadn’t been waiting, which undid me every time, the way she didn’t perform anything. She was in the T-shirt she’d worn on the FaceTime call last night, the one that was technically mine, her hair loose, her feet bare on the hardwood. The lamp behind her was on low and the house smelled like her. Warm and faintly citrus, the smell of a space that was lived-in and cared for, and after nine days of hotel rooms and recycled charter air and the antiseptic smell of visiting locker rooms, it landed somewhere in my fucking utopia.

My right shoulder was carrying the dull familiar ache of too many minutes in the final stretch. My lower back had logged seven games in nine days and was making its displeasure known. I was tired in the way that wasn’t about sleep. The accumulated weight of nine days of being on, being captain, being the person the younger guys looked to when things went sideways.

I stepped inside and she practically fell into my chest. I got my arms around her before the door had finished closing and pressed my mouth into her hair and breathed her in. The warmth of her, the beachy scent, the way she fit against me like the nine days hadn’t happened. Her arms came around my waist and she exhaled against me, slow and complete, the release of a held breath.

“Hi,” she said, into my shoulder.

“Hi.” I pulled back enough to see her face.

She was open and steady and a little undone, the careful management she wore most of the time gone from her face entirely. I let myself feel that for one full second. Then I kissed her.

It started slow. Or started to. She had her hands in my shirt before five seconds were out and I walked her backward and she went, her hands moving up to the back of my neck, pulling me down to her. I got her shoulders against the wall and she made a sound against my mouth that burned through whatever was left of my patience after nine days of wanting her across two thousand miles.