Page 121 of Offside

I let out another long sigh and told him everything. Oddly, it was cathartic to get some of it off my chest, even if it was to Cole.

“When this started, Maren didn’t want anyone to know. She wants to be respected at work, and I don’t want to put her in a position where she feels she has to defend her ability to do her job or anything. She’s amazing and she’s worked hard to get here. You know how much easier it is for us.” Cole nodded. “The agreement to keep it quiet was mutual,” I said. “But the timeline is definitely mine now.”

Cole looked at me for a moment, silent. Then the warmth came back fully, easy and uncomplicated, the Cole who gave everything to the people he’d decided mattered. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

He stood, clapped me once on the shoulder—solid, brief—and headed for the door. “I’ll see you out there, Captain.”

The door swung shut behind him and I sat alone with the hum of the bike fading out, thinking about all the ways a person could mean well and still be an asshole of a friend and a coward about the one thing that actually meant something.

CHAPTER 22

MAREN

I figured it out on a random morning, standing in Ryan’s kitchen in his flannel shirt, and what made it undeniable was how ordinary the day was. Ordinary, but perfect.

He was making breakfast. I was leaning against the counter with my coffee, and he moved around the kitchen without thinking about my being there. Reaching past me for the spatula, pressing a kiss to my temple on his way to the cabinet, asking if I wanted the last of the coffee before he poured it. Small things. Unconscious things. That was all it was.

Josh had planned our entire life out loud and informed me of it after. Where we were going on Saturday, which friends we were seeing, the trip he’d booked and mentioned in passing like a thing already decided, because it was. Two years of being told the plan instead of asked, of sitting next to him at dinners where he talked about his work and his week and his thoughts and never once turned the question back to me. I’d been an accessory to his evening, the warm body beside him that made him look like a man with a full life, and when other women found their way into his orbit at those dinners he let them stay there, let them laugh too long and touch his arm, because being wanted in front of me cost him nothing and he liked the math of it. I’d told myself it didn’t matter. That I was asking too much. I’d gotten very good at wanting less.

Ryan asked me what I thought. About the third-period collapse against Dallas, about whether Theo’s hip was a real problem or a maintenance thing, about calls I’d have made differently or how I perceived a play on the ice or how I wanted to spend a day off together. He wanted the answer, my real and honest thoughts, and he waited for it. He listened with interest. A week ago he’d mentioned a stretch later in the season with back-to-back off-days and said he wanted to drive up to Flagstaff and see snow in Arizona. He’d included me in it without thinking about it but didn’t plan anything without me. Several weeks ago in a crowded bar I’d watched another woman hit on him, brazen about it, and he’d shut her down without a second of hesitation.

I wanted every morning to be like this one. I wanted his flannel shirt and the low morning light and his hand at the small of my back as he moved around me. I wanted to stop thinking of these hours as something I was borrowing and start thinking of them as something I had.

“Scrambled?” he asked, already knowing.

“Please.”

He glanced at me over his shoulder. A quick, warm smile, the kind that didn’t ask for anything, and turned back to the pan. I took a sip of my coffee and let myself feel this thing with us, this full and inconvenient and completely irreversible emotion in my body. I’d spent months managing it. Filing it away for someday or later. It was later now.

Breakfast landed it in front of me and Ryan kissed the top of my head on his way back to the stove, which was something he did now, drive-by kisses, and I thought, yeah, there it is.

We ate in the easy quiet that had become ours over the last few weeks. His phone face-down on the table, mine in my bag, the low hum of the city outside waking up. The guys had practice at ten. I had patients starting at nine. Neither of us was rushing.

I was thinking about how to say any of the things I was feeling and whether to say them at all, whether this was the moment, whether I was anywhere near ready to crack that door open, when Ryan set his fork down and looked at me.

“Can I say something?”

I met his eyes. “Yeah, of course.”

Then Ryan said, “It’s time. And I think I should be the one to tell Griffin. Myself. Not us together.”

“Ryan—” He held his hand up so he could finish, and I stopped to let him. The hard set of his jaw told me he needed to say whatever had been on his mind, and this affected both of us, not just me.

“Not because I’m worried about getting caught or because of anything he’d do, or what anyone will say; nothing like that. I honestly don’t give a shit about any of that. Because—” He paused, working through it. “Because what I feel about you is not something I want to keep having to pretend I don’t feel. Every practice, every dinner at your parents’ table, every time Griffin talks about you to me like I’m just his friend and don’t know you myself, and I’m not the person who—” He stopped. His jaw worked. “It’s gotten too big to keep in a box, Maren. And he deserves to hear it from me. Not discover it.”

“That’s what you want?” I asked. Part of me knew our relationship was headed in this direction but him bringing it up now was a surprising twist, and a smile curved my lips. I could do this. With him. He gave me so much strength.

“It is.” Two words. Zero question in his tone.

“I don’t want you to do this on your own. It isn’t just you managing this…it’s us.” I emphasized the us, knowing he liked when I considered us one, but meaning it regardless.

“Maren, does this,” he pointed between us, “feel like something you’d want people to know?” He asked it carefully, like he didn’t know the answer and was asking for real, bracing himself for a multitude of possible answers. “I’m serious. Look at us. If none of the complications existed. With work, with anything… If Griffin wasn’t— If it was just you and me. Would you want this to be something people knew about?”

“Yes.” I said it with no hesitation. Because it was true.

His shoulders relaxed and then Ryan stood before he leaned down to plant a kiss on my lips. “Me too. More than anything.”

His words worked their way through my veins, lighting up as they passed through my heart. I walked to the counter and leaned against it, facing him.