Page 123 of Offside

When the dust settled, Eli got two minutes for roughing and two minutes for instigating, all while grumbling, “Motherfuckers know better than to fuck with a goalie.” Number eighteen, two minutes for goalie interference. Cole, two minutes for roughing. One other Dallas defenseman, two minutes for roughing. Ryan received a warning from the referee that he acknowledged with a single nod and no expression whatsoever.

Double return. Four skaters off the ice at once, two from each side, the remaining players resetting at even strength with the period winding down.

Griffin had gotten to his feet during the fight. He was standing in his crease with his mask up, watching Eli get walked to the box, and when Eli looked back across the ice Griffin gave him one nod. That was all. The price had been paid.

I stood at the tunnel entrance with my arms crossed and my heart in my throat and watched the last four minutes play out with cold professional attention. The slightly altered positioning, the fraction of a second’s hesitation on the cuts he’d never hesitated on before, the redistribution of weight he couldn’t afford to redistribute.

I’d seen it on his face the moment he came off the ice when the final horn sounded. Griffin came out limping. Not badly, controlling it, his jaw set, his weight carefully redistributed, but I’d spent years watching this body and I knew the difference between fine and performing fine.

“Don’t,” he said, when he saw my face.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re doing the face.”

“I don’t have a face.”

“You absolutely have a face.”

He sighed and let me fall into step beside him. His gait was off, favoring the left, each step placed with care, telling me everything I needed to know. I clocked it, the clinical part of my brain running its quiet assessment while the rest of me was his sister walking him to his car.

“How bad?” I asked.

“Tweaked it.”

“Griffin.”

“It’s a tweak, Mare. I’ve had worse.”

In the third period, Dmitri Sorokin took the net.

He was twenty-three and Russian and the youngest player on the current roster, and he made four saves in eleven minutes and gave up nothing, and the Sidewinders won three to one. Griffin watched the third period from the tunnel in his gear, his mask in his hand, not saying a word to anyone.

After the game was over, he didn’t want to be assessed, so I walked him to his car and watched him lower himself into the driver’s seat. Slow, controlled, one hand braced on the door frame, and thought about Ryan, about this week, about the conversation that was supposed to happen in the next few days.

I crouched next to the open car door. “Come in tomorrow morning. Early, before anyone else is in.”

“I have⁠—”

“Griffin.”

He looked at me for a moment. Nodded. “Fine. Eight o’clock.”

“And ice it tonight, twenty minutes, then heat. Alternate.”

“I know how to treat a knee, Maren.”

“I know you know but let me be who I am? Please?” I squeezed his arm once and stood. “Text me when you’re home.”

He nodded, a grimace on his face, then pulled the door closed and I stood in the parking structure and watched his taillights disappear and thought about timing and circumstances, and how important conversations kept finding new ways to push themselves further down the road.

I texted Ryan from the car. Not because I had news. He’d been watching it unfold and had seen all of it. Because I needed him, and for the first time, I could admit that freely.

Maren: Long night

The response came before I’d cleared the structure.

Ryan: Yeah. You okay?