Page 127 of Offside

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t slam the door. He stood there for a moment with the beer in his hand, taking in the two of us. The kitchen, the wine glasses, the evening he’d interrupted, and then he turned and walked away.

The door closed behind him with a soft, final click.

I stood at the door and listened to the footsteps recede, the distant chime of the elevator arriving, the silence after. I turned around.

Maren had set the spatula down. She was leaning back against the stove with her arms crossed. Not in defense, holding herself together. Her face was carefully still in the way it got when she was deciding not to let something show, but her eyes were bright and her jaw was tight and the line of her shoulders told me everything. Her lower lip was trembling.

“Hey,” I said.

“Don’t.” Her voice was steady. “Don’t tell me it’s going to be okay.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

She watched my face. The effort of it visible, the weight of having hurt someone she loved by omission, over and over, until the moment it couldn’t be held anymore. I knew the weight. I’d been carrying the same one.

I crossed the room in an instant, and she let me pull her in, her forehead dropping against my chest. I held her tight and didn’t say anything because there was nothing useful to say yet. Griffin was gone. The thing we’d been carrying had put itself out there, messily, ahead of schedule, in the worst way it could have, and I stood in the wreckage of it with Maren in my arms and understood, without question, that I would do it again. All of it. Every week of the secret and every Sunday dinner and every careful performance of indifference. I would do all of it again to have this. To have her.

I’d expected guilt, and there was guilt, plenty of it. Underneath the guilt though, was something that didn’t waver at all.

“He was so mean,” she said into my shirt. Her voice was thick. “That was a cheap shot.”

“Yeah.” I pressed my mouth to the top of her head. “It was,” I said into her hair before inhaling deeply.

I couldn’t believe I had let it come to this.

“He doesn’t do that. Griffin doesn’t go for the throat like that.” The hurt in her voice made mine ache.

“He’s hurt.” I tightened my arms around her slightly. “People go low when they’re hurt. He didn’t mean it.”

She pulled back and I let her go reluctantly. She moved to the couch and sat down, drawing her knees up, and I followed and sat beside her, close enough that our shoulders touched. Neither of us reached for the wine. Neither of us glanced at the pasta going cold on the counter.

“I’m the problem,” she said. There was a resolute tone in her voice, and I sensed her spiral coming.

“No.” I’m not going to lose her over this. I love her. I just…

“Ryan.” Her voice was tired, not argumentative. Just honest. “I’m the variable. You and Griffin were fine before me. The team was fine. You had a best friend and a locker room that trusted you and a season going somewhere, and now—” She stopped. “Now you’ve got a starting goalie who won’t look at you and a locker room that’s going to feel it and a playoff push that needs everyone pulling in the same direction. That’s because of me.”

“That’s because of us,” I said. “There’s a difference.”

“Is there?” Her eyes watched me steadily. “Because from where I’m sitting, as it turns out, you actually had a lot more to lose than I did. And when this all started? I thought the opposite. I was so worried about my reputation with the team…” She sighed heavily and trailed off.

I turned it over carefully. She wasn’t wrong about the math. The team, the season, the locker room, all of it was real and all of it mattered. I’d been mapping it since the moment Griffin walked out the door. I knew what the next few weeks were going to look like. I knew how much harder my job had just gotten. It didn’t change what I wanted though.

Then I looked at her. Sitting in my shirt on my couch with her knees drawn up and her eyes steady and tired, trying to give me an exit I hadn’t asked for, and the doubt I was supposed to be having never arrived.

“Do you know what I was thinking,” I said, “when Griffin walked away?”

She waited.

“I was thinking I’d do it again.” I held her attention. “All of it. Every part of it. The whole messy, badly-timed, should-have-handled-it-differently thing. I’d do it again without changing a single piece, because every piece of it led here.” I paused. “To you, sitting on my couch, telling me you’re the problem. You’re not the problem. You’re the reason.”

Maren held very still for a moment. The braced quality in her face finally eased.

“That’s a lot to put on a person,” she said quietly.

“Yeah.” I reached over and took her hand, turned it palm up, ran my thumb across the inside of her wrist where the bracelet sat. Alltid din. Always yours. I’d meant it when I sent it and I meant it more now. “Worth every bit of it.”

“The team⁠—”