Page 144 of Offside

I drove to Griffin’s with the windows down.

Phoenix at nine o’clock at night was still seventy degrees, holding the day’s unseasonal warmth. The streets were lit orange and white, the palm trees along the boulevard going black against a sky that never quite got dark this time of year until the real middle of the night. I’d grown up in Minnesota where winter nights smelled like woodsmoke and cold and the clean silence of frozen things. Phoenix in February smelled like warm asphalt and dry sage and the faint mineral bite of desert air.

I was aware of my hands on the wheel. The way my shoulder carried its familiar low ache after a hard practice. Not pain exactly, more like the echo of effort, my body’s quiet accounting of what it had been asked to do. I’d pushed hard today. I always pushed hard when I was in my head about something.

I was also aware, although I’d been trying not to be, that Maren had texted me back.

I’d been sitting in my apartment after dinner, not watching whatever was on the television, when my phone had lit up with her name and my whole body had gone still. I’ve read every text. In case you were wondering. I’d had to put the phone down and stand up and walk to the window and look at the city for a full minute before I could respond like a normal person.

She’d told me to go talk to my best friend.

It was time. I missed her so fucking much and needed to get this over with so I could go to her. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to work things out with Griffin, but Maren had become my person and the magnitude of that and not seeing her was taking its toll on me.

Griffin’s building was in Tempe. A mid-rise with underground parking and a rooftop pool Griffin had mentioned once and never brought up again. I’d been here a dozen times since September, had my own code to the parking garage, knew which elevator bank served the eighth floor. I parked and sat in the car for a moment with the engine off, listening to the tick of cooling metal, the distant sound of traffic from the street above.

I thought about what I was going to say.

I’d been running versions of this conversation since October. I’d rehearsed and discarded. A hundred different possibilities of how this could go. I’d written things in my head and on my phone on road trips and deleted them. In the end I said the thing. That was all I’d ever been good at. The thing, plainly, and then the silence after.

I got out of the car.

Griffin answered the door in sweats and no shirt, a bottle of water in his hand, his hair still damp from a shower. He took in me on his doorstep. The fact of me, standing there at nine-fifteen without a text first, which meant this was not a casual visit, and his face went careful and still.

“Hey,” Griffin said.

“Hey.” I met his eyes. “Can I come in.”

A beat. Then Griffin stepped back from the door.

The television was on low. Some West Coast matchup, teams I didn’t care about, at low volume. There was a half-eaten bowl of something on the coffee table and a book spine-up on the arm of the couch. The whole space felt lived-in, a man comfortable alone in it. The television threw shifting blue-white light across the hardwood. Outside through the sliding glass door, the city sprawled in its orange grid all the way to the dark line of the mountains.

I stood in the middle of the room with my hands tucked in my pockets.

“I should have come to you from the beginning,” I said. “Before any of it started. I should have told you what I was feeling and asked you how you wanted to handle it. I didn’t, and that was wrong, and I’ve been carrying that since October.” I paused. “I’m not here to make excuses. I just want you to know I know it.”

Griffin was leaning against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, the water bottle hanging from one hand. His face wasn’t closed off. He was processing, running the play, jaw working, eyes somewhere past my shoulder.

“You could have told me,” Griffin said. “Any point between then and now. You had a hundred chances.”

“I know.”

“You looked me in the eye at my parents’ table at Sunday dinners.” Griffin’s jaw shifted. Not anger exactly, but the residue of it. “That’s what I keep coming back to. Not the relationship. I’ve had time to think about the relationship and I get why it happened. That’s not the part I’m stuck on.” He set the water bottle down on the counter. “It’s that you lied to me. Over and over. And I didn’t see it coming because I trusted you completely.”

I didn’t look away. “Yeah.” I sighed heavily. “I never meant to destroy our trust, Griff.”

“I’m a goalie.” Griffin’s voice was quieter now, ignoring what I said. “I read everything. Body language, eye contact, tells. I’ve been doing it since I was sixteen. You sat across from me in that locker room for months and I didn’t see it. Which means either I’m losing my edge or you’re the best liar I’ve ever known.”

“Neither,” I said. “You trusted me. That’s not the same as being fooled. I used your trust against you and that’s the thing I’m most ashamed of.”

Griffin watched the game. The television continued its indifferent progress. A whistle, a commercial, the low drone of a crowd that had nothing to do with this room.

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” Griffin asked, almost pleading. Not accusatory this time. Genuinely asking. “If it was real. If you actually—why not just come to me and say, look, this is happening, I need you to know.”

I thought about that. “Because I knew what you’d say.”

“Which was?”

“Don’t.” I held Griffin’s gaze. “You’d have told me to leave it alone. And if I’d asked you—can I take Maren out—you’d have said no. And I knew that. So I didn’t ask.” I paused. “That was cowardly. I should have come to you and had it out then, before anyone got hurt, and I didn’t because I was afraid that if I made you choose…I’d lose you both.” I made myself keep going. “That’s not the whole truth, though. The truth is worse. I knew what I wanted almost from the first week. I’ve known since September. I was already all-in, already certain, and I lied to you anyway because the truth was so big I didn’t trust you to hear it without taking her away from me first.” I exhaled. “I didn’t lie because it wasn’t serious. I lied because it was the most serious thing in my life and I was a coward about protecting it.”