Page 165 of Offside

I pressed my lips to her hair. It had meant something to me too. The image of her in warm-ups, 17 across her shoulders, the way it had landed in my chest and stayed there through sixty minutes of playoff hockey. I’d played every shift knowing she was in those stands wearing my name. I intended to tell her that at some point when I had the words for it.

Cole appeared at my elbow. “Good season, Captain.”

“Good season,” I said. “You played well.”

“I played extremely well,” Cole said. “I’m glad someone noticed.” He glanced at Maren. “You too, by the way. For everything this year.”

Maren looked surprised. “Me?”

“Someone had to keep this one functional,” Cole said, with a gesture at me that managed to be both affectionate and deeply unflattering. “We appreciate the service.” He clapped me on the shoulder once and disappeared back into the corridor.

“I like him,” Maren said.

“Don’t tell him that. It’ll go to his head.”

She laughed, and I pulled her closer.

“Next year,” I said.

Maren looked up at me. “Next year,” she agreed. Her hand found mine. “Take me home.”

I drove us through the Phoenix night, the arena receding behind us, the city spreading out in its grid of orange light all the way to the dark mountains. I drove with the windows down and the April air coming in. Warm still, the desert holding the day’s heat, the jacaranda trees along the boulevard dropping their purple flowers on the sidewalks. And thought about everything the season had been.

I’d arrived in September not knowing what this place would become to me. Now the season was behind us and I wasn’t leaving it so much as carrying it forward into whatever came next. Phoenix had gotten under my skin—the heat, the stubbornness, the way the city refused to apologize for any of it. The team that had become a brotherhood. Griffin. And Maren, who had made a desert city feel like the only place I’d ever wanted to be.

“You okay?” she asked into my shoulder.

“Yeah.” I pressed my lips to her hair. “I will be. Let’s go inside.”

She took my hand and led me in.

Later, much later, when the city had quieted and her house was dark except for the lamp on the nightstand, I lay with her against my chest and her breathing slow and the ceiling fan doing its slow work above us.

I thought about the season. About what it had been and what it had become and all the things I hadn’t anticipated in September when I’d arrived in a city I didn’t know to captain a team that didn’t exist yet. I hadn’t anticipated Griffin, or the team, or the way Phoenix had decided to love us back. I hadn’t anticipated Maren.

I pressed my lips to her hair.

“Jag älskar dig,” I said quietly. Into the dark. Not a declaration. A fact, said plainly, in the language that came up from underneath everything when I had stopped being careful.

Maren stirred against my chest.

“I know what that means,” she said. Not asleep. She hadn’t been asleep.

I waited.

“Jag älskar dig också,” she said. Quiet. Certain.

I held her tighter.

Outside, Phoenix held the night in its warm hands, the desert spreading out beyond her yard, the mountains dark against a sky full of stars that never quite looked real from inside the valley. The city that had been abandoned and had kept going anyway. The team that had arrived with nothing and made something of it.

I was sure of very few things in the way I was sure of this. The woman in my arms, the season we’d built, the year ahead of us, the warmth of the desert night coming through her open window.

I’d made something of it.

I closed my eyes and stayed.

EPILOGUE