Page 44 of Offside

“I know where Tempe is.” His smirk was almost more than I could handle. He knew what he was doing.

“That’s a significant commitment of an afternoon.” Trying to sound coy, I was stalling and he knew it and I knew he knew it. The back of my neck was warm. I was having a one-sided internal argument with myself about the fact that the correct answer here was obviously let’s go, had been since the plane, and every word out of my mouth was the gap between knowing that and letting myself have it. “You’ve never even been. You might not like it.”

“I’ll like it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Maren.” His voice dropped. I closed my eyes briefly. He said my name low and slow, taking his time with the second syllable, and it was designed to make reasonable people unreasonable. “I’ve been here three months and the only things I’ve seen are this building, your parents’ backyard, like you said. Well, and The Rusty Nail. You told me about this place and I’ve been thinking about it since.”

He was still in the doorway, not pushing, waiting with that patience of his I found maddening, and the morning light from the window was catching the scar through his eyebrow and I thought about what I’d almost said last night in the truck after he’d pulled back. The thing I’d swallowed. The thing that had come out sideways at eleven forty-seven as I don’t hate you at all, which we both knew was not about hating him.

I wanted to go, enough that I was still standing here having a conversation about Tempe’s distance from Glendale instead of saying so, because wanting it that much was terrifying on its own.

“Give me twenty minutes,” I said. “I need to wrap up a couple of things here.”

The line at the corner of his eye deepened. Not a smile, just the shape of one, warm and private, and he pushed off the doorframe.

“I’ll pull the truck around,” he said.

The bookstore was called Bound, which I’d always thought was either a clever bit of branding or a complete accident, and it occupied the ground floor of a converted warehouse in downtown Tempe with exposed brick and ceiling-high shelves and the smell of old paper and good coffee I’d been coming here for since college. The owner, Ruth, seventy years old, opinions about everything, shared them freely, had given me a staff discount three years ago on the grounds that anyone who came in as often as I did deserved it.

Ryan walked in behind me and stopped.

I turned to find him with his head tilted back, taking in the shelves, an expression I hadn’t seen on him before, something open and slightly undone, like encountering something he hadn’t expected to want this much.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“It’s big.”

“It goes back further than it looks.” I nodded toward the rear. “Small town is in the back left. Romance is back right. Fantasy takes up the whole east wall.”

“You have a map?”

“I’ve been coming here since I was eighteen.” I started walking. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

I took him through the fiction stacks first. The good stuff, the section I always lingered in, pulling out spines and reading him first lines the way I would with anyone I trusted to have opinions, because I’d learned on a red-eye flight that he had them. He took each book I handed him with both hands and read the back copy with real attention, not the polite version. He put two in the crook of his arm.

In the small town section he found a Cal Beckett I hadn’t read and held it out to me. “You need this one.”

“I have a list.”

“It should be on your list.” He turned it over. “Trust me.”

I took it. Our fingers brushed in the transfer and neither of us commented on it and I added it to my stack, which was getting unwieldy, and I didn’t care even a little.

We spent forty minutes in the stacks. Not browsing in the vague, directionless way, but talking—arguing, actually, about whether a book’s cover was a reliable indicator of its quality. Me, yes, always, and I had data to support this. Him, categorically no, delivered with the flat certainty he brought to everything, which explained the catastrophic state of his copy of The Innkeeper’s Terrible Idea. We debated a sequel I’d loved and he’d found disappointing, the argument going in circles the way good ones did, neither of us convincing the other and neither of us trying very hard. When we discovered we’d had the exact same reaction to one author’s third book I laughed, and he looked at me when I did it—not at the joke, at me—and I had to turn back to the shelf and find something to do with my hands.

At one point I rounded a corner looking for a title and stopped.

Ryan was there, crouched at the bottom shelf, completely absorbed, no idea I was watching. His thumb moved along the spines slowly, one at a time. He pulled one out, turned it over, read the back with the same attention he’d given every book I’d handed him—real, unhurried, like nothing else existed. The late afternoon light came through the high windows and caught his blond hair, and I thought about Thursday night in his truck, the way he’d kissed me like he’d decided and wasn’t in any hurry about it, and the sound I’d made against his mouth that I was still embarrassed about and also couldn’t stop thinking about.

I was absolutely staring.

He raised his head and caught me and I turned so fast I nearly knocked a display off the end cap, grabbed the first spine my hand landed on, and stared at it with great focus.

“Any good?” he asked.

I read the cover. A memoir about competitive bird-watching. “Supposed to be excellent,” I said.