Page 47 of Offside

CHAPTER 11

RYAN

Dallas in November was cold in a way Phoenix had made me forget was possible. Not Minnesota cold—nothing was Minnesota cold except maybe Canada—but cold enough that the walk from the bus to the arena had me pulling my collar up and Griffin making exaggerated suffering noises at my shoulder. Our breath came out in small clouds.

“You played in Seattle for eight years,” I said.

“And I left for a reason.” Griffin hunched his shoulders against it. “I have thin blood now. I grew up with thin blood. This is your fault somehow.”

“I didn’t talk you into anything.”

“You were very convincing by existing near me.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Captain of the team,” Griffin said solemnly. “Should really be more inspiring, Lindy.”

I pushed through the arena doors. The warmth hit immediately and Griffin made a sound behind me like a man returning from the sea.

We lost three-two in overtime. Not a bad loss, the way road losses went—we’d been the better team for fifty minutes, gone up two, given it back in the third on a bad line change I was going to be thinking about for the next forty-eight hours. Calloway kept the postgame tight and professional. I showered and changed and sat in front of my stall longer than I needed to, running the sequence back. The second turnover in the neutral zone. The coverage miss. The way the change had broken down before I could stop it.

Cole dropped onto the bench beside me. “You’re doing the thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing where you sit here and personally accept responsibility for the rotation of the earth.” He pulled on his jacket. “We gave up two goals in three minutes, Ryan. It happens. We’re still three points up on the wild card.”

“The change was bad.”

“The change was bad,” Cole agreed. “It won’t happen again because everyone in this room saw it and nobody wants to look at your face or ourselves for that matter when we blow a lead.” He stood. “Team dinner. You’re coming.”

I looked up at him. Cole was twenty-five and from Malibu and had never in his life spent more than six consecutive minutes being serious about anything, and yet he had a talent for appearing at exactly the right moment and saying the one thing that punctured my self-imposed pressure before it calcified into something worse. It was deeply annoying and I was grateful for it in equal measure.

I went to dinner.

The restaurant was good—somewhere Cole had researched with the same dedication he had for his pre-game rituals, a steakhouse near the hotel with low lighting and booths deep enough to hold the whole group, which at our size overall, in person and quantity, was a feat. The post-loss energy was quieter than a win but not fractured. Men eating, talking, letting the game settle into the category of things that had happened and couldn’t be changed. I was two bites into something excellent when Griffin appeared at my shoulder with the expression I’d learned meant he was about to ask for something.

“So,” Griffin said.

I kept eating.

“There are two women at the bar.” He sat down in the empty chair beside me. “They recognized Westbrook. He’s in his element, but there’s two of them and one of him and I thought⁠—”

“No.”

“You haven’t even⁠—”

“No, Griffin.”

“She’s lovely. I talked to her for ten minutes⁠—”

“You talked to her for ten minutes and now you want me to take her off your hands because there’s someone else who has your attention.”

Griffin had the grace to look slightly caught. “I talked to her for ten minutes and she’s lovely and I think you’d like her and, yes, I would also like to continue talking to the other one without my best friend sitting here staring at his steak when there is a beautiful southern woman who likes guys like you.”

Guys like me. What does that even mean? A hockey player? Where any one of us would do? I wanted to tell him I wasn’t single. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t.

“Isn’t she talking to Westbrook?” I asked, hoping to pawn off this situation on the pretty boy himself.