Page 84 of Offside

I'd meant it. I had been there. The early years, the road trips, the women who wanted a hockey player and didn't particularly care which one. It had been fine. Easy. Uncomplicated the way empty things always were. I'd grown out of it and I hadn't missed it. Especially not since Maren came back into my life.

The problem was Tiffany had appeared anyway. Because I was the captain of a professional hockey team and that was always going to be true, and there would always be another Tiffany in another bar on another random day, and Maren had sat six feet away through all of it with a smile on her face and no way to say a single word, and I hadn't been able to do a thing about it from across a table.

That was my fault. The situation. The secrecy that made the situation impossible to navigate.

I needed her to know that. Not by text. In person, tonight, looking her in the face. Panic was setting in and my need to fix the situation was taking over.

Cole dropped into the chair Paige had vacated. The bar had thinned out. Eli was already gone. Theo was putting on his jacket.

Cole sat with his forearms on the table and said nothing for a moment, which made me glance over.

"She sat through that whole thing," Cole said.

"I know."

He tilted his head slightly. "You really like her."

I gave him the smallest possible nod.

"Saw where she sat at the game," he said. "Four rows off the glass. That's the player’s seats."

I didn't answer.

"I only looked up there because you did." Cole turned his glass a quarter turn on the table. "Twice."

Cole let out a breath. "Okay, I know it’s not my business." He held a hand up to stop me from interrupting. "You want to know what's wild? I genuinely cannot figure out how Griffin hasn't clocked this. You two are not subtle. Every time she says something you do this…this thing. Where you catch a glance or something with her." He made a barely perceptible gesture with his eyes. "And she does it back. It's been happening since September. The man reads everything on the ice. Off it, apparently, not so much."

"Cole." It was a warning.

"I'm not asking for details." He looked across the bar to where Griffin was collecting darts, laughing with Theo, completely unguarded. "There are two ways he finds out, Lindy. One of them he can work through. The other one—" He shook his head. "Don't let it be the other one. That's all I've got."

He stood, clapped me once on the shoulder, and went to say goodnight to Griffin.

I checked my phone. Nothing. Time to go.

Phoenix at night in November, that strange warm dark, the absence of cold I kept waiting for and that kept not coming.

Text her, Paige had said. I had.

I checked my phone one more time. Still nothing. Screen dark, the message sitting there unanswered.

I put the car in reverse and turned toward Scottsdale anyway.

CHAPTER 16

MAREN

I spent every minute of the ride home building a case against a man who hadn’t done anything wrong.

Now I was on my couch in an old ASU T-shirt and shorts I’d had since college, my feet tucked under me, a glass of wine on the coffee table that I’d poured and hadn’t touched because I didn’t want wine. I’d needed something to do with my hands when I walked in the door.

I knew it wasn’t his fault.

I’d known it the entire drive home, both hands on the wheel, going through it over and over, checking and rechecking an answer I already had and did not want. Woman approaches. Ryan moves her hands. Ryan shuts it down. Ryan looked trapped and miserable and was not enjoying a single second of it. I’d watched him from across the table. I’d watched everything, because apparently I was a person who did that now, and I’d seen all of it. The rigid set of his shoulders. The way he’d taken her wrist and relocated it to her own lap like she’d wandered somewhere she had no business being. The almost imperceptible exhale when she finally turned toward Cole.

I’d seen all of it and it didn’t matter because I still felt like this.

That was the real thing I was mad about. Not Ryan. Not even her, just a woman in a bar making a reasonable assumption about a ridiculously hot and relatively famous hockey player. I almost couldn’t blame her. I was living the impulse myself.