Page 101 of Offside

I thought about what it meant to have his name on my back. I thought about the professional calculus. The questions it would invite, the conversations I wasn’t ready to have in public. I thought about sitting next to our parents at home games, moderating every reaction, and performing the careful neutral version of myself. I thought about the team wives and partners who had started to become my friends, and what they might think.

I thought about how none of that was what I was feeling right now, standing there holding Ryan Lindqvist’s jersey, and how what I was feeling was warm and certain and not remotely manageable.

I hung it in my closet carefully next to my own staff jacket.

I texted him a photo of it hanging there. No words.

His response came twelve seconds later.

Ryan: Next home game you’re not working, you wear mine.

I looked at the text for a long moment.

Maren: People will ask questions. And you’re bossy.

Ryan: Let them.

Ryan: You like it when I tell you what to do.

I put my phone down. Picked it back up and thought about a snarky response but what he said landed. I set the phone back down. I mulled over the certainty in those two words. Let them. And the fact that he’d sent me a jersey so soon into our relationship, or whatever this was, without making it a conversation or asking for my opinion on what it meant.

He knew. And he wanted me to know he knew.

I went back and picked up my phone.

Maren: Sometimes I do.

Ryan: I want to see you wearing my name.

Maren: Okay.

He called me from Vancouver that night. Late, after the game, after the media, after whatever the team did in hotel bars after road wins, and I was already in bed, which I had not planned on admitting to him.

“Hey, baby,” he said. His voice was low and warm. The version of him nobody else got, the one that lived underneath the captain and came out only in the dark and only for me. The soft Ryan who was mine.

“Hey.” I settled back against my pillow. “You won.”

“Three-two. Theo scored the winner.”

“I watched.” I had. I’d sat on my couch in his jersey, just to see what it felt like, in my own house, nobody around, and watched him play and tried to be objective about it and failed completely. “You had a good game.”

“You watched in the jersey.”

I went still. “How do you know that.”

“The photo you sent. It was on the hanger when you took it. You moved it.”

I held the jersey, now back on the hanger in the open closet, and thought about how nothing got past him. “I was just seeing if it fit.”

“Does it?”

“It’s enormous. You’re enormous.”

“You love it.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Maren.” The low quiet register of his voice shifted, just slightly. “I can hear you smiling.”