Page 113 of Offside

Alltid.

After dinner, Griffin and my father took the argument about the eighty-three Oilers to the living room, which was where it belonged. My mother started the dishes with the cheerful efficiency she brought to everything in her own kitchen. She’d say she didn’t need help, accept it from whoever showed up, and never mention it either way.

Ryan showed up with a dish towel.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched him dry plates beside my mother and chat about Anna, his sister, Stockholm, the fact that Anna had married a man named Johan who was a chef which Ryan found both convenient and intimidating, and I thought, clearly and with nowhere to put it, that I was in love with him and he was drying my mother’s dishes on Christmas and nobody in this house except me knew what that meant.

My mother said something that made him laugh, low and brief and genuine, and she looked pleased with herself as she sent him home with a mountain of leftovers some time later.

He showed up at my house at nine-thirty with a new bottle of wine and a small, wrapped box. It was beautifully wrapped, brown kraft paper, a red ribbon tied in a bow on top and fit in the palm of my hand.

I let him in. He set the wine on the counter and held out the box without preamble.

“Ryan—”

“It’s small,” he said. “Take it.”

I unwrapped the kraft paper carefully, aware of him watching, and found a small white box inside. Lifted the lid.

The necklace was delicate. A thin gold chain, and on it a charm so small I had to tilt the box toward the kitchen light to see it clearly. A skate. Tiny, perfectly rendered, no bigger than my fingernail.

I went very still.

“Ryan.”

“You can wear it whenever you want,” he said. “Nobody has to know what it means.”

I studied it for a long moment. The skate caught the light, small and certain and already feeling like something I’d been missing without knowing it. I thought about the rink, the dim amber glow, his knee on the concrete floor, the careful focus he’d brought to lacing up my skates like it was the obvious thing to do.

“Help me put it on,” I said, and turned my back.

His hands were as steady as they always were. The clasp caught. The small weight of it settled at my throat.

I turned around. He kissed me in the cold light of my own kitchen, quiet and certain, and I kissed him back and thought next Christmas will be different.

He stayed.

We opened the wine and found something on television—an old Christmas movie, the kind neither of us had to pay attention to—and ended up on my couch the way we always did, my feet tucked under me and his arm around my shoulders and the low flicker of the screen the only light in the room. The necklace was warm at my throat. Outside, the desert had gone quiet the way it only did on holidays, and in here there was just him and the movie neither of us was watching and the smell of the wine and the fact that he was gently playing with the ends of my hair without either of us remarking on it.

"About the hallway at your parents'," he said.

I sat up and turned to look at him.

"I've been thinking about it all night." He shifted so he was facing me, one arm along the back of the couch. "I put all of that on you in a corridor with your mother barely twenty feet away and Griffin in the next room. You couldn't have answered me if you wanted to. That wasn't fair and I knew it when I did it."

"Ryan—"

"I did it anyway." He said it plainly. "Because I watched you sit at that table all afternoon being everything but what you are to me, and I could not stand it for one more hour without you knowing what was actually true."

The refrigerator cycled on in the kitchen. I did not know what to do with my hands and my lips fell open, just barely while I tried to summon the words.

"I'm not asking you for anything tonight, and there’s no pressure to change what is going on between us, or anything else," he said. Stopping for a moment, he took a deep inhale. "We’re already planning to tell your brother after the new year, and…I told Anna about you this morning.”

“What, uh…did you tell her?” The words felt like stalling. I had a million things to tell him, but none would come out. I am obsessed with you. You’re mine. It’s always been you for me since I was eighteen? None of the things I felt for him were coming to me, but they were all there, begging to be said.

“Your name, that we’ve been seeing each other for months. She asked me if it was serious."

I swallowed thickly. “What…um…was your answer?” I knew, but knowing I was about to hear him say it was huge.