Page 114 of Offside

"I told her it was serious. No hesitation. I want you to know I didn't have to think about my answer. That's all. You don't have to do anything with it."

Slowly, I crawled into his lap, placing one hand on his chest, and he reached up, running a hand gently against my throat where his thumb ran gently against my necklace. I wasn’t quite ready to say anything, the magnitude of my feelings for him were more than I could express yet, but I licked my lips and smiled, staring into his beautiful blue-gray eyes.

His hand moved from my throat to the back of my neck and he pulled me in for a kiss. Deep, passionate, our tongues tangling, I hoped my movements as I pressed my body to his spoke for me. Ryan lifted to his feet, carrying me with him down the hall to my bedroom where I continued to show him how I felt in lieu of the words I wasn’t ready to say.

CHAPTER 21

RYAN

We lost in Vegas on a Tuesday.

I said the right things in the postgame interview and walked out to the bus. My dad had texted somewhere between the locker room and the parking lot.

Dad: Tough loss. You’ll get them.

I pocketed my phone.

The bus was quiet the way buses got after bad road losses—not sullen, not fractured, just wrung out. Guys with headphones on, heads back, the exhaustion of men who’d given everything and come up short. I took my seat and looked out the window at the Vegas strip sliding past, all that light, none of it landing.

Griffin dropped into the seat next to me about five minutes out.

“God,” he said. “I’m glad that game is over.”

“Yeah.”

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “The second period bounce. I saw it the whole way and couldn’t do a thing about it.”

“I was already calling for the coverage shift.”

“Half a second.”

“Half a second,” I agreed.

We sat with that for a minute—not picking it apart, just letting it be what it was. The bus hummed. Someone’s music bled faintly from three rows back.

Griffin opened one eye and looked at me sideways. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” I meant it mostly. “Wiped out.”

“Same.” He closed his eye again. “Same.”

He was asleep before we hit the hotel. I sat next to him and looked out at the city going by and thought about Maren. I’d been thinking about Maren through the whole postgame, through the handshake line, through the interviews—like a current running underneath everything else. Not distracting me from it. Just there. She’d been there for weeks, always in the background of whatever else was happening in the foreground, a frequency I’d stopped noticing because it had become constant, and comforting, and entirely hers.

I wanted to call her. That’s all there was to it. After a bad loss in a city I didn’t know, surrounded by people who had my back completely, the thing I wanted most was to hear her voice. Not to debrief the game or fix anything. Just her on the other end of the line saying whatever she said.

Back in my room I sat on the edge of the bed, the game film open on my laptop, room service on the desk I wasn’t going to touch and called her.

She’d watched the game on her TV at home, sound up. She knew the score. She knew which period had gone wrong. She answered on the second ring.

“Hey.” Already warm, already in it. “I watched the third.”

“I know.”

“The coverage miss.”

“I know.”

A beat. “Is something wrong with the room service?”