Page 115 of Offside

I looked at the desk. How did she know I wasn’t eating? “No. Just feeling shitty.”

“About the loss or something else?”

I lay back and stared at the ceiling. “I just wanted to hear your voice. It’s one of those days where being the captain felt impossibly hard and I didn’t want to debrief it or fix it. I just wanted—” I stopped. “This.”

She went quiet for a moment, not the quiet of working out what to say, but the quiet of having already worked it out and deciding whether to say it.

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. When you get back, you’re coming over for a nap date.”

“A nap date.”

“Yes.”

“What is a nap date?”

“You come over,” she said, like this was self-evident. “We get into bed. We watch something completely mindless. We fall asleep. When we wake up, I make you food and we don’t talk about hockey for at least half a day. Mostly because I don’t think either of could actively avoid hockey talk longer.” She let out a small laugh which made me smile.

“That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know why that’s not just called a nap.”

“Because it’s intentional,” she said. “You have to mean it going in. That’s what makes it a date.”

I laughed. “Okay. Fuck yeah,” I said. “It’s a date.”

“Get some sleep,” she said.

“I will.”

“Good.” Her voice went warm and low. “I’ll see you when you get home.”

“Maren?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

“Anytime, baby. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, solsken.”

I lay in the dark after she hung up and thought about the word home and where I’d started to feel it the most lately. The answer was obvious. It was with her. Anywhere she was felt like home, and I couldn’t wait to get back there.

Griffin fell into step beside me on the walk over. I’d picked him up on my way to the Rusty Nail for New Year’s Eve, and I’d be a liar if I said I was excited to go. All I really wanted was to cozy up with my girl and ring in the new year between her legs, and then wrapping my arms around her the rest of the night.

“How’s the apartment?” he asked.

“Good. Finally put things on the walls.”

“Yeah?” He glanced over. Griffin had seen every place I’d ever lived—the freshman dorm, the rookie apartment, the one after that—and the question wasn’t small talk.

I had to park pretty far away with the crowd being so big that night. We walked without talking for a stretch, the easy quiet we’d had since we were eighteen, neither of us needing to fill it.

“The speech,” Griffin said. “Back in San Jose. I was thinking about it. You said the thing nobody says out loud and the room shifted.” He paused. “People will run through a wall for someone who’s honest with them.”

I looked at the bar ahead of us. “Let’s hope so.”