Page 116 of Offside

“It’s already working.” Griffin held the door. “I watched their faces.”

I went through and the noise of the bar came up around us, and Griffin clapped me once on the back—brief, solid—and went to find a drink.

I stood there for a second in the doorway noise and let it land. Griffin didn’t say things he didn’t mean and he didn’t say them to make you feel better. Eight years apart and he still read a room the same way I did, maybe better. If he said the room shifted, the room shifted.

I went to find my girl.

The Rusty Nail smelled like spilled beer and cedar and the bright citrus of whatever Dee had put in the punch bowl that nobody was going near yet. By nine-thirty every table was taken. The speaker in the corner was running a playlist someone had clearly curated with intent. Something with a low pulse underneath it, music that said we’re not leaving early without saying it. Streamers in burnt orange and black hung from the exposed ceiling beams. Cole’s work, obviously. The man had no restraint and zero shame about it and I had learned to find that useful.

Maren was across the room.

She’d come in at eight-thirty with Paige, both of them in good spirits that meant the evening had already started somewhere else, and in the first twenty minutes I’d found myself next to her at the bar and I’d said hi to her like I’d say hi to Griffin’s sister at a team event. She’d said hi back. She’d asked if I’d confirmed my travel window for the road trip. I’d told her. She’d made a dry comment about Jordan Holt treating rest as a theoretical concept, and I’d laughed, and she’d smiled at me, the professional version, warm and precise and giving me absolutely nothing, and then Paige had materialized and that was that.

Thirty seconds passed between us, completely unremarkable to anyone watching.

I was standing near the end of the bar with a whiskey I’d been nursing for forty minutes, which was the right drink for a night where I wanted to be functional at midnight and also needed something to do with my hands.

I was still thinking about my brief interaction with Maren two hours later. She was the only person I wanted to hang out with and it was making me irritable.

It wasn’t our conversation I was thinking about though. There was nothing to think about there, it had been twenty words about logistics and one joke. The way she’d been standing. The angle of her shoulder toward me. The skate necklace at her throat catching the bar light. The way she’d smiled at me with the professional version and I’d felt it in my ribs anyway, because my body had stopped caring about the distinction months ago.

Danny was at the pool table attempting to teach Kasperi a technique Kasperi had clearly already mastered and was pretending otherwise out of basic human kindness. Eli was in the corner booth with his beer, present and self-contained, doing what Eli did at social events. Surviving them with dignity while he’d rather be at home with his kid. Theo had found a woman I didn’t recognize and was doing the thing where he listened like she had his complete focus, which with Theo was either genuine or strategy and probably both.

Griffin was in the northeast corner, and had been for quite some time, talking and flirting with a brunette I wasn’t familiar with.

I’d noticed the shift around eleven. Griffin’s posture going deliberate, the dark-haired woman beside him laughing at something, Griffin leaning in with the same full-attention expression he brought to the ice except this wasn’t the ice and wasn’t hockey. I recognized it as Griffin deciding he was not going anywhere for the rest of the evening.

I stared at my whiskey.

I thought about Christmas. The hallway, the string lights, her unwrapping the box. The way she’d gone still when she saw the necklace. Not a performance of being touched, just the real thing, which was the only version of her I’d ever gotten and the only one I wanted. The way she’d said help me put it on and turned her back and I’d worked the clasp with hands that were steadier than they had any right to be given the situation.

I was watching her now across the room. She was talking to Paige, one hand around her drink, and she said something that made Paige laugh hard enough that she grabbed Maren’s arm for balance, and Maren’s face in that moment was open and easy and lit up and I wanted her so badly it was difficult to think around.

I picked up my drink. Put it down.

Waited.

At eleven forty, Cole materialized at my elbow.

“Griffin,” Cole said, without preamble, “is not coming back from that corner.”

“I noticed.”

“I’m just saying.” Cole sipped his drink. “It’s almost midnight. People are pairing off. Atmospherically speaking.” He glanced sideways at me with the same satisfaction he’d been wearing for months, the look he got when something he’d been watching develop was finally moving the way he’d predicted. “Just observationally.”

“Cole.”

“I’m being atmospheric.”

“Go away.”

Cole went, grinning, back into the crowd.

I found Maren at the end of the bar three minutes later. She was half listening to something, and she saw me coming. She didn’t look up. That was the tell. In a room where looking at someone was completely normal, she kept her eyes on her drink and left them there for a full ten seconds.

I leaned past her to get a napkin from the bar dispenser and put my mouth close to her ear, just for a second, low enough nobody would catch it in the noise.

“Griffin’s occupied,” I said. “Northeast corner. Not coming back.”