Page 120 of Offside

“You continue to surprise me,” she whispered.

Griffin came out of the northeast corner, straightening his collar, looking extremely pleased with himself, and equally disheveled. He caught my eye across the room and grinned. Enormous, golden, completely unsubtle, just how Griffin always grinned at things that had gone well for him, the same one he’d been deploying since college when something was working out exactly the way he wanted it to.

Griffin pointed finger guns at me.

I shook my head.

I looked at Maren one more time. No longer looking at me, she was laughing with Cole and the same girl he’d been with at his pool party, seeming completely unaffected by what we did in Dee’s office. Several of the guys came up to her to wish her and Cole a Happy New Year, and the more guys that tried to get a kiss out of her, the more ready I was to tell the whole fucking world she was mine.

I was paying close attention.

I raised my glass to Griffin and silently drank to that.

Two days later I was on the bike cooling down after the morning skate when Cole came in and sat on the one next to mine without turning it on.

I kept pedaling.

“So,” Cole said, fiddling with the controls on his bike.

“What’s up, Westbrook?”

“So,” he repeated. He put his hands on the handlebars and looked at them for a moment. “Maren.”

My cadence didn’t change, externally. “What about her?”

“I just—” He stopped, then started again. “Look. I’m going to say something and I need you to know I know it’s none of my business and I have mentioned it before but I’m going to say it anyway and you gotta know it’s coming from a good place and I’m not trying to be a pain in your ass.”

My heart rate, which had been dropping steadily for the last four minutes, reversed course.

“It’s obvious,” Cole said. “Whatever’s going on between you two is more than a flirtation. Anyone paying attention can see it.” He glanced at me sideways. “I’ve been paying attention.” He grinned. “And, I mean most of us saw you kiss her at midnight on New Year’s.”

I kept my eyes forward. That kiss was downright chaste. If only he knew what else we did that night. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I didn’t care. But I did care. Mostly I cared what she would think of this situation. I knew she was caring less and less and her feelings toward me were growing. But being outed? This wasn’t good. We had our own timeline. It would be taken care of soon.

“I think it’s great,” Cole said, snapping my attention back to him, and the thing about Cole was that he meant it completely—no angle, no performance, just a guy who wanted good things for the people around him. “You seem…happy. She seems happy. It’s honestly kind of wonderful to watch. I love love.” He paused, and the warmth in his voice shifted to something more direct. “But she’s Griffin’s little sister. Your best friend. The guy who has your back every single night.” He looked at me. “He doesn’t know.” It wasn’t exactly a question.

“No,” I said.

“How long?”

“Since October.”

He exhaled slowly, letting a beat pass before he spoke again and rubbed a hand down his face. “So it’s serious.”

“It is.” No hesitation.

Cole nodded, his expression settling into quiet certainty, his read confirmed. “He’s going to find out,” he said. “And when he does, it won’t be finding out about Maren that breaks him, and the team. It’ll be finding out you said nothing—every dinner, every practice, every time he told you something real about his life while you were sitting on the truth of yours.” He paused. “That’s the part that’s hard to come back from.”

I stopped pedaling and sat with his words, the bike winding down under me, the way I’d been refusing to sit with it for months. He wasn’t wrong; a fact I’d known for some time.

“Not to mention the sister rule.”

Defensive, I finally spoke up. “That’s a fucking stupid rule. We’re adults.” Cole pursed his lips at me and shrugged. I let out a belabored sigh and admitted, “I get it. You’re right.”

I’d told myself I was protecting the team and the season and Griffin from a complication he didn’t need mid-season, and all of that was true, but none of it was the whole truth. I’d been protecting myself too—from the look on Griffin’s face, from the moment I couldn’t take back, from being the person who had done this to his best friend even for the right reasons. I’d wanted to tell him from the beginning.

It was Maren who’d needed time, who’d come into this with her own caution and her own calculation of what she stood to lose, and we’d agreed together even if it wasn’t what I’d wanted exactly, but I’d have taken her any way she’d let me in. But the agreement had a shelf life and I was the only one still hiding behind it, and the reason wasn’t uncertainty about her. The reason was that I was afraid of what the conversation would cost, and I’d been calling that something else for three months.

“Maybe it is a dumb rule. But it is a courtesy, at the very least. And don’t you think that maybe Griffin deserves that courtesy? I’m not saying permission, you do whatever you want, but I’m concerned how this will affect the team if it comes out before you tell him yourself.”