Page 134 of Offside

I knew he wanted me. I’d never doubted that.

What I didn’t know, what the past few days of shorter texts and canceled dinner and fine had made me question in the small hours of the night when I was least equipped to argue myself out of it, was whether wanting me was going to be enough to make him choose me. Openly. Fully. Without Griffin’s blessing as a prerequisite.

I was furious at Griffin for making this complicated.

I was furious at Ryan for letting it be.

I was furious at myself for insisting on secrets. So there I was, sitting in a parking garage crying about it instead of being home in my own house, in my own bed, not doing this.

My phone lit up on the passenger seat.

Ryan: I know what you said. I know what you need me to do. I’m going to do it. I just need you to know that there is nothing to figure out. I already know what I want.

I stared at it as the tears kept coming. Then a second message.

Ryan: Jag vill förtjäna din kärlek.

I sat with his words for a moment, then opened my browser and typed it in with one hand.

I want to deserve your love.

I set the phone face-down on the passenger seat and massaged the spot his words affected me the most. My heart. I wasn’t ready to deal with it in a parking garage at ten o’clock at night.

I knew he meant it. That was never the question.

I started the car.

I drove home through the warm Phoenix dark thinking about all the ways a person could mean something and still not do enough with it, and about Griffin sitting across from me on the treatment table saying this clearly isn’t that, and about a key on a The Ashby Letters keychain taken off his own ring.

I wasn’t done. I wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t need a grand gesture. His every day actions—outside of the last few days–—outside of the last few days—were proof he loved me. But I needed him to act, and I needed to matter enough to him that he did it now. While things were fucked up and messy. Not when the moment was convenient, not when Griffin had fully recovered, not when everything was tidy. Now, while it was hard and inconvenient and required something real from him. That was the thing I needed to see.

I pulled into my driveway and sat with the engine running for a moment.

He’d sent me two texts before I’d even cleared the parking structure.

I picked up my phone and studied them again.

I already know what I want.

I want to deserve your love.

I turned the engine off and went inside.

CHAPTER 25

RYAN

I got to the facility early.

Not unusual. I was almost always the first one in, the one who liked the building before it filled up, before the noise and the equipment and the charged energy of forty people preparing their bodies for something that mattered. I liked the quiet of it. The facility at six-thirty in the morning smelled like rubber and cold air and the faint antiseptic underneath everything, and it was mine, briefly, before the day claimed it.

I’d told myself I wasn’t coming in early because of Maren.

But I was absolutely coming in early because of Maren.

I changed into my training gear and headed down the hallway toward the treatment rooms, and my pulse picked up somewhere around the second door. The aliveness of knowing I was about to be in the same space as her, even if that space was a treatment table and she was being professional and careful. I’d take careful. I’d take whatever version of her I could get right now.

I knocked on the treatment room door.