Page 146 of Offside

“We talked a lot of it out. She wanted us to talk. It was important to her. She didn’t ask me to forgive you. She didn’t make it about you at all, actually. She just—” Griffin inhaled a breath. “She owned her part of it. Told me she should have said something from the beginning. And she was right.” He looked at me. “She was also still furious at me, which she had every right to be.”

“You know what actually made me maddest, but opened my eyes?” Griffin said finally. I didn’t respond. “Not the lying. Not even the relationship.” He looked at me. “When you stepped in front of her. At the apartment. When I said what I said about Josh—and before you get defensive, I know, I know I shouldn’t have—you just moved. Like you didn’t even think about it. Just put yourself between me and her without blinking.” He shook his head slowly and breathed out a humorless laugh. “That’s when I knew it wasn’t casual. A guy who’s just sleeping with someone doesn’t do that. A guy who’s in love with someone does.”

“You said something you shouldn’t have.”

“Yeah.” Griffin’s jaw tightened. “I know. That’s—I’ve been carrying that.” He turned to me directly.

I thought about the apartment. Griffin in the doorway, the six-pack, the moment when he’d taken the cheap shot about Josh and I’d moved without deciding to. I hadn’t thought about it. I’d acted. And it had told Griffin everything he needed to know about what I was to Maren, more than any conversation could have, because you didn’t think in those moments. You just acted from whatever you were made of.

I was glad Griffin had seen it. I was glad it was the truest thing in the room that night.

“She’s my little sister,” Griffin said. “I’ve spent twenty-seven years making sure that meant something to people. That she wasn’t someone you could pick up and put down or use when it suited you. I’ve watched guys treat her like that.” His eyes came up to mine. “I cannot watch someone I actually trust do that to her.”

“You won’t.” I said it without heat, with the same certainty I carried onto the ice. Not loud, not heated, just certain. “I’m not going anywhere. I handled the timing badly and I was wrong for the lying and I’ll carry that. But I know what I have with her and I know what I’d be losing if I walked away, and I’m not walking away.” I paused. “I’d rather lose our friendship honestly than keep it by pretending I don’t feel what I feel. But I’d rather have it, Griff. I’d rather have both. I’m just not willing to give her up to keep things comfortable.”

The silence after that had a different quality than the ones before it. Not the silence of unresolved things. Something more like an exhale. The sound of a room letting go of something it had been holding.

Griffin’s posture changed. The arms uncrossing, the set of his shoulders coming down a fraction.

“You hurt her,” he said, “and I will make sure you never hold a stick comfortably again.”

“Understood.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you mean it. I’d expect nothing less.”

The ghost of a smile crossed his face, brief and real, the kind that appeared when someone was trying not to let it and lost. Griffin turned toward the kitchen. “You want a beer?”

The tightness that had lived in my chest for weeks released. Slowly, enough. “Yeah,” I said. “But I can’t stay.”

Griffin turned back. “Why not?”

I looked at him.

Griffin held my gaze for a moment, reading it the way he read everything. Then his face changed. Not softening exactly, more like arriving somewhere. He’d figured it out.

“Right,” he said. “Does she know you’re coming?”

“No.”

Griffin sat with it for another moment. I watched him work through it. The fact of me standing here having done the thing, and where I was about to go next, and what that said about all of it. About whether this was real. About whether I would show up.

“Go,” Griffin said. Not fine or whatever. Just go. A word that meant he’d already decided.

I was moving toward the door. I stopped with my hand on the frame and turned back one more time. Griffin standing in his kitchen, backlit by the warm light of his apartment, water bottle in hand, the same way he’d been standing the first time I’d met him and understood immediately that this was someone worth trusting.

Some people I knew within minutes. Griffin had been one of those.

“Thank you,” I said. “For hearing me out.”

Griffin’s expression settled into something dry and familiar. “Don’t thank me. Don’t screw it up.”

“Working on it.”

“Lindy.”

I turned back one more time.