Page 148 of Offside

“You are not the cost of anything,” he said. “You’re not a complication I have to manage around or a risk to the team or the reason my best friend and I had a hard week. Griffin and I had a hard week because I lied to him. I made that choice. Not you.” His voice stayed low and certain, no give in it anywhere. “Let me be as clear as I know how to be.” He paused, and my heart was about to beat right out of my chest. “If it came down to it—if someone put it in front of me tomorrow and said it’s her or the team, the C, all of it—I’d hand back the letter and clean out my stall and not think about it twice. I waited my whole career for this season, for this team, and I would walk away from it for you and never once wonder if I’d made the right call.”

Now I had to interrupt. What was he saying? “Ryan, you can’t say⁠—”

“Wait. I’m not saying I’ll have to. Nobody’s asking me to.” His mouth moved, almost, then he schooled his features before continuing. “I’m saying you’ve got it all backward. You’re not the thing that costs me the team. You’re the thing I’d give the team up for. You’re the gift I never thought I’d have the chance to have, and I’m not letting this second chance with you go. Those are not the same and I need you to feel the difference.”

The tears came loose in a flood now. He brushed them off my face with his thumbs again and kept going, because he wasn’t finished and he wasn’t going to let me hide in the middle of it.

“Baby, please don’t cry. You spent far too long learning to make yourself smaller. Learning that needing things or wanting things for yourself made you a burden, that wanting more than you were handed made you difficult, and the safest thing was to want less.” His jaw tightened. “I have watched you do it. Watched you call what we have borrowed. Watched you wait for it to expire. And I am telling you, in your living room, at midnight, with nothing left to hide behind—you are never too much. You were never the thing that cost me something. You are the thing I would pay anything to keep.”

“Ryan—”

“I told you I’d fix it. I fixed it. Griffin knows, and tomorrow the team knows—I mean a lot of them figured it out, and apparently there were bets, but whatever—that’s a whole other thing—and I’m done hiding and done waiting for the right moment and done letting you believe for one more day that you’re something I have to be talked into.” His thumb moved along my jaw. “I want to sit next to you at your parents’ table and put my hand on yours in front of your mother. I want to stand next to you at Cole’s parties and let people think whatever they want. When I score I want to look up and find you, not look away. I want every person in that building to know exactly whose you are.” He held my face like it was the only thing in the room. “You are never going to feel less than again. Not with me. I won’t allow it.”

“Really?” I sounded meek and didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t believe the declaration he was making.

“Maren, I’ve known since you were eighteen years old standing at the edge of a frozen pond in my sweatshirt. I held the line then because of Griffin and I would have kept holding it for the rest of my life if you hadn’t walked into me at the arena in September. You were always the one I was comparing everyone else to without letting myself know that’s what I was doing. Nine years, Maren. And I’m not doing that anymore.”

The last of the careful distance I’d been maintaining cracked open.

I reached up and took his wrists, not to move his hands away. Just to hold on.

“Okay,” I said. My voice came out slightly wrecked.

“Okay?” he asked, as if he were almost surprised.

“Yeah. Okay. I’m yours… For real.” And I was. Whether or not I was the problem didn’t even matter. I was always his.

A huge grin spread across his face.

“You’re goddamn right you are.”

He kissed me.

It wasn’t soft. It was two weeks of distance and the long stretch of everything we’d been careful about, finally given somewhere to go. I got my hands in his shirt and pulled and he pulled me onto his lap, his body solid against mine, his mouth moving with a focused intensity that made my brain go quiet. My fingers gripped at his shoulders before moving into his hair, where I gripped the strands, eliciting a moan from him. I could feel his hardness beneath me, and I rocked my hips for just a little friction.

He kissed my neck, licking and sucking as he breathed me in, and I leaned back, groaning.

“I need—” he started.

“I know,” I said. “Me too.” I pulled at his shirt. “Take me to bed.”

He stood, holding me in place, and my legs instinctively wrapped around his waist and he carried us to my bedroom.

In my room he stopped in the middle of the floor and put me down on my feet gently. He reached up and tucked my hair back from my face with both hands, deliberate and tender, then he kissed me again. Slower this time, thorough, a kiss that was saying something. His hands moved down my arms to my waist, gathering the hem of my shirt and pulling it over my head. He dropped it. His palms flattened against my ribs and I felt the warmth of them on my skin.

“You’ve been patient with me,” he said, against my jaw. “More patient than I deserved.” His mouth moved to my throat. “I’m going to spend a long time making that up to you.”

“Ryan—”

“Don’t argue with me.” He unclasped my bra and let it fall. He stepped back slightly and took me in. Not hurried in any way, looking at me in the low light of my bedside lamp with the quiet intensity I’d come to recognize as him deciding something, and I felt heat climb my skin. “Get on the bed.”

I sat on the edge. He dropped to his knees in front of me.

The surprise of it. His size, his steadiness, the complete unhurried intention of him, made my breath catch. He put his hands on my thighs and slid them up slowly, his palms gentle against my skin and pressed a kiss to the inside of my knee.

“I’ve been thinking about this,” he said, against my thigh. “Every day of this past week.” His mouth moved higher. “Every practice, every film session, every dinner I ate alone.” Higher still. “Every time I texted you and you didn’t answer.”

“Ryan—”