Page 153 of Offside

“Hey.” She tipped her chin up and I pressed my lips to hers, right there in the middle of the hotel lobby with three dozen teammates and staff pulling their bags through the doors behind me.

Someone wolf-whistled. I was fairly sure it was Cole.

“About time,” someone else said. Danny, I thought. Or possibly Kasperi.

Griffin, passing us on his way to the elevator, stared at the ceiling, visibly exercising restraint. “I’m not seeing this,” he said.

“Yes you are,” Maren said, teasing him, the way only a little sister could.

“I’m absolutely not.” But his jaw had given him away. He kept walking.

I put my hand at the small of Maren’s back and steered her toward the elevator. She was smiling. The one that reached her eyes and landed in the center of my chest.

“So,” she said, as the elevator doors closed. “That’s what it feels like.”

“Being public?”

“Being chosen in public.” She turned to face me. “It’s different than I expected.”

“Good different?”

She considered me for a moment. It was a measured look, but lighter now, unguarded. “Yeah,” she said. “Really good different.”

I kissed her again in the elevator because I could. Not holding back my affection was my new favorite thing.

The Vancouver games were good. The team was playing with the cohesion that had been building since before the Griffin situation and had only sharpened since. The playoff push concentrating everyone’s attention, the standings close enough that every point mattered. Theo had found a gear in the last month I hadn’t been sure he had. Eli was playing the best hockey of his career, quietly and without making anyone notice he was doing it, which was entirely in character.

I was playing well too. I knew why. I’d been carrying something heavy since October and I wasn’t carrying it anymore, and the difference was visible in my game the way it had been visible in my distraction. Only now it was all going the right direction.

After the second Vancouver game, a 4-2 win that pushed us to within three points of a playoff berth, the team went to a bar near the hotel. A low-lit, wood-paneled place that smelled like cedar and good beer, a dive bar that had probably been there for forty years and had no interest in being anything else. We took over the long table near the back.

Maren sat next to me and I put my hand on her thigh under the table and didn’t move it, and nobody pretended not to notice, and nobody made a thing of it either. That was what I hadn’t fully anticipated. How easy it would be once it was just out in the open. Cole had clocked it the moment Maren arrived Thursday, had given me a look of such profound vindication that I’d almost laughed out loud, and then had gone back to being Cole. Theo had noted it with the flat observational precision that was Theo’s baseline, giving a nod and saying nothing. Kasperi had opened his mouth and Danny had elbowed him before anything came out, which I appreciated.

Griffin, across the table, was on his second beer and deep in conversation with Theo about the power play rotation. He glanced at me once. At my hand on Maren’s leg. And glanced away without comment. Not warm yet, not fully. But not cold either. Holding to a decision he’d already made.

I appreciated that too. More than I could have said.

Maren got into an argument with Theo about defensive zone coverage that I found deeply attractive. She was sharp and direct and completely unbothered by arguing with a professional hockey player about hockey. Theo, for his part, had the same expression he wore when he was interested in what someone was saying and too proud to let it show, but I could see the slightest upturn of his lips like he wanted to smile.

“She’s right,” I said.

Theo turned. “You’re biased.”

“I’m always right,” Maren said pleasantly, then sipped her drink.

Cole was telling a story about a Nashville hotel incident I was fairly certain was at least sixty percent fabricated. Danny was hanging on every word. Kasperi was attempting to look unimpressed, which he wasn’t.

Eli sat at the end of the table with a club soda he’d been nursing for most of an hour and said almost nothing and seemed entirely content. That was Eli. He didn’t need to fill space, never had. He was one of the few people I’d met in my career who understood presence didn’t require noise.

“Eli.” Maren leaned forward past me. “How’s Iris?”

The whole careful economy of Eli’s face shifted. Just slightly, just enough to resemble a smile. “Good,” he said. “Getting big. Starting to ask a lot of questions these days.”

“Like what?”

“Why Daddy goes away so much. Why other kids’ dads are home more.” He turned his beer in his hands. “Hard to explain a hockey season to a four-year-old. Hard to explain why this is the life, why it has to be this way. She had a whole thing at drop-off last week. Wouldn’t let me put her down. Twenty minutes.”

The table had gone slightly quieter. Eli didn’t talk about Iris often.