Page 157 of Offside

I put my hand over hers and held it flat against my heart so she could feel what she'd done to the rhythm underneath. “Baby, feel what you’ve done to me. I fucking loved it.”

She settled against me and I lay in the sealed dark of that room with her weight on my chest and no working thoughts at all for quite some time.

Later, still awake, but relaxed and calm, we talked. “Tell me something,” she said.

“What.”

“Anything. Something I don’t know about you yet.”

I thought about it. “In Malmö when I was a kid, my grandfather used to take me to watch the local team play. Little rink, smelled like diesel and wet wool. I thought it was the greatest place on earth.”

“Did he know?” she asked. “How much it meant to you.”

“He knew.” I paused. “Same rink, twenty years earlier. It’s where he fell in love with the game.”

She stilled for a moment. Her fingers found the bracelet on her wrist. Alltid din. And traced the engraving with her thumb, back and forth, over and over.

“I want to go to Sweden with you someday,” she said. “See the rink.”

I pressed my lips to her hair. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Simple. Certain. No room for argument.

I held her a little tighter and stared at the ceiling and thought about Malmö in July, the light that didn’t fully go dark, my grandfather’s voice, the smell of the ice in summer. I thought about what it would be like to take Maren there. To show her the rink and the city and the beauty that existed at the top of the world in midsummer, and to watch her turn it into something she’d never forget and would associate with me.

I knew someday we were going to do it.

“Alltid din,” I said quietly.

I woke at two in the morning to the deep darkness of a hotel room. The blackout curtains, the thin line of light under the door, the unfamiliar hum of climate control, and Maren warm against my side, her breathing slow and even.

I lay still for a moment, taking stock. The road trip, the games, the locker room, Griffin sitting in the chair across from my laptop at midnight talking defensive coverage like it was September again. The table at the bar with all of us. Theo arguing, Cole fabricating, Eli saying almost nothing and meaning all of it. Maren’s hand on my thigh, my hand on hers, two people not hiding anything in front of thirty people who were all, as it turned out, entirely fine with it.

I thought about Maren saying “I want to go to Sweden with you someday” like it was a settled thing, like our future was a place she’d started planning visits to, and I didn’t have a Swedish word or an English one to describe how it made me feel. Just the warmth of a thing that was mine and that I was not going to be careless with.

I turned toward her.

She rolled to face me in her sleep. Just that—her face finding my shoulder, her hand settling against my chest without her knowing she’d done it—and that was the end of lying still.

“Hey,” I said quietly, against her hair.

She stirred when my hand moved along her jaw. “Mm. S’late.” Her voice was thick with sleep.

“I know.” I pressed my mouth to her temple. Her cheek. The soft skin at the corner of her jaw. “You can go back to sleep if you’d rather.”

“Ryan—” My name came out blurred and soft. “What are you doing.”

“Nothing.” I kissed her throat, slow, and felt her exhale shift. “Shh.”

She made a sound that was not an objection. “Mmm.”

I moved down. Took my time getting there—her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder—and when I closed my mouth over her nipple she came awake fast, her breath catching sharp, her hand finding my hair.

“Oh—” Not a word. Just that sound—her body ahead of her brain, entirely out of her control.

I stayed there, soaking in what made her grip tighten and what made her hips shift and what made her say my name in the register that went straight through me. She was warm from sleep, her skin softer than usual, and she tasted like something I was going to spend a long time thinking about. I moved to the other side and felt her arch up and I pressed my palm flat against her stomach to hold her still, because I wasn’t done yet and I wanted her to know it.

“Ryan.” Breathless now. Awake.