Page 162 of Offside

“Mm.”

“Thank you for tonight.” He said it simply. “For letting me be here.”

“You were always going to be here,” I said.

He drove us home. The city going past, the stars visible now that we’d left the neighborhood lights behind.

In my room he undressed me slowly, his hands unhurried, taking his time with every button and clasp like he had all night and intended to use it. He kissed my shoulder, my collarbone, the curve of my throat. I turned off the lamp so only the moonlight came through the curtains. Silver and soft. I lay back on the bed and pulled him down to me.

“Hey,” he said quietly, over me.

“Hey.” I put my hands on his face. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Alltid,” he said. Always. He turned his face into my palm and pressed his lips there.

He moved down my body with his mouth. My throat, the hollow of my collarbone, the inside of my wrist where the bracelet sat, the soft skin at my ribs. I had my hands in his hair and my eyes closed and let myself be taken care of, which was not something I’d been good at for a long time and was getting better at, slowly, with him.

When his mouth found the inside of my thigh I exhaled his name.

“I’ve got you,” he said against my skin. “Stanna hos mig.”

Stay with me.

He was thorough and entirely focused on me. Reading me how he always did, and I understood now this was the same thing, just Ryan paying attention, and I let myself be the thing he was paying attention to without managing it or minimizing it. I came apart quietly, my hands fisting in the sheets, his name on my breath.

He moved over me and I reached for him, pulling him close. We moved together in the silver dark with nothing urgent underneath it, no distance to close, no hiding to undo. The two of us in my bed in the house I’d built my life in, the moonlight moving across the ceiling. Mitt hjärta breathed against my hair when he thought I was almost asleep.

I wasn’t almost asleep.

I was wide awake and present and entirely, completely here.

When I came the second time it was slow and deep and I pressed my face against his throat and felt him follow me, his breath warm on my skin, Swedish I knew and Swedish I didn’t, all of it landing like something true.

Afterward I lay on his chest with his heartbeat under my ear and the moonlight moving across the ceiling and his hand in my hair, and I thought about my mother’s eyes going bright over tulips, and my father’s quiet certainty, and Griffin at the sink with a dish towel. You look like yourself, more than you have in a while.

I was myself. Fully and without qualification, in my own house with my own person, in the city I’d grown up in and chosen to stay in, with the desert outside and the stars above it and everything I’d been managing myself away from finally, completely, and mine.

“Mitt hjärta,” Ryan said quietly, against my hair.

I pressed my lips to his chest and closed my eyes.

CHAPTER 31

RYAN

We clinched a playoff spot on a Wednesday night in April.

The game was against Dallas. A 3-1 win, Theo scoring the first goal and me the third, and when the final horn sounded the bench erupted the way it only had a handful of times in my career, a whole room of us detonating at once, a year of work paying off in a single sound. Cole jumped on Eli’s back. Kasperi was screaming in Finnish. Danny was crying and trying not to, jaw tight, eyes fixed somewhere above the middle distance, not yet knowing it was allowed to just let it happen.

Griffin skated to center ice and I followed him and we embraced. A real one, both arms, the kind that lasted long enough to mean something, and I felt Griffin’s hand on the back of my neck and heard him say into my shoulder, “We did it, Lindy.”

“We did,” I said. “All of us.”

Griffin pulled back and his eyes were on me. The goalie’s precision, reading the play, arriving at the same place I was. “All of us,” he agreed.

It wasn’t everything yet. But it was close.

Maren was in the stands in my jersey.