Page 49 of Offside

“Please don’t,” Eli said.

Griffin, from the far end of the room, said, “He’s going to make a highlight reel.”

“Obviously I’m making a highlight reel. I scored a goal. Two of the bounces were good.”

“Two of the—” Cole stopped. Looked at the ceiling. “How many bounces were there total?”

“Four,” Danny said. “But two of them were intentional.”

The room erupted. I sat at my stall and let myself laugh—the real kind, no managing it—and thought about the team I’d played for before this one and how long it had been since a locker room felt like this. We’d won 4–1. Theo had his fifth of the season and accepted everyone’s congratulations with the flat expression he held for things he considered the bare minimum, which was so perfectly Theo I almost said something warm to him and then decided against it. Some things you didn’t disrupt.

The team went out. A bar near the hotel, close enough to walk, warm inside with the low noise of men who had earned their drink. I went with them and had one beer and sat with Eli at the end of the table while Cole held court at the other end with the volume he brought to every room he’d ever walked into.

Griffin found me on the walk back and grabbed me around the neck from behind, said something in my ear that was mostly profanity and entirely affectionate—something about the redirect goal I’d scored off a Westbrook shot in the second, about how I managed to make every good play look like I’d rather be filing taxes. I caught his arm and held on for a second the way I had after San Jose. I couldn’t afford to lose this either.

That was the thing I kept not letting myself examine directly even though it was always looming around the edges of this thing with Maren. Griffin had told his parents about me before training camp ended. He’d given me a key to his parents’ house, the casual trust that most people took years to build, and he’d done it in six weeks because that was who he was—all-in, no half measures, the most wholehearted person I’d ever known. He’d told me once, after a bad loss our sophomore year, that I was the kind of person worth building something with. He’d been twenty years old and completely serious and he’d been right, and I’d spent the last eleven years trying to deserve it.

What I was doing now was not that.

Every day I didn’t tell him how I felt about his sister was a day I was deciding, again, that my own comfort mattered more than his right to know. I’d been dressing it up as protection—protecting the team, the season, the friendship itself—but standing in a Nashville street with his arm around my shoulders, I knew the name for what I was actually doing. I was a coward about the one thing that should have made me brave.

I stayed for one drink. I was watching Cole charm a table of women without appearing to try while Eli nursed a soda and checked his phone, his thumb hovering over the screen. I watched Griffin laugh at something across the room, easy and unguarded, how he always was when the team was playing well, and the familiar pull of gratitude for this group of people I still hadn’t found the right words for arrived and settled in my body.

Then I put my glass down, said my goodnights, and went back to the hotel.

The room was on the fourteenth floor and overlooked the city, the Cumberland River a dark ribbon below the lights. I stood at the window for a moment. Two cities in two nights—a loss and a win, a woman I’d thought about for every waking hour of both. I sat on the edge of the bed and picked up my phone.

The team wouldn’t be back for hours. I had no reason to call her. It was late and she had work tomorrow and I’d texted her earlier. I had no reason to call her.

I called her anyway.

It rang twice.

“You won,” she said.

“We won.”

“I saw. 4–1.” I heard shifting in the background, the quieting of a room at the end of a night. “Theo got his fifth.”

“He did.”

“He looked very unhappy about the celebration.”

“He always looks unhappy about celebrations. It’s how you know he’s enjoying himself.” I lay back against the headboard, phone against my ear, and stared at the ceiling. “Where are you?”

“Couch. I was reading. It’s almost eleven. Why aren’t you out with the team?”

“I was. I left.”

“You left to come back to your hotel room alone?”

“I left to call you.”

Then, quieter. “Ryan.”

“I know.” I did. I knew exactly what it meant that I’d put down a drink and walked out of a bar full of celebrating teammates to sit in a hotel room in Nashville and hear her voice, and I wasn’t pretending otherwise. “How was your day? Tell me about it.”

She let me change the subject and conceded to my request. She told me about a difficult intake session, a defensive prospect with a hip labrum tear that was going to require a longer rehab timeline than anyone wanted to hear. She filled me in about a scheduling dispute with the team physician that had eaten forty minutes of her afternoon. Then she told me about dinner, a new recipe from Paige that had turned out better than expected. I listened with the full attention I gave things that mattered, and the empty hotel room stopped feeling empty.