Page 52 of Offside

Griffin: How did you not know this already you’re the captain

Ryan: I’m forwarding you the email

Griffin: Oh. Huh. Okay

I packed my bag and decided not to text Maren. I’d experienced travel fuck-ups before and I didn’t want to think I’d be in early only to find out the whole email was wrong and we’d be fucking off at the airport until the next day anyway.

We landed at Sky Harbor at 10:22. The desert air hit me when I stepped off the jet bridge—warm even in November, the dry heat of Phoenix that still felt foreign after a Minnesota childhood but had started, over the last few weeks, to feel like something I might call home. I grabbed a rideshare from the curb while the rest of the team waited for the bus or grabbed their own rides, bag at my feet, and gave the driver her address.

Her street was quiet. One light on in her front window, the warm amber of her living room lamp throwing a glow across the front steps. The car pulled up and I got out with my bag still on my shoulder, still in my travel clothes, and walked to her door, loosening my tie.

I knocked.

I heard movement inside and then she pulled the door open.

“We landed early,” I said, and forgot every other thing I’d planned to say when I saw her.

CHAPTER 12

MAREN

I had been reading the same paragraph for twenty minutes. Not because the book was bad. It was fine, better than fine, a slow-burn romance Paige had sent me with a voice note that said you need this right now and a string of emojis I had chosen to interpret generously. The problem was that I kept hitting the same line about the hero’s hands and then thinking about different hands entirely, and then I’d lose the page and have to find it again, and the third time it happened I put the book face-down on the cushion beside me and stared at the ceiling.

I’d cleaned up from dinner, answered two work emails, watered the succulent on my windowsill that I kept meaning to name. Normal Wednesday. Except I’d had a phone call two hours ago that had left me lying in the dark for forty-five minutes before I gave up and made tea, and the tea had gone cold while I stared at nothing, and now I was on my couch with a romance novel I couldn’t focus on and the restless edge of waiting for something I’d already been told was coming.

Think of me, he’d said, and hung up.

I was thinking about him. I had been thinking about him since the parking lot outside Bound, if I was being exact, and before that since a pool party kitchen in September, and if I went all the way back I’d been thinking about him since the corridor on my first day when he’d caught my elbow and held it a beat too long.

I hadn’t known the half of it.

I gave up on the book around ten-thirty. Made more tea I didn’t drink. Checked my phone and found nothing useful, nothing from Ryan, nothing from Griffin, a meme from Paige that made me snort, and was composing a response when someone knocked on my door.

I set my phone down. Almost eleven on a Wednesday. I wasn’t expecting anyone.

I went to the door and checked the peephole.

Ryan Lindqvist was standing on my porch with a duffel bag on his shoulder.

Still in his travel clothes. White button down, slacks, and a plain black silk tie. He was holding the jacket I’d seen him wear getting off planes since September. He’d come directly from the airport without stopping anywhere first, which the bag confirmed, and I also knew was impossible because the team wasn’t supposed to land until tomorrow afternoon.

I opened the door.

“We landed early,” he said.

He stepped across the threshold and pushed the door shut behind him.

Then he stopped in his tracks and it seemed like he forgot what he came to say.

His eyes dropped to the sweatshirt—to the faded gold lettering, the worn fabric—and came back up to my face, and then he grinned. Wide and real and completely unguarded, a grin that meant he’d just gotten the answer he already knew but needed to see confirmed. He knew exactly how old that sweatshirt was. He knew exactly where it came from.

My face went warm. It was what I wore on couch nights, curled up with a book and nowhere to be—had been for years. And now he was standing in my doorway at eleven o’clock and I was taking him in—the dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms, his tie loosened and pulled to one side like he’d done it somewhere on the drive over and never thought about it again. No bag checked. No text. He’d come straight here, rumpled and deliberate, because apparently tomorrow had been too long to wait.

He was looking at me like seeing me tonight had answered a question he’d hoped to answer after nine years, like maybe he did notice I took it back then.

His grin shifted, the delight of confirmation giving way to pure intention, and heat flooded through me as I recognized exactly what I was looking at. Nine years ago we’d sat in the bed of his truck and walked away like responsible young adults. We weren’t walking away tonight. His eyes had gone dark and focused and entirely predatory, and my body had already made its decision—if I was being honest, the decision had been made somewhere around the third time he’d said my name on the phone from Nashville and my body lit up. We were adults. Nobody was going to walk in here. And I was done pretending I didn’t want every single thing he was about to do.

“That’s my sweatshirt, isn’t it?” he asked.