Page 90 of Offside

I hadn’t understood what it meant to be that person, what you carried with it. That it lived in his jaw and shoulders and just the quality of stillness he held in public—the effort of it, all the time, every day. There was a weight to it that didn’t really end.

He was putting it down right now. Here. On my couch.

The tight place in my chest went very quiet.

I reached over carefully and turned off the lamp. Pulled the blanket up over both of us. Settled back against his side and felt his arm tighten slightly, reflexive, even in sleep.

I knew what was happening to me. I’d known it longer than I’d admitted to myself. I just lay there in the dark and let it be true without doing anything about it.

The city was quiet on the other side of the blinds and he was warm against my side, his breathing slow and even, finally unburdened of whatever he’d been carrying all day. I lay there listening to it and understood, with the bare clarity that comes at two in the morning when you stop pretending, that I didn’t want to be anywhere else but with him.

He couldn’t do this anywhere else. Not at the rink, or the locker room, and not with his best friend. The only place he got to set it down was at a house nobody was supposed to know he was in.

I’d been telling myself the secret was the easy part.

CHAPTER 17

RYAN

I was on the ice at six-fifteen.

The facility was still at that hour. The building crew finishing their night maintenance, the Zamboni driver doing a final pass on the far rink, the overhead lights still warming up from their overnight dim. I had learned the rhythms of this building the way I’d learned every building I’d ever skated in. The echo of fresh ice, the cold that lived differently indoors than out, the way the boards smelled when nobody had hit them in a while.

I did my edges first. Always. Thirty minutes of footwork before anyone else arrived, before the noise and the drills and the weight of the C on my jersey. Me and the ice and the silence of early morning in an empty arena.

I’d slept well. Better than I had in months, which was notable given the circumstances. The bar, Tiffany, the drive to Scottsdale, Maren falling asleep against my shoulder with her hand flat on my stomach. Around three in the morning my back had filed a formal complaint about her couch, and I’d eased her up carefully and carried her to bed without waking her. She’d made a small sound and tucked herself against me when I settled in beside her, and I’d lain there in the dark of her room with her hair against my chin until I fell back under.

My alarm had gone off at five-thirty. I’d silenced it fast, dressed quietly, pressed my mouth to her hair. She hadn’t stirred. I’d let myself out and driven to the facility in the gray pre-dawn with the windows down and the desert air still cool enough to mean something.

I knew why I’d slept the way I had. I’d been carrying a tightness in my chest for months. The wanting without the certainty, the feeling without knowing what to do with it, and last night had finally stripped it loose. Watching her try to hold herself together in that college T-shirt, hearing her say infinitesimally with total seriousness, feeling her press her nose against my shoulder when she thought I wasn’t paying attention. All of it had landed and settled. I knew what I felt. I’d known for a while.

I made a wide arc around the far end of the ice, leaning into my edges, and let myself have it for a moment. The certainty, the stillness of it. Then the day started.

Griffin stepped onto the ice and the moment was over.

“You’re early,” Griffin said.

“I know.”

Griffin shrugged, snapping his helmet on. “Couldn’t sleep.” He pushed off toward his crease, already shifting gears, and then glanced back. “You look annoyingly well-rested.”

“I am.”

Griffin held my gaze for exactly two seconds, the goalie reading angles, and then let it go. I turned back to my edges and let the ice do what it always did. Simplify everything down to movement and the clean problem of staying upright at speed.

Practice ran two hours and change.

Calloway had us working structure. Zone entries, breakout patterns, the defensive sequences that had been bleeding against left-shooting forwards all month. The Sidewinders had a habit of going soft on the weak side in our own zone, a product of twelve guys who’d learned twelve different systems on twelve different teams, and Calloway had been grinding on it with the patience he brought to problems he’d fixed before and knew how long they took.

I ran the first line through the breakout until Eli’s positioning clicked and Cole stopped cheating toward the puck. The second part took longer.

“West, you’re drifting again,” I called on the third rep.

“I had the lane.”

“You had the lane and gave up the backcheck.”

“Kovac had it.”