Page 23 of In the Crease

Ryan

Loading coolers. Jensen and Petey and I moving them from the bank to Jensen’s truck bed in two trips each, nobody needing to say anything about where everything went. The fire was down to embers. The pond dark. The night colder.

My hands knew exactly what they'd been doing an hour ago and hadn't fully caught up with the part where that was over now.

Griffin appeared at my shoulder. “Good night?”

He said it like he already knew the answer, though the honest answer would have involved significantly more profanity.

“Yeah,” I said.

He read me the way he read everything, still and patient. Then he nodded and moved off to say goodbye to Jensen.

Nothing had happened. I'd held the line, and that was what you did. The line was right. The line was the only thing that made sense given every relevant fact about the situation—Griffin, the draft, the four hundred miles between Minnesota and Arizona, the fact she was eighteen years old and visiting for a weekend and going home tomorrow.

All of those things were still true.

None of them were helping as much as they should have.

I’d done the right thing while sitting on the tailgate of my truck with the stars out and the pond in front of us and the blanket around both of us and her head tipping slightly toward my shoulder and my hand on her knee and her not moving away. And then the back of my fingers against her cheek, one slow deliberate second, and the way she’d gone completely still for the length of it.

Line held. Even if I couldn’t stop replaying it over and over.

On the drive home, Griffin was out before we hit the main road, his head against the passenger window, completely gone. Maren was in the middle. She made the decision—the small shift of her weight, deliberate, leaning into my shoulder instead of his. Not asleep. Choosing.

I kept my eyes on the road and rested my hand on her leg the way I had on the tailgate. Just there. Still holding the line. Tight.

After a moment her pinky found mine, slow and deliberate. Inching over. Not asking exactly. Just arriving next to mine.

I turned our hands over and shifted them to my side of the seat, out of sight, fingers settling into hers. I rubbed my thumb slowly across her knuckles and kept my eyes on the dark road ahead.

We didn’t say anything. I didn’t dare look over either. The heat ran and the roads were dark and empty and she was warm against my side and we held hands in the dark the whole way home with her brother asleep three inches away, and every single one of those forty minutes was spent with her fingers tucked into mine. I kept my eyes on the road and tried to make sense of forty-eight hours that had somehow rearranged me in ways I hadn't known were possible, and I drove slower than I needed to because the night was ending and I wasn't ready for it.

I had absolutely no business being this wrecked by that; by her.

I pulled into the lot and cut the engine. For a moment, nobody moved. Griffin was still out. Maren lifted her head from my shoulder—slow, coming back from somewhere—and the absence of her weight was immediate, a cold where the warmth had been. She sat up and looked at the building through the windshield and didn’t say anything.

I got Griffin moving, which took some doing. He managed the stairs with about ninety percent of the dignity he was going for. Maren came up behind us, quiet, her hands in the pocket of the sweatshirt.

At the top of the stairs, she stopped and glanced back out at the parking lot. The Silverado was below. The birch at the corner were still lit by the streetlights. The sky was black and clear, and the stars were out. I stood and waited.

She turned around. In the low light from the hallway, her eyes were dark and her cheeks still cold-pink from the bonfire and she looked at me for a moment without saying anything, which was its own quiet conversation.

“Good night, Ryan,” she said.

“Good night.”

She went inside.

I stood at the end of the hallway for a while after the door closed. The cold settled back in.

Helvete.

Then I went back toward my room, passing a snoring Griffin on the couch.

The apartment was quiet.

I’d held the line. I was going to be fine. It was just going to take a minute.