Page 112 of Offside

The thing I hadn’t expected, the thing I kept being surprised by, even months in, was how natural he was here. I’d spent the fall managing the separation between the facility and this other thing, keeping them in their correct containers, treating him like a patient during work hours and treating him like my secret everywhere else. I’d gotten practiced at it. I could sit across a treatment table from him and be precise and professional, and I could also lie in his bed at two in the morning and feel like myself in a way I hadn’t felt in years, and I’d kept those two things from touching each other so carefully that I’d started to believe they lived in entirely different worlds.

Except here he was at my parents’ Christmas table, passing the ham to my father and asking my mother about the glaze and being himself. The same version of himself he was in his apartment at midnight. The same steadiness, the same economy, the same dry attentiveness that made every person he talked to feel like the only person in the room worth talking to.

I hadn’t prepared for him to be exactly the same everywhere. I should have.

He found me in the hallway between the kitchen and the living room, which was not a private place at all, and was probably why he’d chosen it. Plausible deniability. Just two people talking in a corridor.

“Hey,” he said, low.

“Hey.” I glanced toward the kitchen. My mom was in there. My dad and Griffin were in the living room, Griffin’s voice carrying over all the other noise of the day. “We should probably⁠—”

“I know.” He didn’t move. “One minute.”

I looked up at him. His expression didn’t negotiate anything. The low lamplight caught the planes of his face, the faint line through his left eyebrow, and I thought, not for the first time, that it was profoundly unfair that he looked like that in my parents’ hallway on Christmas, the glow of my mom’s decorations illuminating his eyes as he bore his gaze into mine.

“I needed you to know,” he said, “that this isn’t nothing. For me.”

I went still.

“I know we can’t—” He paused. Glanced toward the living room over my shoulder, then lowered his voice further. “I know what tonight looks like. And I know what the next couple weeks are probably going to look like. But I didn’t want you to sit at that table and think that the way I’m behaving means what it looks like it means.”

“Ryan—”

“Jensen’s pond,” he said. His voice was quiet, but rushed, like he needed to get this out.

I stopped breathing.

“The truck. The blanket. That bonfire.” His eyes stayed on mine as he whispered. “Griffin had disappeared somewhere and you were cold and we sat in the bed of my truck and watched the stars come out and I had my hand on your knee and there was a moment—” He stopped, then started again. “There was a moment where I almost did something I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to do. And I didn’t. Because of Griffin. Because the timing was wrong. Because I was twenty-two years old and I didn’t know how to want something and also do the right thing at the same time.”

The hallway was very quiet. The television murmured from the living room. My mother’s voice drifted from the kitchen, warm and ordinary, and I was standing in the corridor of my childhood home having the conversation I’d spent nine years pretending I didn’t want to have.

“You remember that,” I said. It came out barely above a whisper.

“I remember all of it.” He said it simply, like it was a fact he’d long since made peace with. “The laugh you gave when something landed and you tried to hide it. The exact weight of the blanket. Your hair in the firelight. I’ve been filing it away for nine years, Maren. That’s not nothing.”

The weight of his words landed deep in my heart, warm and inconvenient, given that we were a room away from my mother.

“I’m not telling you this to—” He stopped and exhaled slowly. “I just needed you to know that whatever this looks like from the outside, to me it’s always been real. You were always—” He stopped. His jaw shifted, fractional. He looked at me with an expression that was older than wanting, older than this season, older than Phoenix. “You were always mine. Even when I couldn’t say it. Even when I had no right to.”

“Ryan.” My voice had gone somewhere I didn’t entirely recognize.

He reached out. Just his hand, covering mine where it rested against the doorframe, his thumb pressing once, warm and deliberate, before he let go.

“Alltid,” he said. Quietly. The way he said things he meant in his core.

I looked at him and swallowed. “What does it mean? Alltid.”

“Always,” he said. “In Swedish. No matter what happens. No matter how it looks from the outside or how long this takes or what I have to carry to get there.” His eyes held mine. “Don’t forget that.”

He looked at me the way he’d looked at me in that truck bed nine years ago. Steady. Unhurried. He had decided this nine years ago and had not changed his mind since. “Say it again.”

“Alltid.”

The line at the corner of his eye deepened. Not a smile. The thing before a smile, the one he kept on a short leash.

“Don’t forget it,” he said again.

My mother called my name from the kitchen. Neither of us moved for one full second. Then I pushed off the doorframe and went to see what she needed, and I carried the word with me the rest of the night like something I could hold in my closed hand without anyone knowing it was there.