Page 141 of Offside

Griffin: I know you are. We’re good Mare.

Griffin: You should talk to your guy

I put the phone down.

Talk to your guy.

I’d sent him a couple messages the night it happened, after I left his apartment, while I was still shaking.

Maren: I need a few days. It’s not about us.

Maren: This team is in its first year. It’s the whole city’s second chance and millions of dollars and a locker room that’s barely a team yet, and the first thing to crack is you and my brother. Because of me. Because of what we did.

Maren: I’m not going to be the reason it comes apart before it gets off the ground. I think we need to take some space and really think about that and what we want.

Ryan: I know what I want and I’m not going anywhere.

Ryan: I’m going to fix this.

He’d answered in under a minute, and then he’d done exactly what he said. He hadn’t gone anywhere. He just hadn’t crowded me either.

I’d been holding the line with my guy for over a week. Not to punish him. Not to make him suffer or wait or prove anything. I believed his apology. I believed the Swedish text and the keychain and every one of the days he’d kept showing up in my phone. I wasn’t pulling back because I doubted him.

I was pulling back because of what I’d done to him.

I’d watched Griffin’s face change in Ryan’s kitchen, watched a friendship that predated me crack down the middle, and I understood with total clarity that I had done that. This team was four months old. Two hundred million dollars of someone else’s money, a city that had been burned once and was deciding whether to believe in hockey again, a room full of men learning how to be a team in their first season—and the first real fracture in it ran straight down the middle of the captain and his best friend. Because I’d slept with one of them in secret for months. The most fragile, most important thing any of these people had built, and I was the crack in it.

So I’d made the only decision that felt like setting something right. I’d taken myself out of the middle of it. Handed his care to Jade, given him room, stepped back far enough that he could repair the thing that mattered without me in the frame making it harder. It was the responsible thing. The mature thing. The thing a person did when she loved someone enough to stop costing them.

That was the story I told myself on the patio, watching the hawk hold itself motionless against the wind. That this was generosity. That I was giving him something.

Underneath it was an older, quieter thing I’d carried so long I’d stopped hearing it. A man like Ryan would come to his senses about a woman like me the moment she cost him something real. Better to step back while it was still my choice than to stand there and watch him do the math and land where everyone landed eventually. Better to want less now than to be taught to want less all over again.

But I couldn’t put away the the longest string of texts he’d sent all week the night before.

Ryan: I can’t sleep when you’re not here. I keep reaching over.

Ryan: I miss the way you argue with the TV.

Ryan: I miss your cold feet.

Ryan: I miss you telling me I’m wrong about books.

Ryan: I miss you so fucking much, Maren. I’m going to fix this, baby.

I teared up and sent a reply.

Maren: I miss you too.

Maren: I just think we need a little time. You’ve got games that matter and I don’t want to be the thing pulling your head out of them.

I’d read it four times before I put the phone down. He hadn’t pushed. He’d just left it there, the truth of it, and let me do what I was going to do with it.

The space was starting to feel like a room I’d accidentally locked myself into.

I picked up my phone again and opened Ryan’s messages. I hadn’t been ignoring them exactly. I’d read every one, usually within thirty seconds of receiving them. I’d answered him twice—once to tell him I needed time, once to tell him I missed him too and meant it—and both times I’d made myself stop there, because saying more meant giving ground I wasn’t ready to give. But I’d read every one. All of them.

What struck me, going through them now in the late afternoon quiet, was what they weren’t. They weren’t escalating. They weren’t increasingly desperate or pointed. None of the subtle pressure I’d learned to recognize from Josh, the texts that were technically innocuous but carried an undertow of why aren’t you answering, what does this mean, are you punishing me. Ryan’s texts didn’t have an undertone. They were him. His feelings and nothing more.