Page 151 of Offside

I smiled against his chest.

I turned my face up toward him. “Why do you call me that?”

He met my eyes. Nothing held back, the full weight of him present in it, and I held his gaze and waited.

“Because that’s what you are to me,” he said. Simply. “You walked into that rink in September and you were the warmest thing in the building. You still are. Every room you’re in.”

I held his gaze for a long moment. This steady, careful, completely non-performative man who had driven across the city tonight and said the true thing because he meant it.

Then I kissed him, soft and slow and without urgency, and felt him smile against my mouth.

“Go to sleep,” he said.

“Staying?”

He pulled me closer. “Always.”

I lay back against his chest. His heartbeat was slow and steady under my ear. The ceiling fan turned. Outside, Phoenix went about its midnight business, indifferent and vast and glittering, and in my bed in Scottsdale with his arm around me, I let myself have the thing I’d been keeping at arm’s length since September.

All of it.

Finally.

CHAPTER 29

RYAN

The Sidewinders left for the road trip on a Tuesday morning, a charter out of Sky Harbor at seven-fifteen, and for the first time in the seven months I’d been doing this I didn’t spend the drive to the airport thinking about the team.

I was thinking about the night before, and the morning after, and having Maren in my kitchen again. Her coffee made and consumed this time, her hair up in the messy knot she used when she wasn’t thinking about it, wearing my flannel shirt with nothing underneath because she’d stayed and her clothes from the night before were on my bedroom floor. I’d watched her eat toast standing at my counter and talked about the road trip itinerary and the ordinary domestic ease of it all settled into me deep. Like I’d been missing it without knowing what I’d been missing.

I’d kissed her at my door before I left. Not a quick see-you-later kiss. A real one, unhurried, both hands on her face, because I could now and I was going to keep doing it until it stopped feeling like something I’d gotten away with.

“Ten days,” she’d said against my mouth.

“I know.” I’d pressed my lips to her forehead. “But… You’re coming Thursday.”

She was. That was the other thing. Maren traveled with the team for extended road trips. Director of Sports Medicine, two weeks out, multiple players with ongoing treatment needs. She’d always traveled with us. The difference was that now, when she walked into the hotel lobby in Vancouver or Seattle or wherever, she wasn’t going to be performing careful distance from me in front of twenty people who had recently found out we were together anyway. The idea of being with her in the open gave me hope our domestic bliss was permanent.

Cole had texted me at six-thirty in the morning.

Cole: So Maren’s coming Thursday?

Cole: Just confirming

Cole: Asking for the boys

Ryan: Yes

Ryan: Why would the boys care?

Ryan: Wait, why are you asking?

Cole:

I’d put my phone in my bag and smiled at the wall of the departure terminal for a moment before I could stop it.

The first two days of the road trip were in Los Angeles. Two games back-to-back, a grueling schedule that left no room for anything except hockey and recovery. We won the first and lost the second on a last-minute power play goal that I replayed in my head through the entire postgame shower. Theo scored twice in the first game. Eli was quietly immovable all series, a six-foot-three wall in front of the net that the other team’s forwards kept discovering they couldn’t move. Griffin made thirty-five saves in the second game and held us in it long enough to matter even when we lost.