Page 31 of Offside

I did not sleep.

I lay in the dark of my apartment and stared at the ceiling and replayed the kitchen forty-seven times. Her hair. The way it had slipped forward when she leaned toward me, dark and a little damp from the pool, and the way my hand had moved before my brain had fully signed off on it. The warmth of her cheek against my fingers. The look on her face when I’d tucked her hair back. Open and unguarded in a way she wasn’t usually, just the right amount of not-sober, the careful professional distance gone for one undefended minute as her mouth fell open slightly.

I’ve been very professional about you.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes.

She’d been about to close the distance between us. I’d known it with certainty. Nine years of reading bodies and momentum, the split-second before something happened. She’d leaned forward and I’d made a choice. The hair, the cheek, one point of contact that was still technically something a person could explain. Because if I’d let her close that distance I wasn’t sure either of us would have stopped, and she’d had three drinks and I’d had none, and the gap mattered. It was the only thing keeping me on the right side of a line I couldn’t uncross.

Well, that and the fact her brother and Cole had barreled into the kitchen at exactly the right moment. Or was it the wrong moment? Ugh.

I stared at my ceiling at two in the morning and did not sleep and was not certain the decision had been the right one, and that uncertainty sat in stomach like a stone.

I was at the facility at six-fifteen, early even for me. I needed the ice. I needed forty-five minutes of skating hard enough that my body had something else to concentrate on, and when it didn’t fully work I stayed another twenty and skated harder.

It helped. Somewhat. The way a cold shower helped. It didn’t solve anything but it gave me something else to feel.

I showered, got dressed, sat in the locker room with lukewarm coffee and thought about Griffin.

Over ten years. Since we were eighteen and freezing and sharing a dorm room the size of a parking space at Minnesota State, eating bad dining hall food and talking about hockey until two in the morning because neither of us knew how to stop. Griffin had been at my side through bad seasons and the loneliness of building a life in a new city. We were that for each other. He’d answered every call. He’d shown up. He was the best friend I’d ever had, and the reason I’d said yes to Phoenix with something approaching excitement rather than just professional obligation.

I thought about how Griffin talked about Maren. Warm, constant, not a hint of sibling angst in it. My sister would say that. My sister did this thing when we were kids. You’d like my sister. I had heard it for years and built a picture from the pieces and thought nothing of it because that was what friends did. They gave you the edges of their lives and you filled in the rest.

I thought about what Griffin’s face would do if I told him what had almost happened in Cole’s kitchen. Not almost in the sense of something abstract. Almost in the sense of a hand on her hair and a moment that had lasted long enough to be a decision until we were interrupted.

I thought about the fact it hadn’t technically happened. I was not sure that made it better. I was also not sure it made it worse, which was its own problem.

The team had a rest day. I cleaned my apartment with excessive thoroughness, which accomplished nothing except a scoured apartment. I called my mother, who talked for forty minutes about my cousin’s new house and my father’s ongoing opinions about the Swedish national team and asked twice whether I was eating enough, which was the question she asked regardless of my physical condition.

After I hung up I called Anna on video chat.

She answered on the second ring. “What’s wrong?” Her pale face and blond hair popped up dramatically.

“Nothing’s wrong. Calling to say hello.”

“Ryan.” I could picture her exactly. Sitting at her kitchen table in Stockholm with her coffee, looking at my face on her screen the way she’d been looking at it my entire life and reading it accurately against my will. “You have the look.”

“I don’t have a look.”

“You have the same look you had when you were eleven and you broke Mom’s lamp and didn’t want to say so.” She paused. “Tell me.”

I told her the shape of the situation, not everything. Not the weight of seeing her again nine years later and wanting her as much as I did when I was twenty-two. But the fact she was Griffin’s sister. She worked with the team. And how something was happening I wasn’t sure was definitely happening or maybe I was constructing it all out of proximity and how badly I wanted her.

“The not knowing,” I said. “That’s the part I keep snagging on. I don’t know if she felt any of it or if I misread the whole thing. She’d had three drinks.”

“She also told you she’d been professional about you,” Anna said. “Sober people say things like that too.”

I didn’t answer.

“Griffin’s sister,” Anna said. Then, after a pause with a different quality, “The one from the bench. At the first game.”

“Anna.”

“How long have you been not dealing with this.”

“A month.”

Anna made a sound that contained her entire opinion. “And you’re going to do the thing.”