Page 38 of Offside

“Has he gone?”

“Once. I made him come with me to meet an author.” I paused. “There’s one in Scottsdale too. Closer to me. I know all the staff.”

He was watching me with that full attention, filing it away the way he filed everything.

“I could show you,” I said. “You’ve been here three months and I don’t think you’ve seen anything that isn’t the facility or my parents’ backyard.” Or Cole’s kitchen. But I kept that one to myself.

He was quiet for a moment. “I haven’t.”

“Well,” I said, keeping my voice easy, “if you ever want to get out and look at books with me, I’ll take you.”

“You promise?” he asked, quietly.

Two words. Completely unguarded, and they found a soft place in my heart and stayed there.

“Yeah,” I said. “I promise.”

“It’s a date,” he said. Quiet.

He held my gaze for a beat, then turned back to his paperback. I turned back to my Kindle. Outside the window, the lights of Phoenix were coming up through the dark below, scattered amber and white across the desert floor, growing closer.

I didn’t read another word. I stared at the screen and thought about a date. A real one. What it would look like to walk into a bookstore with him on a Saturday afternoon with nowhere else we had to be, his hand maybe at the small of my back, finding him in the stacks with his head tilted and that expression he wore when something had his real attention. Pulling a book off a shelf and handing it to him. Him handing one back.

Simple. Ordinary. Completely impossible.

I wanted it so much I had to look out the window again, the opposite direction of him.

Phoenix spread out below us, relentless and glittering, growing slowly closer.

I was in so much trouble.

CHAPTER 9

RYAN

The Rusty Nail was exactly what it sounded like. The owner, Dee, sixty years old, who had seen everything and was impressed by none of it, treated us exactly like regular customers, which meant she brought our drinks and rolled her eyes at Cole and told Theo his face would look better if he smiled occasionally.

The team loved her for it.

Tonight the back patio held maybe a dozen of us. Thursday, postgame, loose enough to be out but not loose enough to be stupid about it. The win column had ticked up three in a row and the mood was easy, warm. The looseness that came from a team beginning to trust each other and feel it.

I was on my first and only beer, sitting with Eli at the far end of the table while Cole held court at the other end with the volume he brought to every room he’d ever walked into. Theo leaned against the railing nearby, half in the conversation and half somewhere else, which was where Theo usually was.

Maren had come with Griffin after the game. She’d shed her staff jacket somewhere in the first twenty minutes and now she was in a yellow sundress at the other end of the table, laughing at something Cole said with her whole face, and I was thinking about a boarding pass stub in a cracked paperback spine and it’s a date said in the low quiet of a red-eye cabin.

I took a drink and listened to Eli talk about Iris’s latest attempt to convince him that pasta counted as a vegetable.

Griffin found me around nine-thirty, appearing at my shoulder with an expression I’d known since college. The one that meant he had somewhere to be and was hoping I would silently agree whatever it was could be considered reasonable without requiring further explanation.

“Hey,” Griffin said. “So.”

I watched him.

“There’s a girl.” He tilted his head toward the interior of the bar. “We’ve been talking.”

“Go.” He didn’t need my permission.

“Maren’s here. She was going to rideshare home but—” Griffin had the grace to look slightly sheepish. “Can you just make sure she gets home okay? You don’t have to take her, but like maybe wait for her car with her? I’ll feel better.”