Page 78 of Offside

There was a camera on him during warm-ups. There had been a camera on him during warm-ups at every home game since October.

Jenna’s whole job was noticing what a camera caught.

I got to my car and sat in it without turning the key. I had said yes to those seats without thinking about it once, and I had sat in them for two and a half hours, and a woman with rhinestones on her sweater had asked me if it was my first time.

Nobody had caught us. That was the part I kept coming back to on the drive home.

Nobody had caught us yet, and I had not once thought about what would happen if they did. I was becoming less sure I cared.

CHAPTER 15

RYAN

The Sidewinders had twenty points in the standings. Solidly in a playoff position, ahead of two teams that had been in the league for decades, and for an expansion franchise in its first November of existence, that was not nothing.

I was choosing to feel good about it.

The Rusty Nail midweek smelled like it always did. Spilled beer and citrus from the garnish tray and the faint ghost of whatever Dee had fried earlier that day. The AC ran too cold near the bar. Outside on the patio it was November Phoenix air, still seventy-two degrees at nine in the evening, warm enough that Dee had the misters going out of habit more than necessity. The dart board in the back corner thudded steadily. Someone had put the jukebox on shuffle and it was cycling through classic rock at a volume that made conversation possible but required leaning in.

The big round table near the back wall had become ours somewhere in October. Not claimed in any official sense. Occupied enough times in a row that Dee started having our drinks ready when she saw us walk in. Tonight it was full and the fullness felt, for the first time, permanent.

Griffin was to my left, two beers deep, explaining butterfly technique to Eli who had his forearms on the table and his eyes on Griffin. A half-empty Labatt sweated in his hand. Cole and Theo were at the dart board, a game that had started friendly and was now, based on Theo’s posture, something else entirely. Cole had his jacket off. Theo’s jaw was set. Nobody had suggested stopping.

Griffin’s phone buzzed on the table. He glanced at it, made a face, and turned it over.

“Audrey?” I asked.

“Yeah.” Griffin picked up his beer. “She wants to go over some endorsement stuff. I keep telling her I’ll call her back.”

“She’s been patient about it,” I said. We had shared the same agent since college, and

“Audrey is never patient about anything.” Griffin shook his head slightly, exasperated and fond in equal measure and not going to say either. “She just has a very polite way of making it clear she’s waiting.”

He set the phone aside and went back to his butterfly technique analysis, with seemingly days’ worth of pent-up enthusiasm behind it.

Paige was there. Maren’s best friend, who I had met twice before tonight and who had looked at me both times already having decided about me and was just calibrating how much to show. She’d arrived with Maren, ordered a margarita, and within twenty minutes had gotten into a debate with Theo about French versus Italian food. Theo had taken the bait hard. He was currently at the dart board but I could tell from the set of his shoulders that he was still thinking about it. Paige had a settled quality like none of this was going to surprise her.

Maren was across the table.

She had on a dark green top I hadn’t seen before, soft and fluid, and her hair was down loose over her shoulders, and she was in the middle of telling Paige something, building to the good part of a story with her hands, Paige already pressing her lips together to keep from laughing. A half-drunk margarita sat in front of her, salt rim mostly intact on one side. The candle on the table threw warm light up against her jaw and the side of her throat and I watched her for three seconds. Long enough to feel the pull, short enough to be deniable. Then I looked away.

Wanting someone you couldn’t say anything about didn’t dull with time. It sharpened. I had an involuntary catalog of her now. The way she stirred her drink without looking at it, the way she caught Eli’s dry humor a half-beat before anyone else, the way she tucked her feet up on the rung of the barstool when she got comfortable for the night. The small warm weight of her against my shoulder last week on my couch. The sound she made when she was almost asleep. The sounds she made when I ate her pussy. Ugh.

I noticed all of it. Filed all of it. Did nothing with any of it in public.

I was managing.

“You’re up,” Cole called from the back corner, pointing a dart at me. “Winner plays the captain.”

“You haven’t won yet,” Theo said, without looking up from his line.

“Optimism, Marquis. It’s called optimism.”

I pushed back from the table and went to take Cole’s dart. Griffin groaned before I’d even lined up.

“Come on.”

“I haven’t thrown anything yet.”