Page 85 of Offside

What I was mad about was the fact that I’d had to sit there with a smile stapled to my face and make jokes and act like I was having a perfectly normal Wednesday while a woman draped herself over a man I had been sleeping with for weeks and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, I could do or say. Not a hand on his arm. Not a look. Not even the silence that said we’re together without requiring words.

I was invisible. By agreement. My own agreement, which I had made with full information and zero coercion, which made it worse somehow.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and exhaled hard through my nose. This was so dumb. I was being so dumb. I had a graduate degree and a title and I was sitting alone on my couch at eleven-thirty on a Wednesday feeling sorry for myself over a situation I had chosen.

My phone buzzed on the cushion beside me.

Ryan: I’m sorry about tonight. There was nothing to see—I need you to know that.

I read it. Set the phone face-down. Picked it up again. I read it one more time. I knew there was nothing to see. That was not the problem.

I wanted to text back I know and also wanted to throw my phone across the room, and both of those impulses were embarrassing, so I set it face-down again and pulled my knees to my chest and stared at the ceiling. The AC hummed. Outside, a car went past on the street, its headlights dragging briefly across the ceiling.

I was not going to cry about a puck bunny.

I pressed my lips together. I was probably going to cry about a stupid puck bunny who wanted my man. My man. He was mine, right?

The tears were stupid and I knew they were stupid, which made them worse. The indignity of being a grown woman who ran a sports medicine program for a professional hockey team, weeping into my college T-shirt because a stranger had put her hands on a man I had no public claim to. He was still mine though. I knew he was.

I sniffed, wiped my face with the back of my wrist, and took a deep breath. The tears stopped.

The knock at the door made me go completely still.

I knew before I opened it. Three patient knocks. It was him. Of course it was him. I left without saying a thing to anyone but Paige, and we’d had something close to plans for the evening. Okay, we totally had plans. But I wasn’t feeling saucy and flirty anymore. I was pouty and mad and disgruntled.

I didn’t move for a moment. I looked down at myself. The T-shirt, the ancient shorts, my face blotchy and swollen from crying, none of it flattering. I considered not answering. I considered being a reasonable adult.

I got up, rubbed my face with both hands, accomplished nothing, and opened the door.

Ryan stood in my doorway in the same clothes from the bar, jacket gone, sleeves pushed to his elbows. He read my face. Steady.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m not mad,” I said.

He waited.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

“If I say no are you going to camp out on my doorstep?”

“Yep.”

I stepped back from the door. “Well then you might as well come in. But I’m not very good company right now.”

“Okay.”

He stepped past me and I caught it immediately. Soap and cedar and him underneath, warm and clean and his, and I hated that I’d clocked it, hated how much my whole nervous system registered his presence like a shift in pressure. I was supposed to be annoyed. I was annoyed. I was also hyperaware of exactly where he was standing in my living room, the fact that he wasn’t pushing into the space but wasn’t retreating either. Patient.

“I texted you,” he said.

“I know.”

“You didn’t answer.”

“I was—” I waved a hand. “Composing myself.”

“How’s that going?”