Chapter 9 #2
Matteo barks a laugh, full-throated, the first uncomplicated noise to break the room since the door opened, and the rest of the boys watch it land with the slack-jawed fascination of a crowd discovering the previously stoic captain has a regular conversational gear that they had not been issued the manual for.
“Captain, do not lie under oath. The girl had you wrapped around a soft-serve handle inside thirty seconds.” Matteo turns back to Iris, sweeps a flourish that includes the cone and the room. “And you. For the record. Found her first, Cap. Called dibs.”
Dibs.
As though dibs is a real legal instrument.
I ignore him entirely because that is the only currency he respects.
Rémi has materialized.
He has come from the kitchen on those quiet feet of his, towel slung over one shoulder, a smear of flour on his forearm, and without any visible decision he has angled himself between Iris and the front door we just walked through.
Not crowding. Not announcing. Just present, his enormous pale-blond bulk forming a quiet wall on her open side, and I watch her notice and not comment, and I watch the small private way her shoulders settle a degree she does not have a conscious budget for.
“Rémi Bellerose,” I say. “Defenseman, thirty-three. Bakes. Builds things out of wood. Will not say more than fourteen words to you for the first month.”
Rémi tips his chin at her. Approximately a degree. It is the warmest greeting he has issued a stranger in a calendar year.
“Matteo Santori,” I add, dryly. “Winger, twenty-one. Already self-introduced. Repeatedly. Aggressively.”
“Rude.” Matteo, delighted.
“Accurate.”
Iris’s mouth does the crooked thing again. She is fighting the smile and losing.
I shrug the duffel off my shoulder onto the bench by the door, set the case down beside it, and turn to face the room. I let the silence settle before I speak, because I have learned that a captain who fills silence the moment it appears is a captain whose team will eventually stop listening.
“Listen up.”
Twelve heads come up at once. Even Petrov, mid-stretch, freezes and remains frozen, because two years of training have made the lift of my voice an involuntary signal.
“This is Iris O’Shea. As of this morning she is our sector’s goalie. As of this afternoon she has a problem that lands at our door. Omega housing is full. The administration confirms there is no bed for her in the standard residence this semester.”
A small ripple goes around the room. Murray, finally, returns the toast to the counter.
“And the other half of the program,” I continue, level, “was polled an hour ago and refused to host her. Unanimously. Citing disruption.”
Hargrove makes a soft sound through his teeth. Not laughter. Something closer to a snort buried under a winter coat.
“Her scholarship requires confirmed housing.” I let the words sit. “Without it, her placement is forfeit by tomorrow afternoon. She is on a plane home. Her North Star career ends before it begins.”
Linder shifts his weight. Petrov is still folded.
“Clearly,” I say, “we hate losing.”
“We hate it,” Matteo agrees, lazy, from where he has reclaimed his perch on the couch arm.
“We also,” I go on, “are not douchebags.”
A few quick nods. A handful of heads that do not nod and that I watch and file. Hargrove specifically. Murray, slower, getting there.
“This house is large enough to absorb one more person. We have an unused storage room at the back of our sector’s wing.
Bare walls, bare floor, a window that opens.
Convertible to a bedroom inside an afternoon with the four of us and a trip to the hardware store.
I am offering it to Iris. I would like the offer to come from the room rather than around it. So.”
I sweep the team.
“Any objections, you bring them to me. Now. Out loud. Not in a group chat. Not in a hallway. Now.”
Silence.
The good kind. The kind where every man in the room runs the math, considers the captain in front of him, and decides not to be the example.
“Ground rules,” I say, before the silence can shift.
“One. Same as it was this morning. You will be civil. You will not chirp her in the kitchen. You will not chirp her in the laundry room. You will not chirp her, period. Two. The storage door is her door. You knock. You wait. Three. You bully her, I will be unhappy. And me unhappy is a logistics problem none of you want.”
From the couch arm: “And I will break a limb of yours, and Coach will bench you a minimum six weeks for fighting in-house, and the medical staff will start a wager pool on the recovery time.”
I cut Matteo a sidelong look.
I do not contradict him.
Matteo’s grin widens. From the kitchen doorway, Rémi’s mouth tilts, fractional, the version of a smirk he only ever issues with the lights low.
“Objections,” I repeat. “Speak now.”
Petrov clears his throat from the floor.
“If Cap is fine with it,” he says, with the conversational gravity of a man who has decided this is the line he will be remembered for, “we’re fine with it.”
Murray nods. Linder shrugs and goes back to the toaster. Hargrove, slow, the last to commit, gives me a single dip of the chin that I will be watching for the next forty-eight hours regardless.
“Thank you,” I say. “For the unexpected cooperation. And the team play.”
I turn to Iris.
“Follow me. We’ll do the full tour later. For now, you look like a woman who has not sat down since six this morning.”
She nods. Then — and I am not, in this moment, the only person in the room to register it — she does something none of us were expecting.
She bows her head.
Small. A degree. Not the grovel of a person making themselves smaller, but the deliberate, contained gesture of an athlete acknowledging a call that did not have to go her way. Her voice when it comes is low and even and meant for the whole room.
“Thank you. For understanding. And for giving me a chance, despite the Omega thing. I won’t take it for granted.”
The room recalibrates around her, visibly, every man present trying not to be caught visibly recalibrating. Murray looks at Petrov. Petrov looks at the rug. Hargrove’s jaw moves once, the precise unconscious motion of a man swallowing a chirp he had loaded and has just realized would land wrong.
That, the captain in me logs, is a girl who has had to thank rooms for less.
I shoulder her duffel again. Matteo takes the hard-sided case from beside the bench without being asked, Rémi falls in at her other shoulder, and we move as a unit through the shared room toward the back wing of the house in a configuration that does not, at any point, require a single one of us to discuss it.
Interesting.
Our sector’s wing is its own apartment in everything but name. Three bedrooms off a small private hallway. A common room with a kitchenette. A back door onto a covered porch with a half-stripped Adirondack chair Rémi has been refinishing since August.
The common room is the inventory of the three of us, laid out unironically.
Rémi’s woodworking bench in the corner, currently holding the unfinished cradle of what I am ninety percent sure is going to be a child’s rocking horse for one of his cousins.
Matteo’s back issues of Vogue and Esquire and a French publication I cannot pronounce stacked precisely on the coffee table, dog-eared in the columns rather than the photos, because he reads them and refuses to lie about it.
My own candles down the mantel, beeswax in mismatched holders, the steady honey-spice base that, more than any other single smell in this house, is the one I associate with home.
Iris turns a slow circle in the middle of it. Her eyes catalogue every object the way I once watched her catalogue a five-man rush.
“We don’t do initiations here,” I say. “We do movie nights.”
She smirks. “A little voodoo could have been fun. But yeah. Movie nights, I can work with.”
“Good. Settled.”
“Thank you,” she adds, quieter. Then, brightening with the breeziness I have come to suspect is her tell for not wanting to be looked at too long: “Oh — I should give you the paperwork before you go. Patricia made me sign something. Apparently bureaucracy still has needs.”
I check my watch. The coaches’ debrief is in twelve minutes and the rink is across campus, and Declan is many things, but he is not a man who treats a late captain with patience.
“Hand it to me. I’ll run it back over to admin on the way to the meeting.”
She bends to the duffel, rummaging, the small concentration line forming between her brows.
Rémi, without a word, pulls a pen from his back pocket and offers it across her shoulder, and she takes it with a flicker of a smile I am suddenly certain he will be replaying internally for the rest of the evening.
She drops to one knee, smooths the paper flat against the side of her case, and starts filling boxes with the brisk competence of a person who has filled too many forms in too many cold offices.
She is on the bottom line when she stops.
Her shoulders, the ones that have been carrying her up porch steps and through hostile cafeterias and across foreign quads all afternoon, go down.
Not in surrender. Worse. In the specific bone-tired drop of a woman discovering that the thing she just spent the last hour climbing toward had a small print clause at the bottom that she did not check for.
“Fuck.”
Quiet. Almost to herself.
Rémi has gone still. Matteo has stilled with him, the case half-set against the wall, halted mid-motion.
“What,” I say, levelly.
She does not look up. She reads.
“The undersigned Omega athlete, where unpacked, shall not be permitted to participate in official league competition or sanctioned matches. Housing may not be confirmed in the absence of registered packship.”
The room goes underwater.
That is the only way I can describe it. The kitchen sounds of the house behind us fade out. The cinnamon-and-butter in the air goes thin. Matteo’s grin does not so much fall as forget how to be a grin. Rémi has not moved at all, which on Rémi reads as a small contained scream.
Of course. Of course. It is the missing piece of a puzzle I have stared at for two years without ever clocking the shape of the hole.
There has never been an Omega on this team, never been an Omega on any team in this league, and the answer is not policy and it is not prejudice and it is not even the chirps in the next house over.
The answer is on the bottom line of a piece of college bureaucracy in a pink-haired girl’s lap.
An unpacked Omega cannot play. An unpacked Omega cannot be housed. Which means an Omega athlete cannot exist on this circuit at all unless the men around her decide, before the season starts, to formally bond themselves to her.
The sport is designed to fail her. By page. By line. By small print.
Iris sets the pen down on top of the paper.
She exhales. Her chin stays level by a discipline that costs her, visibly, and the small private flicker I clocked on the bench under the maple is back, and for one suspended second I am not standing in my own living room.
I am standing in a different doorway four years ago looking at the only other person I have ever seen wear that exact shade of tired.
Not now.
I do not let myself look at the past more than the half-glance, because the past is a room I have spent four years not unlocking and I am not opening it at this hour, in this light, in front of a girl I have known for nine hours and a winger who will read the shift on my face before I have finished arranging it.
But the dread that lands in my sternum is the same dread. The same metallic weight. The same powerlessness of watching someone I have decided to stand for run into a wall I cannot punch a hole through with the small private supply of force I am currently authorized to use.
It is the dread of a fourth name. The chair at our table that has been empty for four seasons. The pack of three that should have been a pack of four. The young man I lost to a habit that ate him in inches and that I could not, for all the captain’s tax I paid, save.
I close the door on it. I close the door on it. I close the door on it.
And when I open my mouth to say something — anything — Rémi gets there first.
Rémi, who does not speak. Rémi, who has not said more than four words since we walked through the front door.
Rémi, who stands at the edge of the small kneeling shape of Iris O’Shea with his flour-smeared forearms and his quiet pine-and-snow scent and a face that gives away absolutely nothing and yet, somehow, gives away everything at the same time.
“So,” Rémi says, low and even and entirely without question.
“Let us be your temporary pack.”