Chapter 11 #2
I locate a glass. I find the cold tap. I pull my shaker bottle from the front pocket of my hoodie — because of course I bring it down with me, of course I sleep with it ready, hydration is the only fight I never lose — and I unscrew the lid, and I add the water with the steady, unhurried hands of a woman who is, on the inside, gripping the rim of the countertop hard enough to leave a fingerprint.
From the duffel pocket: my scoop. From the same pocket: the canister. Strawberry whey, the same brand I have used since I was sixteen, because routine is its own kind of armor and I have never been in the market for new armor.
I measure. I pour. I twist the lid back on.
And then I shake the bottle with the practiced, controlled violence I have shaken it with on every cold morning of my life, the wire mixer inside rattling like a small angry hornet, and I do all of it without looking at him once.
He watches.
I can feel him watching. The careful, attentive weight of his attention has not changed in five years.
He is reading my hands. Reading the brand on the canister.
Reading whatever a man like Declan O’Rourke reads in a woman he has not seen since she was eighteen, doing a thing he taught her how to do.
“You still use the same brand,” he says, quietly.
My hand stops mid-shake.
Do not slam it down. Do not slam it down. The whole house is asleep, you absolute child.
I set the bottle on the counter with the deliberate, level care of a woman defusing something. I turn to face him.
And there it is. The face that has filled five years’ worth of cold-room ceiling at four in the morning.
The Irish granite jaw. The green eyes that taught me how to read a room.
The expression that gives away absolutely nothing, the professional clean of a man who has spent his entire adult life being unreadable on purpose, and the realization that lands in my sternum is not new.
I have had it before. I had it last night across the corridor outside the admin office. I have it again now.
He is going to act like nothing happened.
He is going to stand in this kitchen, at five in the morning, in the temporary pack-house of the unbonded Omega he personally signed the paperwork to bring to this country, and he is going to comment on the brand of my protein powder the way you comment on a colleague’s shirt.
As though five years was a long weekend. As though the leaving was a footnote. As though I did not spend the back end of my teenage life relearning the slope of my own walls because he walked out of the room and did not turn around.
“You,” I say, and I am gratified to hear that my voice has come out flat and small and surgical, “do not get to know things about me anymore.”
The kitchen does not move.
He does not flinch. He does not lower his eyes. He does not even, that I can see, breathe.
You bastard. You absolute bastard.
And because my body has, in the past sixteen hours, started doing things without consulting the rest of me, I find I am crossing the kitchen.
Five steps. The cold tile under my socks.
The scent of him climbing as the distance closes, cedar and snow and whiskey, the under-cabinet lights catching the silver at his temples I had not, from across the room, let myself see.
He is so much taller up close than I have allowed myself to remember.
He is, this close, exactly as tall as he was the last time I stood within scenting range of him, which was in the doorway of the rink at home with a duffel of training gear at my feet and a hundred things I would never get to say.
I stop a hand-span off him.
I tip my chin up. His green eyes drop to meet mine.
“Why.”
It comes out as the entire sentence. The whole question I have been carrying since I was eighteen years old, stripped down to one syllable and offered up at five in the morning to a man wearing a jacket the color of nothing.
“Why did you leave.”
He looks at me.
He looks at me for a long, dense beat in which I have to actively decide not to break it first, because I have learned the hard way that silence with Coach Declan is a game, and I have never, not once in my whole life, been the one to lose at it.
And then he says, in the same low, even voice he uses to call a line change:
“I had my reasons.”
That is it.
That is the whole answer. Five words, predictable as the weather, the exact bureaucratic placeholder I have rehearsed in my head every single time I have allowed myself to imagine this moment, the response that is not a response, the door that is also a wall.
All right.
All right then, Declan.
I look him dead in the eye. I do not break the contact.
I do not blink. I reach back, with my right hand, for the strawberry shake I set so carefully on the counter, and I bring it up, and — in one clean, slow, full-body arc that is, on the inside, the most satisfying motion I have made in five years — I empty the entire bottle directly down the front of his jacket.
Time does the dilation thing.
Pink. So much pink. The shake hits the lapel of his black jacket and blooms outward in a slow gorgeous splash, climbs the collar, catches the V at his throat where the jacket falls open, drips in a fat strawberry rivulet down to the dark denim of his jeans.
A single pearl-pink drop reaches his jaw and rolls down it and disappears into the line of his throat.
The kitchen fills, instantly, with the wholesome breakfast smell of artificial strawberry and powdered protein, which is, frankly, an unholy chord against the cedar of his cologne.
He does not move.
He does not flinch. He does not curse. He does not lift a single muscle of that immaculate granite face, and the strawberry slides down his lapel in slow, obscene rivulets, and his green eyes hold mine through the whole event without breaking, and the back of my neck goes hot with the realization that this is the most reaction I have gotten out of him in five years of imagining the conversation, and the most reaction is, somehow, no reaction at all.
You magnificent immovable bastard.
The door at the back of the kitchen opens.
Rémi steps in from the cold porch, skates tied together by their laces and slung over his shoulder, hair damp at the temples from the rink, the sharp scorched-mineral bite of fresh ice and the deep clean pine of him following him through the door on a small wave of below-zero air.
He stops. His pale eyes go from me, with the empty shaker dripping in my hand, to Coach Declan, currently wearing the entirety of my breakfast, and back again.
His expression does, approximately, nothing.
Which, on Rémi, is itself an entire commentary.
I huff. I walk. Past Declan, past the dripping silence of him, past the strawberry tide pooling at his boots, until I am standing in front of Rémi at the back door, and I look up at him from the depths of someone else’s crimson hoodie, and I keep my voice perfectly level.
“Good morning.”
Rémi blinks once.
“… good morning,” he whispers back, with the careful neutrality of a man who has decided that whatever he just walked in on is none of his business, possibly forever.
Behind me, I hear the small, controlled sound of Declan finally moving.
The slow drag of a paper towel from the holder.
The wet, deliberate wipe of strawberry off his own jaw.
He does not say anything. He does not look at Rémi.
He simply finishes blotting his face, sets the ruined towel on the counter, and walks out of the kitchen the way he walked into my life and out of it both times: in his own time, on his own terms, leaving the room rearranged behind him.
The back door at the front of the house clicks shut.
The kitchen exhales.
I become aware of the empty shaker in my hand.
Of the wet smear on the floor.
Of the fact that I have not eaten anything yet and need to be on the ice in eighty minutes and have just hurled my entire breakfast at the head coach of my new program.
Cool. Solid morning. Top form, O’Shea.
“Cup,” Rémi says, quietly.
I stare at him.
He holds out his hand. Palm up. Patient.
I, slowly, deliver the empty shaker into it.
He carries it to the sink with the skates still slung over his shoulder like a man who has decided the order of operations does not matter as long as the operations get done. Rinses it. Dries it. Returns it to me.
“There is almond milk in the fridge,” he says, level, conversational, as though we are discussing the weather and not the small Strawberry-Saturated Reckoning currently dripping off the kitchen island. “Use that instead of water for your shake. Tastes sweeter. Better for you on a morning skate.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it.
“Rémi.”
“Hm.”
“You are — you are not going to ask.”
“No,” he says, mildly, as he crouches with a fresh wad of paper towels and begins to mop the strawberry off the tile without ceremony. “You will tell me when you want to. Or you will not. Either is allowed in this kitchen.”
Something in my throat goes glassy.
I look down at the top of his pale head, at the broad bowed shoulders moving in calm small efficient circles across my mess, at the skates still slung patient and forgotten across his back, and the lump that has been sitting under my breastbone since I walked down those stairs swells up to the size of a fist and threatens.
Do not.
Do not cry at the man who is on his knees cleaning your tantrum off a hockey-house floor at five fifteen in the morning.
I swallow. I swallow again. I cross to the fridge, because moving is the only way I know how to survive being looked after.
The almond milk is on the second shelf, behind a half-finished carton of orange juice that has Matteo’s name written on it in Sharpie in handwriting that is, somehow, exactly what I would have guessed his handwriting would look like. I take the almond milk. I close the door.
When I turn back, Rémi has the floor mostly clean, the worst of the splash gone, the tile streaked and gleaming. He stands. Ties the bag of paper towels off in a neat knot. Drops it in the bin. Washes his hands.
“Ice in seventy minutes,” he says. “Shake. Banana. Coat by the door, you’ll want the hood. The walk over is colder than the rink.”
“Rémi.”
“Mm.”
“Thank you.”
He tips his chin at me. One degree. The Rémi standing ovation.
Then he disappears up the back stairs to shower, the skates finally lifted off his shoulder, and I stand alone in a kitchen that smells of cold ice, almond milk, fading cedar, and the artificial strawberry of a five-year-old emotional debt I have just paid in one beautiful long arc, and I exhale for what feels like the first time in twelve hours.
Day one, official. First Omega goalie on a Division One roster. Already in debt to a defenseman for his discretion. Already on record with the head coach as a woman who throws breakfast.
Fingers crossed nothing else happens before lunch.