Chapter 15
~MATTEO~
“You cannot buy me a two-thousand-dollar phone.”
“Mmh.”
“Are y’all mad? Lost? Concussed?”
Cute.
“Drunk on coffee. Drunk on coffee is the only available diagnosis. There is something genuinely, neurologically wrong with the three of you, and I want it noted for the record.”
Adorable.
I do not say any of this out loud.
I am, instead, leaning a hip against the glass display case at the highest-end mobile boutique in the highest-end shopping district of the highest-end commuter city within forty-five minutes of campus, watching Iris O’Shea visibly come apart inside the borrowed sweater she has been hiding inside all morning, and I am, with frankly no shame whatsoever, enjoying the show.
It turns out our pink-haired goalie does not handle being spoiled. Not in any of the seventeen ways I have, over the past two hours, attempted to inflict it on her.
The city we are in is a forty-five-minute drive north from campus, set back into a small lake on three sides, and built entirely for the kind of Alphas and Omegas who think nothing of dropping a paycheck on a single belt.
Boutiques with no signage, only logos. Restaurants where the waiter brings you a tasting menu before you have ordered.
A pavement so well-maintained your shoes do not actually wear down.
It is also, frankly, the only place within reasonable distance of North Star where Iris is going to be able to buy decent women’s clothing that has not been pre-screened for shapelessness by an Alpha-coach committee, and Jude knows it, which is the only reason he agreed to drive.
The shops we have hit so far have lined up like a small private heist. A boutique called Vellichor for the basics, where she vetoed a hundred-dollar sheer cropped top with admirable speed and was allowed, after a small skirmish, three black tank tops, two jumpers, and a pair of dark wash jeans that Jude paid for at the register without breaking eye contact with her the entire time.
A second store called Pithy for the loungewear, where Rémi quietly pulled six items off racks she would not have looked at and dropped them in the dressing room for her, which is the most active Alpha-shopping behavior Rémi Bellerose has exhibited in the entire time I have known him.
A small bra shop, the door of which I was politely but firmly barred from by Jude, where she emerged twenty minutes later carrying a discreet bag and refusing to make eye contact with any of us for a full block.
And now, here.
The phone counter. The boss level. The reason she has been sweating buckets since we crossed the threshold of the store.
She is not used to this.
Not even slightly.
I should clarify that for myself, since I am the one keeping the running tally.
There are women in this country who would, on a date one with three new Alphas, have already drained a black card and laughed about it on a tasteful Instagram post. I have personally been on dates with several.
I know the species. Iris is not the species.
Iris is the woman who looked at a two-hundred-dollar pair of jeans, calculated the exchange rate to her home currency in her head, and tried to physically replace them on the rack at the speed of a sleight-of-hand magician.
The three of us made the pack vow our second year of college. Around the same fire, the same long evening, the same dorm room rug. After Connor.
I am not going to dwell on that, because we are at a phone counter and the woman across it deserves a winger present in the room and not in a memory four winters old.
But for the record: whichever Omega the three of us eventually committed to, fully committed to, was going to be cherished.
Was going to be cared for. Was not, under any circumstance, going to be the person who held the calculator.
Unless she was asking for something genuinely outrageous — a million-dollar car she could not drive, a townhouse in a country she had not visited, the kind of greedy nonsense that has, frankly, drained more young Alpha-packs in this country than any sport on the calendar — she would not have to ask twice. She would not really have to ask once.
Iris would, at this rate, have to be asked, and she would still try to refuse the gift.
Cute.
Tragically, ruinously cute.
None of us, for the record, is hurting for this trip.
Rémi, behind me right now scanning the store windows for whatever it is Rémi scans store windows for, is, if you had to put a number on him, an unflashy multimillionaire.
His family is the kind of generational wealth that has financial literacy embedded in their bones before they can walk.
He has a card holder with five different metal cards in it and walks around in a flour-stained henley and a pair of dollar-store sneakers and, if he does not pull out the wallet, you would put him down as your average broad-shouldered hockey-build Alpha on the block.
Nothing about him gives him away. It is one of the things I love about him.
I am no slouch in the inheritance department either.
Italians in trades, three generations deep, the family business almost lost in my father’s second year of running it and then dragged back from the brink by some genuinely impressive arm-breaking and an obscene amount of black coffee.
We are not mafia. I love joking that we are mafia.
We are not mafia. We are, in fact, comfortable in the very specific way that means I have never, in my entire life, opened a bank app with anxiety.
Jude is the one with the story. He is also the only one of us I would put down as poor, by the standards of the bracket he grew up in.
His parents are the problem he does not talk about.
His four sisters are the reason he started working at sixteen and has not stopped.
He has, through sheer captain-grade discipline and a scholarship and the kind of part-time labor that ages a man five years a calendar season, accumulated enough that he could comfortably afford the day Iris is currently scared of, on his own, without Rémi or me anywhere in the picture.
Which is the part she is going to have to learn. The three of us standing in front of a phone counter together is a unit, not a charity drive.
Speaking of unit.
Iris’s forehead is starting to actually bead.
The boutique’s climate control is set to seventy-two, the way every overpriced retail environment in this country sets its thermostat, and yet she is, on the inside, running a fever the way the financially-traumatized run fevers.
Her pink hair has started to curl at the temples where the sweat is doing its work.
The collar of her brand-new black jumper, which I paid for forty-five minutes ago and intend to enjoy on her body for the foreseeable future, is darkening at the back of her neck.
I dig in my jacket pocket. Out comes the small black battery-powered fan I have been carrying since the summer because, as a man with my personal thermostat, I have learned the hard way that air conditioning is a regional sport in this country and I am not above bringing my own.
I click it on. I aim it at her face. The little blades buzz to life.
She closes her eyes. Sighs. Tips her chin into the breeze with the absurd, undignified relief of a woman who has finally been offered a glass of water in a desert, and the pink strands lift off her temple, and I have to actively not look at Rémi or Jude because I know what is on both of their faces and I do not need the validation.
Then she opens her eyes. Narrows them at the fan. Narrows them at me.
“Wait a damn minute. Why do you have a personal cooling apparatus on your person at all times. Why are you walking around with a fan in your jacket. Why am I being offered a fan I did not ask for. And why am I, separately, very upset that I now want one.”
“You are sweating buckets at the idea of us spending money on you,” I tell her, with affection. “It is, frankly, adorable. You are a sweaty little economic-anxiety raccoon. I would like to put you in a glass case.”
“Santori.”
“I carry the fan because I run hot at all times. Genetic disposition, paternal side, the entire Italian gene pool is overheated. Anywhere I go without working A/C, this thing lives in my pocket. Battery is good for six hours. You are welcome to it.”
She glares at me. The glare is doing none of the work she wants it to do, because she has already started reaching for the fan.
I dangle it. She narrows her eyes one more degree, takes it from my hand with the deliberation of a woman accepting a peace treaty, and immediately tilts it up so the breeze lifts her wet pink strands off her forehead in a way that I am going to be thinking about until my next medical exam.
Yeah. She is keeping the fan. It is mine. I do not care.
“You have never bought yourself a phone before, O’Shea?” Jude asks, casual, from his lean against the next counter over.
“I have.” Defensive. “I have bought myself plenty of —” She breaks off. Looks at the floor. Mumbles into the breeze of the fan. “My current phone took me five years to save for. And it was, ah. Used. I only really needed it for the basics, since I did not exactly have a Rolodex of people to text.”
“Your parents did not supply you one,” Rémi says. He has rejoined us from his perimeter sweep of the store, hands in pockets, low and even.
She shakes her head.
“No.”
She does not elaborate immediately. She drums her fingers on the glass.
Watches the technician at the back of the counter doing whatever it is the technician is doing with the screen protector on the new device.
Decides, in the small visible way she decides things she would rather not, to give us the rest of it.