Chapter 17 #2
“Speaking of,” Rémi notes, mildly, setting down a Lego flying buttress with the precision of a man laying a brick in a wall, “are you doing your reading thing today, on the ice break.”
“Oh. You guys have noticed I read a lot on my Kindle, huh.”
Three heads nod, perfectly in unison.
“You do read a lot,” Rémi says.
“Compulsively,” Matteo adds.
“You read between drills,” Jude notes. “You read in the back of the car. You read while you eat. You once tried to read while you were lacing your skates and walked into a wall.”
“Damning. All of it. None of it inaccurate.”
“You like it?” Rémi asks, the way he asks any direct question, which is in the manner of a man for whom an answer is genuinely useful information.
“I do. I really do.” I cross to the kitchen island, hoist myself up onto a stool, fold my legs underneath me.
“I like the affordability of it, frankly. Books are a bit of a luxury for me to actually own, paperbacks especially. The Kindle helps a lot. I can read whatever I want without thinking about whether I can budget it.”
Rémi and Matteo, at the same time, frown.
“What do you mean, affordability,” Matteo asks. “A Kindle book is the same money as a paperback book. Maybe a couple dollars less.”
“Kindle Unlimited,” Jude says, into the rim of his smoothie glass.
I turn my head so fast my hair clip almost loses its grip.
“Excuse me, sir.”
Jude shrugs, the captain shrug of a man who has been caught and has decided not to deny it.
“It is a lending-library program built into the Kindle. Monthly subscription. You borrow books in and out, no per-title cost. Helps when you cannot put twenty to forty dollars down on a paperback that, if you are a fast reader, lasts you an afternoon. It is, by a significant margin, the cheapest way to read voraciously in this country.”
Matteo and Rémi both, very slowly, turn their heads to look at Jude.
“How do you,” Matteo asks, with the precise affectation of a man who has just discovered something delicious, “know that. Captain. How exactly do you know all of that. Tell me. Tell the room.”
“Curiosity.” Jude takes another long pull off the smoothie. He does not blink. “I looked it up. Once. A while ago. It was on a list.”
“A list.”
“A list.”
“Oh, our captain has a list,” Matteo announces to the ceiling. “Our captain has a list. Twenty bucks says one of his sisters is a romance reader and he subsidizes her habit and the bank statement is the most beautiful document in his apartment, gentlemen.”
Jude does not deny it.
Jude does not, you will notice, deny it.
“Exactly as he explained it,” I tell them, biting the inside of my cheek to keep my face presentable, “though is the long and short of it. I am not, contrary to popular suggestion, rich like you three. So I do the saving route. Maybe when we are in the league and getting paid like adults, I can splurge on paperbacks. Build myself a tiny book nook one day, the whole production. Big armchair, a lamp, the works.”
“Why one day,” Rémi asks, frowning. “Why not now.”
“Rémi.” I level him a look. “Did you, at any point in the last calendar year, walk into an Ikea and look at the price of a bookshelf. Even the cheap one. The one made of compressed regret. They are charging upwards of a hundred and fifty dollars for what is, structurally, three boards and four screws. It is giving bankruptcy. It is giving sorrow. I am not in the budget to be sponsoring Swedish furniture this fiscal year. Prayers cannot fix this economy. Even my best ones.”
They all smirk.
Rémi sets down the Lego in his hands. Calmly. With finality.
“Iris.”
“Yes.”
“I can build shit.”
Beat.
“I can build you one.”
My jaw, traitorously, drops.
Properly drops. The hinge of it, the actual muscular complex, gives up.
I stare at him from my stool at the island, and the entire kitchen tilts a half degree to the left, and I have, suddenly, no idea what to do with my hands or the cup in them or the corner of my mouth that has started to do a small, embarrassingly grateful wobble.
Matteo unfurls off the couch.
He ambles across the rug to where I am sitting, slides one warm hand under my jaw with the casual deftness of a man who has been physically managing me as a hobby for two weeks, and gently pushes my mouth closed.
“And,” he adds, conversationally, “we can buy you the books you actually want to put on it.”
Oh. Oh, no.
Eye-water threatened. Threat retracted. Pride still partially intact.
Jude, behind me, sets his smoothie glass down on the counter.
“And, while we are gathering hobbies into the curriculum.” He tips his head, considering.
“We could do some kind of hockey-house book club. Once we are off the road and there is breathing room. It would, frankly, be good for some of the guys. All any of them do off the ice is doom-scroll. Reading would be a net improvement. And it would be a way to do something as a unit that did not involve sticks or pucks. Get the team out of one register and into another.”
“OH MY GOD.”
Matteo wheels on Jude. His grin is delighted. “Oh, look at our captain, gentlemen. Quietly trying to entwine our Omega’s hobbies into the curriculum of an entire NCAA Division One hockey program. It is so subtle. So strategic. He is a master of his craft.”
“Go,” Jude says, mildly, “suck a lemon, Santori.”
“Will do. After the book club.”
“Wait.” I am still staring at all three of them. “Wait, wait. Genuinely. You guys are —”
“Yes,” Rémi says, before I have finished.
“Okay but —”
“Yes,” Matteo agrees.
“It would,” Jude says, quietly, “be good for the team. Doing a relatable activity as a unit that breaks the ice further. Especially with you on the roster. What do you think.”
“I — I would love that.” My voice has gone embarrassingly small. “I would. Genuinely. I have been wanting an excuse to talk about books out loud with people for, ah, my entire life. What — what would we start with? Is it going to be themed? Are we going to pick by vote, or rotate picks, or —”
“We will offer it,” Jude says, calmly, with the particular captain finality that means he has just put a date on a project, “after our first official game. Open invitation to the whole sector. See who bites.”
“DEAL.”
I am beaming. I am embarrassingly, transparently beaming.
My face is doing whatever it is doing without my consent and the three of them are watching me do it with the relaxed indulgence of men who have, frankly, been waiting two weeks for this particular face and were going to keep working until they got it.
I look at them. All three of them. The three different scents stacking around me at the island like a small invisible architecture I have, in fourteen days, grown helplessly accustomed to.
“Thank you,” I whisper, before my brain has authorized the words. “Seriously. Thank you for, ah. Accepting my little hobbies. Letting me have them. They are dumb but they keep me — functional, I think.”
Matteo’s smirk softens. He lifts his hand. Runs it, slow, through my pink hair, smoothing it back from my temple with the casual ownership of a man who has been doing the gesture for considerably longer than the calendar would suggest he has been allowed to.
“We have got to keep your hobbies alive, sweetheart. So the whole of life is not just centered on the perfection of winning on a sheet of ice. That is a small lonely religion to be raised inside.”
He winks. He leans down. He presses a kiss against my temple, warm and small and absolutely without theater, and the part of my chest that has been quietly accumulating evidence over fourteen days files the kiss in a folder labelled Items to Examine Later, Privately, In a Locked Room With No Witnesses.
“Happy?” he murmurs against my hair.
Yes. Stupidly. Stupidly happy.
I blush. I pout. I level my voice down into something I can survive saying out loud.
“Happy.” A beat. “For now.”
Then I lift the glittery pink tumbler and lightly bop him on the head with it.
“No,” I tell him, sternly, “more pink stuff.”
“You love it,” he says, instantly, with the unshakeable certainty of a man who has been wrong many times in his life and is not, on this particular morning, available for that experience. “Admit it.”
“Nevahhhh,” I declare.
And then I slide off the stool, skip across the kitchen on the toes of my socks like a small pink criminal evading prosecution, and plant myself behind Jude’s left shoulder.
“CAP.”
“God.”
“Matteo is bullying me. With pink stuff. Without my consent. I would like to formally invoke captain’s protection. Article fourteen.”
“I CALL BULLSHIT.” From the rug. “SHE STARTED THIS. SHE INTERROGATED ME. ON CAMERA. FROM A DOORWAY.”
“He is guilty,” Rémi notes, mildly, from the coffee table, without looking up from his Lego cathedral.
“FUCK YOU, RéMI.”
“You snitched on yourself again. You volunteered the popcorn information. The popcorn information was deniable. The popcorn was the cup’s sister product. I am simply naming the obvious.”
Matteo collapses backwards into the rug, arms spread, in the formal surrender of a man undone by his own roommates.
Jude lifts the smoothie. Takes a slow sip. Sets it down. Tilts his head a half-degree at me.
“Come on,” he says. “Grab your gear. We are starting practice early today. Coach wants two extra rotation drills with the sector before we open up to the full roster, and if any of us is late we are going to wish we were not.”
“Yup.” Rémi rises from the rug. The Lego cathedral is left, mid-build, for some future morning.
“Yup,” Matteo agrees, from the floor, without rising.
“Santori. Up.”
“Mmm. Five.”
“Up.”
I nod. I drink from the new tumbler one last time before I have to abandon it on the counter and go find my skate bag.
The water is cold. The slogan around the rim catches the light.
The handwriting on the small folded note now tucked inside my hoodie pocket against my hip has, somewhere in the last ten minutes, started to make me feel less like a charity case and more like a person someone in this house is actively rooting for.
I move for the back hall to grab my pads.
And as I go, I let the small private chamber of my chest catch up to itself for a quiet second. First game next week. The whole machinery of this season turning over into the part where it stops being practice and starts being on the record.
And the world, the very large judgmental world that owns the broadcast cameras and the league offices and the sports columns and the slow grinding policy ratchet of who is allowed in which crease, is going to be watching with arms folded, looking for a reason.
The reason to point at us and say we tried, it did not work, do not ask again.
A world that has never, in the entire televised history of the sport, been particularly invested in seeing an Omega succeed at this level.
Not an Omega.
Nor a pack who supports an Omega with dreams.