Chapter 20
Grandpa’s Stew
~JUDE~
“I am so so so sore.”
The announcement arrives from the kitchen doorway, full-volume, in the kind of voice a woman uses when she has decided that there is no point in suffering quietly when there are perfectly good Alphas in earshot.
I do not turn around immediately. I am, at this hour, mid-stir on the deep enamelled cast-iron pot that has been on my stove for two hours, and the rhythm of a good slow stew is one of those small inflexible religions I refuse to interrupt for the average kitchen entrance.
She comes around to my left.
Pink hair in a messy bun, half of it escaping.
A wide soft headband she has started wearing around the house.
Bare feet on the cold tile. Sleep shorts.
One small hand absently flicking her own left hip in the experimental punches of a woman trying to convince a tendon to be friends with her again.
And, draped on her frame in the soft falling drape of a garment that has, by now, lost its rights to be called a fit, my best season-end T-shirt.
Now we are wearing it. Now we are openly wearing it. In daylight.
Captain. Steady.
“Now,” I say, evenly, tapping the wooden spoon against the rim of the pot, “where on earth did you get my shirt.”
“Oh, this thing.” She glances down at it as though noticing for the first time, which is, professionally, a lie.
“You abandoned it on the bench in the locker room two days ago. I took it upon myself to provide it with a second chance at life. Moreover, it was clean. Not plagued by the hockey-stench of death which, may I add, the rest of your unit’s laundry pile in that wing was emitting at the time. So.”
“So.”
“So it is mine now.” Wrinkled nose. “Acquired. Catalogued. Filed under inventory.”
“Kidnapping clothing is, apparently, your strongsuit, O’Shea.”
“You are not even mad.”
She is, with the grin of a small pink criminal, completely correct. I am not. The corner of my mouth does the small thing that I am, against every instinct of professional restraint a captain has, increasingly unable to keep off my face when she enters a room.
Living with Iris O’Shea has been, against the loud and unanimous prediction of every other adult Alpha in our sector, a frankly easy project.
The conversation in the visitors’ changeroom when our roster was first confirmed had been almost theatrical on the matter of an Omega in the house.
Brennan’s crew had loud opinions. Hargrove had loud opinions.
Petrov had quiet opinions, which from Petrov are sometimes worse.
The general thesis: an Omega woman in close quarters with three Alphas was going to be a constant low-grade emotional logistics problem, a perfume crisis, a wardrobe maintenance program, a complaint hotline staffed by us at our own expense.
Two weeks of cohabitation later, I am prepared to write a peer-reviewed paper rebutting every adjective of that prediction.
She has, instead, slotted in.
Our schedule is her schedule. She is up at five for her own training and at six for ours.
She reads in our gaps. She runs with us when we go on the loop, and she despises it, and she does it anyway.
She has, in the meticulous way of a person trained in a small flat to disturb nobody, taken up the minimum possible footprint in our space and then, over fourteen days, slowly relaxed it.
She is, in the small inner ledger of my captain math, the smoothest housemate I have ever had who was not biologically related to me.
Which is a problem for an entirely different reason.
Matteo has, since the moment she walked in the front door, been visibly all in.
He is not subtle. He has, in the past two weeks, kissed her temple in a phone shop, scooped her off a kitchen island, fed her a smoothie at four in the morning, and made the precise tactical decision to publicly out-Alpha his coach with a bouquet, which is the kind of bold move I genuinely admire even as I file it.
Rémi has been operating in his own quieter register — the powder-blue t-shirt, the chair he sat very still under for an entire third act of a movie, the bookshelf he has been quietly sketching at the kitchen table.
He has not made his moves yet, but he is making them. I can read him.
And I have, throughout, been doing the thing that the captain does. Keep my voice level. My hands occupied. My eyes on the long game.
Patient Alpha.
Am I jealous when Matteo gets to put his mouth on her temple in passing.
Of course I am. The jealousy is the price of the strategy.
The patience is the strategy. I am, in this kitchen on this Tuesday at four-twenty in the afternoon, doing the patient thing the patient way, and I have, at no point, allowed myself to imagine that the patience would be repaid as quickly as it is about to be.
“So. Captain.” Iris pads around to the front of the island, leans her elbows onto the marble, props her chin on her palms. “What is the man cooking.”
“Grandpa’s stew.”
“Your grandpa’s stew.”
“My grandpa’s stew.”
“Is that a brand name, like a restaurant, or is this a literal grandpa’s recipe.”
“Literal.” I tap the lid back onto the pot, lift it, glance at the bubbling.
Lower the heat by an eighth. “Maternal side. My grandfather wrote it down for me on the back of an envelope when I was twelve, and I have been making it ever since. Two pounds of chuck. Three carrots. Two onions. A handful of pearl barley. Rosemary, thyme, two bay leaves. A generous slug of Guinness. A small splash of red wine. Slow heat for three hours.”
She inhales, theatrically, then closes her eyes and inhales again, less theatrically.
Oh, Pinky. That noise you just made is a problem.
“I am just,” she announces, eyes still closed, “checking for poison.”
“Do a thorough job. Take your time.”
“Oh my God.” Eyes open. The grey of them is, in the warm overhead kitchen light, doing the soft awed thing the rest of her face is too proud to do. “Jude. Genuinely. When was the last time I had a cooked meal that took a person three hours.”
“Mm.”
She does not answer the question immediately. The hesitation is, in itself, the answer. I keep my eyes on the pot and let her find the rest of the sentence at her own pace.
“Years,” she finally says, quietly. “Genuinely years. My mum used to make a Sunday roast like it was a religious obligation. Beef brisket, the whole production. When I was little, my parents loved my striving, my drive, my hockey-obsessed energy. They would make me a victory roast after a win. Yorkshire puddings the size of my head.”
“And it fell out.”
“It fell out.”
She does not elaborate. She has told me the rest of it in her own time and in her own pieces — the moment she presented Omega, the slow withdrawal of the family infrastructure that had been her entire support system. The cooked meals had, at some point in there, simply stopped being made.
“I suspect,” she adds, with the small offhand-cruel humor of a person who has thought about it more than she ever lets on, “it is also the case that my mum and dad have, somewhere in the last few years, fallen out of love with each other. Which is the kind of thing that takes the cooking out of a person before anything else does.”
“Mm,” I say, level. “I can see how that might do it.”
There is a beat where she watches me stir. The kitchen island holds the slow steam of the pot in the warm shaft of late-afternoon light from the window over the sink, and the silence is the kind that, in this house, is acceptable.
“Is that,” I venture, carefully, “why you read the books you read.”
Her head tilts. “The books I read.”
“The cozy ones. The romance ones. The Knottingley one.”
She laughs.
Properly. A full surprised laugh, the kind that you only get out of her when you have caught her sideways, and her grey eyes flash up at me with the bright pleased amusement of a woman who has just realized she has been observed more closely than she budgeted for.
“How on earth did you see I was reading that?”
“Movie night.” I shrug, dropping the spoon back into the pot. “Rémi carried you upstairs. Your Kindle fell out of your hoodie pocket on the way through the living room. Matteo picked it up. The book on the screen was titled, and I quote, Knottingley Ever After.
“Matteo,” Iris says, with the resigned warmth of a woman cataloguing a known threat, “is a snitch.”
“He announced it at considerable volume. We have been politely waiting for you to bring it up.”
“I was hoping you would all spare me this. I am, in fact, almost done the book.”
She holds up her index finger, jogs around the island, reaches my counter and snags the Kindle she had, I will admit, left face-down beside the toaster two hours ago. She flicks the lock screen, holds the device up to me. The cover art with a small percentage in the corner.
Seventy-seven percent.
“I am at a suspenseful part.”
“Spoilers,” I say, mildly, “are a war crime.”
“It would be a spoiler.”
“I was not, in any case, planning to read it. Not because I am not curious. It is just that I am, by literacy-rate standards, an embarrassingly slow reader. Three pages a sitting. I have been working on the same novel for the better part of a season.”
Her face brightens. “Oh, thank God. Sir, same. It takes me days. Sometimes weeks. The fastest I ever read a paperback was three days and it nearly killed me. Most of the time it is a couple chapters on the bus, a couple before bed, a couple in the hot tub when the boys are not stinking it up.”
“Have we got a hot tub I do not know about.”
“Theoretically.”
“Right.”
She sobers, slightly.