Chapter 8 Steele
Marilyn Mansfield does not come to practice on Mondays.
That's a stated fact, a pattern I've logged over three seasons with the Scented Scorpions.
Marilyn is a Tuesday-through-Thursday presence, buttoned into her office by eight, out by six, reachable by phone on weekends but only in writing, as if speaking her name aloud on a Saturday might invoke consequences she's not ready to deal with.
But on Mondays the building feels like hers in absentia; her brand of composed authority leaves an impression on the air even when she's not here.
So when I come off the ice after the second conditioning set, my first thought is not Marilyn comes to practice on Mondays now.
My first thought is Saturday night.
I skate to the gate and step off. She waits until I've pulled my helmet while the team mills around behind me, and then she says, "Steele. When you're ready."
"Ready for what?"
"My office." She's already looking past me. "Crew too."
Crew comes off behind me, pulling off his helmet and falls into step beside me.
Marilyn's office is on the second floor of the administrative wing, above the players' lounge and adjacent to the window that overlooks the ice. She furnishes it with the intention of making people feel they've been invited somewhere rather than summoned somewhere.
"Take a seat, gentlemen." She points to the chairs. I pull one out, sit and glance around. There's always a bowl of something from whatever bakery she's currently rotating through. Today it's small almond croissants, which, if we weren't about to discuss what we are, I'd ask for one.
She sits behind the desk.
Marilyn opens a folder.
"I'm going to show you some photographs," she says, "and I'd like you to take a moment before you respond."
She slides the first photograph across the desk.
It's The Obsidian Club, the Labyrinth level, taken with whatever low-light camera the press is using now that makes everything look dark yet clear.
Two men in wolf masks, one at the bar with a drink, the other with shoulders braced against the curved stone beside him.
The shot has caught them in three-quarter profile: enough of a body, enough of a jaw, enough of a jacket to be recognizable to anyone who knows the jacket in question.
The jacket in question is mine.
I pick it up, examine it with what I hope reads as polite curiosity rather than the mild cardiac event that is currently underway behind my sternum, and say, "That's a fantastic wolf mask. Where would someone get one of those?"
Crew says nothing.
Marilyn watches us both. She has the patience of someone who has worked in professional sports PR for fourteen years, which means she has the patience of a geologist watching a cliff erode. It also means she knows eventually something breaks, and she will simply be here to watch when it does.
"It isn't us," I say. "Similar build, sure, but that's a lot of guys."
"The jacket," she says.
"Lots of jackets like that. It's from a department store in town."
She slides the second photograph.
This one is the parking lot.
This time, it's my car. The charcoal Audi that my brother helped me pick because he has opinions about everything, and he might've helped me pay for it.
Anyway, the car was caught through the windshield by what must have been a telephoto lens at forty feet.
And unfortunately, the two men in question had just removed their wolf masks.
The shot is grainy, but it is, unambiguously, our faces.
"Right," I say.
Crew exhales through his nose.
Marilyn leans back in her chair. Her expression doesn't change.
It doesn't go to the clipped professional efficiency I've seen her deploy when she's genuinely angry.
No, this look is Marilyn saying I'm managing my response for your benefit and my own.
She sets her hands flat on the desk and looks at us with something worn and honest.
"I'm not here to lecture you," she says. "I want to be clear about that first."
"Doesn't feel like not-a-lecture," I say.
"Steele." Crew, quietly.
I close my mouth.
Marilyn gathers the photographs and closes the folder.
"You're two of the most talented players on this team.
You're arguably two of the reasons we're looking at a genuine shot at the quarter-finals for the first time in years.
" She pauses. "I would like to get us to the quarter-finals.
To do that, I need you playing your best, and I need there to be nothing in the press that pulls focus from hockey. Do you follow me?"
"We follow you," Crew says.
"We were careful," I say, and immediately recognize that this is a deeply stupid thing to say to someone who is currently in possession of photographic evidence, but here we are.
"You were photographed," Marilyn says. "Which means someone knew you'd be there, which means someone tipped them off, which means your careful wasn't careful enough.
" She's not accusatory, but she is precise, and precision is its own kind of devastating.
"The pictures haven't been published yet.
I've been working to keep them that way.
But that's a temporary situation, not a permanent one. "
Crew's jaw does the thing it does when he's processing something he doesn't like. He has a habit of tightening at the hinge, though barely visible, after three years of living in close quarters with him, I know.
"How bad is it?" he asks.
"Bad enough that if they print it, it becomes a story about what two Scented Scorpions players were doing at an underground alpha-omega club three nights before a crucial stretch of games.
" She lets that sit for exactly the right length of time.
"Not catastrophic. But a distraction. And we can't afford distractions right now. "
The croissants continue to sit there. I'm not going to eat one. I'm absolutely going to eat one.
"I'm sorry," I say. I do mean it. Not because we were photographed. Admitting that is far more complicated. But because it landed on her desk, and her desk is where things become problems of the professional kind, which is not what she's here for.
Something in her expression moves slightly.
"I know you didn't," she says. "And I understand why you were there."
"You do?" Crew looks at her.
"I'm an alpha," she says matter-of-factly. "I've played this out. The aggression. The drive. The biology doing things your rational mind has opinions about. And when my omega..." She pauses.
The room goes quiet.
I don't have my usual deflection mechanism available to me or the ability to pivot to something lighter, because there's nothing lighter in the room at the moment.
Marilyn says it with the flatness of someone who has said it enough times that the words have stopped bleeding, but it is obvious she is still carrying the weight of what the words mean.
It's the same way my sister talks about our parents sometimes, in that controlled register of a person who can't get over being abandoned by the people who were supposed to love them most.
I look at Crew. He's looking at his hands.
"I'm sorry about your omega."
"Thank you." She says it without the usual conversational scaffolding around that kind of exchange.
"I don't want you to feel sorry for me. I'm telling you because I want you to understand that I'm not standing on a ledge I haven't stood on myself.
" She straightens slightly. "The drive doesn't go away because you're professional.
It doesn't go away because the timing is inconvenient, or because there's a season to get through, or because the people you need are off-limits. "
That last clause lands in the room with no emphasis. I let it land without touching it.
"Which brings me to," Marilyn says, and opens the desk drawer, "what I think can actually help."
Crew's gaze lifts. "What does actually help mean in this context?"
"It means I know an omega who's in a fairly similar position.
She's new to Nashville; she's professional; she's discreet; and she's been advised by her own doctor, independently of anything to do with us, that some alpha proximity would do her good.
" Marilyn closes the drawer and folds her hands together.
"I'm not suggesting anything that isn't consensual and mutually beneficial.
I'm suggesting that the three of you might find it useful to spend some time in the same space. "
"As in," I say.
"As in she'd stay at your apartment for a while. Nothing obligatory. Just proximity. Shared meals. The biology is allowed to do whatever the biology does, or not." She pauses. "She needs alphas. You need an omega at home. It's practical."
"I need hockey," Crew says.
"You need hockey, and you need this," Marilyn says, with the gentle immovability of someone stating a fact.
"I've watched this team for many seasons, Crew.
I've watched alphas push through when they shouldn't.
I've watched the performance dip in the second half because the body can only suppress for so long before it takes it out of your reaction time.
" Her gaze is steady. "The club can't afford a scandal.
It also cannot afford you both playing at seventy percent when we need full capacity. "
Crew says nothing.
I say nothing.
There's a knock at the door.
"Come in," Marilyn says.
The door opens.
She's blonde, petite, with the soft-focus prettiness that photographs beautifully and reads as immediately likeable.
She looks from me to Crew with wide-set eyes, and a smile that suggests she was told this would be a straightforward meeting and is doing her best to approach it as such.
She smells clean and lightly floral, something that might be lily-of-the-valley, and she holds herself with the careful poise of an omega who's been in professional spaces long enough that it's become default.
She's perfectly nice.
She's perfectly lovely.
She's nothing like the omega we chased.
She isn't Remi.
Crew and I look at each other. A two-second conversation conducted without words, and the content of it lands in my chest with the weight of a problem he's already solved and doesn't like the answer to.
She isn't the scent in the maze. She isn't the sound of someone hitting a dead end in a hedge and turning and holding their ground. She isn't the feeling of two seconds from the thing you shouldn't want and only stopping because your phone buzzed.
She isn't anyone we have any business comparing to anything, because that comparison is a road we are absolutely not going to drive down in Marilyn Mansfield's office on a Monday morning.
I smile at her. Crew doesn't, but Crew not smiling in professional settings is not a deviation from baseline.
"This is Sloane," Marilyn says, with the calm confidence of someone who has done their homework and believes in the solution they're presenting. "Sloane, this is Steele and Crew."
"Hi," Sloane says. Her voice is warm. She was absolutely told this would be straightforward.
"Hey," I say.
Crew says: "Hi." It comes out like a hockey stat being read aloud. Flat.
Sloane takes this in her stride.
Marilyn leans forward. "Just try it." Her tone has dropped the professional register entirely. Now it is quieter, more direct. "A week. Two. Let yourselves have some version of what you need that isn't a Saturday night in a hedge maze with a camera outside the gate."
The hedge maze lands with the precision of a woman who is not as unaware as we assumed.
Neither of us says anything.
"Do we have an agreement?" Marilyn asks.
Crew looks at me. I look at him. Neither of us says no.
"We'll make it work," I say.
Marilyn takes her pen and looks back at her computer. "Good." The meeting, apparently, is over. "Sloane's details are in the folder. She's currently in temporary accommodation, and you have the room." She glances up. "Don't be strange about it. Just be people."
We stand. Sloane is already adjusting to the room's energy — reading the temperature, adapting, but being gracious about the fact that the two alphas she's just been introduced to are working very hard to be normal and not quite succeeding.
Sloane falls into step beside us in the corridor. It feels strange. We're three people who have been presented with an arrangement and have not yet decided what to do with it.
"Marilyn gave me your address. Should I wait here or..." She trails off, her gaze flicking between Crew and me.
"I'll walk you to your car," I say, removing the apartment key from my pocket and placing it in her hand. "I'll text you the address."
"Are you sure?"
Not really. But I'm not going to tell her that.
Crew stands on my left with the still quality of a man who is thinking about something that isn't in this elevator, and the faint, residual memory of bourbon and chocolate and orange moves through my chest like a frequency I can't tune out, and I look at the numbers counting down and I don't say any of the things I'm thinking.
"Yeah," I say. "Crew has the other key."
I take out my phone and ask for her number, punch it in, and add Sloane as a contact.
"Thanks," she says.
I can't believe we're doing this.
What will Remi think?