Chapter 18 Crew
The call comes in at six on Saturday, Even Steven's name on the screen, and Steele has the phone before it finishes the first ring.
"Tell me it's a yes," Even Steven says, before either of us speaks.
"It's a yes," Steele says.
I look at him sideways.
"Korbin's got a place in the Gulch," Steven continues. "Private. Team only. Julius is already there. Levon brought food. We earned this one, Banks, OT win away, quarter-finals, come on."
He's not wrong. The playoffs are going well, and the team deserves a night thinking about the next game. I look at Steele. He's already looking at the sofa where Remi is reading a book.
"What time?" I ask.
"Eight. Don't be late."
I disconnect.
Steele puts the phone down on the counter and we stand in the kitchen saying nothing for a second, the way we do when we're both in the same problem from different angles.
The apartment has been too quiet today. And Remi is different.
Yes, she is healing and managing it and not saying so.
Today is something else. Today she's been on the couch with a book that has blue aliens on the front, yet she hasn't turned a page in an hour, and when I made coffee she said thank you with the automatic politeness of someone whose brain was elsewhere.
She was fine until New York.
She's been not-fine in a different way since.
I don't have all the pieces yet. Something happened at the game. River never said anything to her. But the more I think about it, I remember whenever I looked at her in the stands, I saw her head moving in the crowd, searching.
I know that whatever she found in New York, she hasn't said.
I'm a patient man. Steele is not.
"We can skip it," Steele says.
"She'd know."
"She'd probably be relieved to have the apartment to herself."
"I know." I take my coffee. "Let's ask her."
She's pushed into the corner of the couch, the book face-down on the cushion beside her, her brace-leg stretched along the length of the seat, the white blanket tucked around her hips.
She looks up when we come in, and the expression she makes is the pleasant neutral one.
The one she puts on for the moments when she's aware she's being observed and would rather not be interpreted.
"We’ve been invited to a team party," Steele says. "But we don't have to go."
She looks at him. At me. Back at the distance.
"Go," she says.
"Rem—"
"Have fun. Celebrate." Her voice is easy. "You won in overtime away from home. Go be with your team."
Steele looks at me.
"We'll be back by twelve," I say.
"You'll be back by two," she says. "And that's fine. I'm going to run a bath and read and go to bed early. Go."
There's a sound to her fine that means she needs the room to herself and knows it and won't say so. I've been learning her tells for weeks, and the even-easy voice means she's processing something privately and needs the space to do it.
I nod once.
“Thanks.”
Sunday morning has a quality in this apartment: the light comes in off the east wall around seven and hits the kitchen in strips, somewhere in the building an alarm sounds through two cycles before it settles, and Steele sleeps through both of them. I don't.
She's between us.
This started without discussion, the way the important things in this apartment have started.
One night she couldn't sleep and Steele sat with her until she did, and then somewhere in the arrangement of it she was asleep with her head on his shoulder and I was on the other side and no one moved until morning.
It's been seven nights now. No conversation about it.
No formal declaration. Just three people who have stopped pretending the alternative is working.
Her breathing is even. The brace is off for sleeping, doctor's orders, and her knee is pillowed on a folded blanket.
In sleep she takes up more space than she does when she is awake. In sleep, the discipline drops, and she sprawls and takes the blanket and doesn't apologize for it.
I get up carefully and start breakfast.
Poached eggs. Good bread from the bakery that makes the sourdough Remi likes, which I know she likes because she had three pieces the first morning I made it and then looked at the loaf with something that could only be described as a personal reckoning.
I brew the coffee, as she takes it. Orange juice because she's still on the post-concussion nutrition protocol even if she won't admit she's following it.
By the time it's ready, Steele's up, his hair still wrong from sleep, and he is leaning in the kitchen doorway in last night's t-shirt.
He takes the coffee I slide toward him.
"She's awake," he says.
I look toward the hall.
She appears in the doorway thirty seconds later. She’s upright, no crutches, one hand on the door frame and one hand at her hip, tentatively crossing the threshold with careful yet determined steps.
"Remi." Steele's voice has the register that means he's about to say something she won't like.
"I'm fine."
"Crutches."
"I'm three steps from the table."
"Crutches," he says again, flat. "The physio said—"
"I know what the physio said."
"Then you should listen."
I've crossed the kitchen before either of them finishes the exchange. Her arm comes up in the reflex of someone who is about to argue and then my hands are at her waist and the back of her knees and she's in my arms. The argument stops mid-breath.
She stares at me. "I'm not a child.”
"I know that." I carry her to the couch and set her down with her leg elevated on the arm, the way the physio recommended. She sighs with the dignity of someone who has chosen to allow this.
Steele appears with her coffee and sets it on the side table with the faint satisfaction of a man who got exactly the outcome he wanted without being the one who caused the conflict.
She takes the coffee.
For a moment she just sits there holding it, both hands, the cup warm, and looks at the two of us with an expression I can't read.
Then she places the cup on the table, reaches up and takes hold of my t-shirt and pulls me down, and kisses me.
Her mouth is gentle and certain, which is not a combination I had fully mapped until now, and my hand finds her jaw before I've decided to move, and she exhales into the kiss like she's been holding her breath and can now finally breathe.
When she pulls back, Steele is very carefully looking at his coffee.
She looks between us.
"Okay," she says. Not to either of us. To herself.
She picks up her cup and drinks her coffee.
We have breakfast.
The morning does its Sunday thing. At some point Steele puts something on in the background that isn't quite music and isn't quite noise, and Remi tucks the white blanket over her lap and reads.
Except that she reads differently than she did yesterday.
Yesterday, was not-reading. Today, is actual reading and the occasional laugh at something.
It's mid-morning when I notice her doing it.
She's been looking at us. Individually. Not the way she usually looks at us. She'll look at Steele for a moment, then look at me, and each time her expression of someone carrying out a test rather than having a conversation.
Steele clocks it before I say anything. He catches my eye over her head.
She tips her chin up.
Sniffs.
Not subtle, not fully conscious. The kind of thing you do when your nose is doing the work and hasn't informed the rest of you. She does it again, turning slightly toward me. The small focused crease between her brows arrives and stays.
"Remi," I say.
She looks at me. Then at Steele.
"What do I smell like?" she asks.
Steele glances at me. "Bourbon. Orange. Why?"
"What about me?" I ask, before she can redirect.
"Chocolate. Orange." She says it with the flat certainty of a result she's been checking for the last hour. "Together—" She stops. The crease deepens. "Together you're bourbon and chocolate and orange."
Steele waits.
"That's my scent profile," she says. "I had it done three years ago.
Bourbon, chocolate, and orange. That's me. It’s come back properly, according to the hospital.
But together—" She looks between us, and what's on her face now isn't confusion, it’s a big smile. One of the biggest she’s ever given us.
"Together you're it. You're the whole thing. "
The Sunday morning sounds around us. Somewhere a church bell peels.
"That's not how it works," Steele says carefully.
"I know that's not how it's supposed to work." She looks at him. "But it's what I'm smelling."
"A scent match is one alpha," he says. "That's biology. It's not a sum of alphas."
"I know what biology says." Her voice is even. "I'm telling you what I'm smelling. Individually, you're each two-thirds. Together you're the whole thing."
Another silence.
I understand what she's doing now. She's been running this calculation all morning, maybe longer, maybe since New York, maybe since before, and she's arrived at a result that doesn't fit the framework and she's choosing to say it out loud anyway, because that's what she does with things that don't fit.
She says them. She tries to make sense of her needs.
"If you found her," Remi says. "Your actual scent match... One person, the whole thing, no math required." She looks at her coffee. "Would you leave the pack?"
Steele and I look at each other.
"I hope she'd pick us both," I say.
"That's not what I'm asking." She looks at me directly, then Steele. "I'm asking if you would pick her. If she existed. If you found her. Would you choose her? Would you choose your full match, whole thing, no splitting, over what you have here?"
The question sits on the table between us.
Steele's jaw works once. He opens his mouth and closes it. He takes his coffee and puts it down.
I look at Remi.
She's watching both of us with the steady, clear-eyed patience of someone who already has a version of this answer and is waiting to see if we'll find it ourselves.
We can't answer.
Not because the answer doesn't exist. Because the answer requires something we don't know yet and without that, anything we say is hypothetical, and hypothetical answers are not what she's asking for.
The Sunday light moves across the floor.
She picks up her book.
Neither of us says another word about it. How can we?