Chapter 22 Remi
I wake up warm.
Not the fever-warm of the last two days, not the chemical warmth of a body fighting itself.
This is the warmth of two men on either side of me, Steele's chest under my cheek and Crew's arm across my waist, and the temperature of a bed that has been occupied by three people who spent most of the night doing things that permanently alter the chemistry of a room.
I don't move.
I lie there and listen to Steele's breathing. It's slow and even, the breathing of a man who is happy. Crew's thumb makes absent circles on my hip bone, which means he's awake and has been for a while and is choosing to say nothing about it, which is the most Crew thing in the world.
The cashmere blanket is around my shoulders.
I don't remember pulling it up. One of them must have done it in the night, and neither of is hating whose blanket it is, and I'm choosing not to think about that right now because right now is the first morning in weeks where I don't feel like I'm holding myself together with discipline and denial, and I'd like to stay here for a minute longer.
"Morning," Crew says, against my hair.
"Morning."
"How's the knee?"
I test it. Flex, extend, the careful inventory I run every morning before my feet hit the floor. It aches. The walk to The Stave yesterday pushed it, but the deep structural pain has faded to background noise.
"Manageable," I say.
"Good." His mouth presses against the top of my head. "Steele wants to make pancakes."
"Steele's asleep."
"Steele was asleep."
Steele kisses my head before he shifts out from under me and my head settles onto the warm dent in the pillow where he was.
"Stay in bed with Crew."
I laugh. "Oh, that is going to be so hard."
"The worst," Crew murmurs against my hair. "I don't know how we'll manage."
I laugh again. A real laugh. Possibly the first one in weeks that doesn't have an edge to it. Just a sound a person makes when she's happy.
And I am happy.
The arena is cold.
Not the kind of cold that surprises you. I grew up on ice, I know how cold it gets. I spent fifteen years in arenas exactly like this one, but this is the kind of cold that resets your nervous system.
The Scented Scorpions' practice facility is newer than the rinks I trained on in Boston, bigger, the boards cleaner, the overhead lights brighter.
I find a seat in the second row behind the boards, close enough to the scratch of blades and the crack of pucks hitting the backing net. Close enough to see the spray when someone cuts hard near the glass.
They're running drills.
Julius Keane, number sixty-nine, which I'm sure he's heard every possible joke about. He’s running a three-on-two rush drill with the forwards. Kane Moretti is on the left wing. Steele on the right side, he moves across ice the way I used to.
That thought hurts more than I realized it would.
His movement carries the unconscious authority of someone whose body was built for this surface.
Number seven. Forward, right wing. His skating is technical where Keane's is efficient and Moretti's is aggressive, and watching the drill is like watching a conversation between three different philosophies of movement that somehow produce the same result, which is getting the puck into the net.
Crew is on the blue line.
Defenseman. Number ninety-six. He plays steady, wide, and immovable when it matters.
Which is how he lives his life. His job is to be the wall between the opposing forwards and the net, and he does it with the patience of someone who has learned that the most important thing in defense isn't speed, it's position.
Crew can read the play two passes before it arrives and puts himself where the puck is going to be, not where it is.
Steele catches my eye.
His gray eyes on mine, his helmet on, the mouth guard hanging from his cage.
He doesn't wave. He doesn't call out. He just looks at me for a half-second between drills. The corner of his mouth curving into a smile he's not going to let the rest of the team see.
My whole chest restructures itself around that half-second.
Crew spots me on his next pass along the boards. His acknowledgment is different. He gives me a full grin behind the cage that he doesn't bother hiding from anyone, because Crew has never in his life pretended not to feel what he's feeling.
I love that about him.
"Those two seem different today."
The voice comes from the seat beside me.
A woman in a navy blazer with a lanyard that reads SCENTED SCORPIONS, Public Relations. Her hair is pulled back. A pen tucked behind her ear.
Marilyn.
"Different how?" I ask.
"Looser." She watches Steele run the drill again. "More relaxed. Less like they're carrying something they can't put down." She glances at me. "How's it going?"
I consider the question. I consider the seventeen possible answers.
"We're making it work."
Marilyn nods. She doesn’t reply immediately but watches the practice.
She turns to me. "Can I ask you something?”
"Sure."
"The last omega who lived with them, before you.
" She crosses her legs, grabs her pen and taps it against her knee in the unconscious rhythm of someone whose brain is always one conversation ahead of her mouth.
"It didn't work. She lasted three weeks.
Steele and Crew couldn't find any kind of balance with her, and the chemistry was wrong, and she left voluntarily but it wasn't... smooth.
" She looks at me. "For a while I thought they were the problem.
That maybe they weren't built for pack dynamics, that the two-alpha thing was too rigid.
" A pause. "I don't think that anymore."
"No?"
"No." She watches Crew hip-check another player into the boards. "I think they’re waiting for the right person."
I don't say anything to that. I stare at the ice, listening to the sound of blades and sticks and short hard grunts.
On the far side of the rink, two players have stopped drilling and are arguing. One is built like a wall and he's standing nose-to-nose with another player. They're yelling about something.
"For fuck's sake." One voice screams, loud enough to echo. "It's electrical tape, not a lifestyle choice."
"It's my tape and it was on my bench and you took it—"
"I borrowed it—"
"You didn't ask—"
Marilyn watches them with the expression of a woman who has seen this argument four hundred times and will see it four hundred more.
She turns to me.
"You don't happen to have any omega friends who could calm those two down, do you? Would you believe they're fighting over a roll of tape?"
"Are they pack mates?"
"Of course."
I look at the two men, who are now gesturing at the tape with the emotional intensity of two people negotiating a land treaty.
"I don't know any kindergarten teachers," I say.
Marilyn's laugh is genuine and unexpected. It changes her whole face in a good way.
The practice shifts to a full scrimmage. First team versus second team, twenty-minute clock, Vonn Keane in the net and looking like he's trying to prove something. The pace is different now, faster, the drills replaced by something that breathes and adjusts in real time.
Julius Keane wins the opening faceoff clean and feeds it to Steele on the wing and Steele carries it across the blue line with the casual authority of someone who has done this ten thousand times.
Crew steps up on defense, reads the play, angles his body between Steele and the net, and for a fraction of a second they're opponents instead of pack. Steele dekes left, shoots right, and the puck hits Vonn's pad and deflects wide.
"Nice save," someone shouts from the bench.
"Nice miss," someone else adds.
The scrimmage continues. The ice takes up the sound.
"What are you going to do?" Marilyn says.
The question is casual. Her tone isn't.
I touch my knee. The brace. The mechanical reality of a joint that may or may not give me back the thing I spent my entire life building.
"I don't know," I say. “The knee is the current problem, but I can’t afford another hit to my head. Apparently, I was lucky. But next time…” I can’t think about it right now.
She studies me for a long moment, the kind of looking that isn't rude because it's so obviously purposeful.
"Come see me later," she says. "Let me think about something."
She stands, clips her pen to her lanyard, and walks down the row toward the tunnel where the coaches are gathered. I watch her go and catalog the interaction the way I catalog everything. I don't know what she's thinking but I know the look of someone who has just connected two dots.
The scrimmage clock runs down.
Keane's line wins four to two.
Steele scored the last one, which is a clean wrister from the right circle that beat Vonn glove-side and made a metallic ping against the crossbar that I will never not love.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
Unknown number. Nashville area code.
I respond because I answer everything.
"Hello?"
"Meet me at The Stave."
His voice.
Lower than Steele's. Quieter. The controlled register of a man who measures every word before releasing it, and who has apparently decided that three of those words are sufficient for a Tuesday morning phone call.
"Knox," I say.
"Yes."
"How did you get my number?"
A pause.
"Meet me at The Stave," he says again.
And hangs up.
I sit in the cold arena with the scrimmage breaking up around me. Steele skates toward the bench and Crew pulls his helmet off. Both look at me through the glass.
It doesn't stop Knox's voice in my head.