Chapter 24 Crew
Coach pulls me into his office after practice and I know before he opens his mouth, it’s bad news.
It's the posture. The way he sits behind the desk with his hands folded and his eyes on the stat sheet instead of on me. It’s the way he tells me to close the door, which I do with a soft click.
It all means this conversation is private.
If he stood behind me and slammed the door, that means you're in trouble. He didn’t do any of that.
And I've been in professional hockey for six years and I know he's a man about to deliver news he's already decided isn't negotiable.
"I'm looking at a different pairing for the next game," he says. "Brooks and Rider on the blue line."
"Okay."
"It's not a reflection of your play—"
"Okay."
He looks at me. He wants me to argue. Coaches always want defensemen to argue when they get scratched, because the argument proves the hunger, proves the alpha won't accept being sidelined, proves the competitive fire that justifies keeping someone on the roster.
I've seen Steele do it. The jaw, the eyes, the controlled heat that says I disagree and I'll prove it.
I don't argue.
I nod once, put my bag over my shoulder, leave his office, and walk through the building to the parking garage.
I sit behind the wheel for four minutes without starting the engine because starting the engine means driving home and driving home means walking into the apartment where Remi Silver is sitting on the couch with ice on her knee and later Steele will be there.
And he’ll be in the kitchen cooking something and the three of us will eat together and sleep together and I will be the one who adjusts, who makes room, who fits into the spaces other people leave, and tonight I'm not sure I have the ability to hold that shape.
Three notes.
Knox Olivetti carries three notes.
Steele told me this morning while Remi was asleep. He stood in the kitchen with his back against the counter and his arms crossed and said the words in the flat, clinical voice he uses when he's processing something that threatens the load-bearing walls of his certainty.
"Knox came here. To the apartment." A pause. "He warned me that he carries all three. Bourbon, chocolate, orange. Scent match for all three with Remi."
I didn't reply.
"We each carry two," Steele said. "Together we cover all three. But he carries them alone."
I still didn't say anything.
"He says if we keep him away from her, her body will choose him eventually. That we'll lose her."
I looked at my best friend. The man I've played beside for six years and lived with for three, who I've shared a woman with, and all of it has changed everything.
I looked at him and I did what I always do, which is calculate where I fit in the configuration forming in my head, wondering if there's a space for me in it, and for the first time in my life the math came back wrong.
Steele is Knox's brother. Blood, biology, real last name and shared tattoo and shared gray eyes.
Remi is the omega. The scent match. The center of every equation.
Knox is the complete match. Three out of three. The source that carries every note she needs in a single body.
And I'm the defenseman from Boston who carries chocolate and orange and isn't related to anyone and who has built his entire identity on being the one who adjusts so that everyone else has room to be themselves.
What happens when there's no room left for the man who makes room?
I do go home, but I leave space between Remi and me on the couch.
I don't plan it. My body makes the unconscious retreat of an alpha whose confidence has taken two hits in one day and whose biology is broadcasting the damage before his brain can manage the signal.
My scent is shifting, the orange pulling inward, and I hate it because I can't control it and I've always, always been the one who controls the room's chemistry by being the steadiest thing in it.
"What happened?" she asks.
I tell her about the scratch. One game. Brooks and Rider. The coach's folded hands. I say it with a steadiness that people mistake for calm and which is actually the sound of a man who learned young that if he stays level the people around him don't fall apart.
"It's fine," I say.
She doesn't believe me. It shows in the way her green eyes narrow, the way she sets the ice pack down, the way her body angles toward mine.
"Crew."
"It's one game."
"You don't believe that."
No. I don't. Because the scratch isn't about the scratch. The scratch is about the pattern. The pattern is my whole life. I've always been the second line, the support role, the defender, the peacemaker that everyone needs and nobody fights for.
I'm the thing that makes the space livable without ever being the reason someone walks in.
"Steele told you," I say to the ceiling. "About Knox."
"Yes."
"All three notes. One alpha. Complete match."
“I already know.”
I stare at the light fixture. She already knows.
"I carry two out of three. Just two. The same as Steele." I turn my head to look at her. "And Steele is Knox's brother. Blood. Biology. If you add Knox, the pack is two Olivettis and me." I pause, the beat holds weight. "I'm the one who doesn't connect to anything."
Her face changes. Not with pity.
I've seen pity a lot. I grew up with a single mother and three younger siblings in Dorchester.
Pity was the currency of every teacher conference and church donation and well-meaning neighbor who brought casseroles.
This isn't that. This is something closer to recognition.
This is the expression of someone who has just been told something she should have seen and didn't, and who is angry at herself for the missing.
She takes the ice pack off her knee, sets it on the coffee table, and closes the gap between us. The space I made because making space is the only thing I've ever known how to do.
She takes my face in both her hands.
And she kisses me.
Not the way she kissed me last night when Steele was beside us and everything was shared and I moved into the rhythm they set, the way I always move into rhythms other people set.
She kisses me like I'm the only person in the room.
Her mouth is on mine and her hands are on my face and the orange note in my scent blooms back so fast it makes me dizzy.
She pulls back. Her eyes are bright and certain and her thumbs trace the line of my jaw.
"It will always be you," she says. "Even if I choose Knox too. Even if the pack is four, or forty, or four hundred. You're not the one who fills gaps, Crew. You're the reason the gaps don't destroy us."
My eyes burn.
I will not cry. I'm a professional hockey player and an alpha and I'm sitting on a couch with a beautiful omega. I will not cry because she told me I matter, except Remi did tell me I matter and apparently crying is exactly what that produces.
"Will you?" I say. "Choose Knox."
She doesn't flinch, nor does she deflect. She holds my gaze with the steadiness of someone who has decided to be honest and is going to commit to it even if the honesty costs her something.
"I feel him," she says. "Knox. I feel him in a way I can't explain and can't control and didn't ask for. My body knows something about him that my brain hasn't caught up with."
The words should hurt. They don't. Or they do, but the hurt is the pain of hearing a truth that confirms something you already knew rather than a lie that makes you question what you thought you understood.
"But I also feel you," she says. "And Steele. And what I feel for you isn't less because it's different. It isn't partial because it's two notes instead of three. It isn't—"
She stops and takes a breath.
"Somehow I need all three of you. And I know that sounds—"
"You're doing that thing again, Remi."
The words come out of me before I've decided to say them. Quiet. Not angry. Not hurt. The certainty that arrives when I finally see something clearly enough to name it. Like I do on the ice when I read a play two passes before it arrives and put myself where the puck is going to be.
"What thing?"
"You want others to take the choice out of your hands.
" I hold her face the way she held mine, thumbs at her jaw, steady.
"You said somehow I need it. Like it's happening to you.
Like the universe is arranging this and you're just along for the ride.
" I look into her green eyes. The woman who has spent her whole life being managed by coaches and protected by brothers and directed by biology, and who doesn't know yet that she's the most powerful person in every room she enters.
"But it's not happening to you Remi. The decision isn’t going to be taken out of your hands.
You're choosing. You chose us. You're choosing Knox. Own it."
The apartment is silent as I listen back to my words. I’ve just given her the go ahead to own her decisions. To find Knox.
“Thank you.” Her hands are on my chest. My heart beats under her palm. She feels it. I do. It’s steady but that is the only thing I've ever had to offer anyone, the constant rhythm that people lean on without thinking about, the way you lean on a wall without thanking it for not falling down.
"And you're right," she says.
"I know."
"I'm choosing you," she says. "Not because you're here. But because you're the only person who tells me the truth when I'm hiding from it, and I need that more than I need three notes."
"I’m choosing Steele…And I'm choosing Knox."
I nod once. My thumbs trace the line of her jaw and I don't flinch and my scent doesn't waver.
Then I realize, I'm the wall. The thing that lets everyone else lean on because that’s what I do.
She leans into me.
Her head finds the space below my jaw where my scent is strongest, and she breathes in.
Her body settles, she exhales, releasing tension that only happens when an omega finds the scent she needs.
Not the complete scent. Not the three-note she holds, but mine.
Two compatible notes. Which is enough. More than enough.
I hope.
My arms close around her.
"First," I murmur against her hair. So quiet that if she weren't pressed against my chest she'd miss it. "You chose me first."
"I did." She holds on tighter.
I'm the defenseman. The position that exists to support others. And she just told me, for the first time in my life, that the support is not the consolation prize.