Chapter 7
Third Plate
~MATTEO~
I have, in twenty-five years of being a person on this earth, never once considered the act of watching an Omega eat lunch to be anything resembling spiritually fulfilling.
Today, the universe is correcting that oversight.
Iris O’Shea is on her third plate.
Plate one was a mountain of grilled chicken, rice, and three steamed greens she pushed around with the dutiful resentment of a woman told to be a good adult.
Plate two was a build-your-own bowl with an unholy amount of black beans and a quantity of avocado I would describe as alarming.
Plate three is, somehow, steak. The campus dining hall offers it to people willing to wait twelve minutes at the carving station, and she waited those twelve minutes with the patience of a woman to whom protein is currency.
She has demolished two tall glasses of protein milk on the way through, and is now sipping orange juice between bites like a small predator pacing itself.
And I am, against every shred of my upbringing, sitting across from her with my hands folded like a man at confession and watching her with what I am increasingly aware is a stupid look on my face.
Get it together, Santori.
The body remembers what the mouth has not yet processed.
Forty minutes ago, my mouth was on her: my hands were full of her, hot wet skin, soft thighs, and the kind of tight clutch that wipes the saved file of a man’s brain clean off the drive.
I have walked off the ice with adrenaline still firing through me a hundred times, but it’s never felt like this.
Not with my cock still throbbing in some low traitor pulse against the seam of my joggers and the taste of her ghosted on the inside of my mouth, watching her chase a bite of medium-rare around a plate.
And here is the part nobody warned me about.
The most undoing thing in the room is not the memory of the shower. It is the way she eats. Without performance. With the appetite of a person who has, against all the evidence in her closet, been ignoring her body long enough that the body has stopped asking nicely.
She does not apologize for the size of her bites. She does not laugh and say god, I shouldn’t. She just eats. Steady. Methodical. Like fuel.
The unsigned standing order in my gut, the one I have stopped trying to argue with, hums in deep, unqualified approval.
She catches me on the last bite.
Fork halfway to her mouth, eyes flicking up to mine through the damp pink fringe that has been refusing to dry since the shower, and the second she registers the expression I am no longer in conscious control of, color climbs her throat in a slow, telling rose.
“Santori.”
“O’Shea.”
“You are staring.”
“I am admiring.”
“It is the same thing with better marketing.” She sets the fork down, glares at me over the rim of her juice glass, drinks. “Knock it off. You’re putting me off my food.”
Fuck, I love an unapologetic woman.
“My apologies. I will look at the salt shaker.” I do not look at the salt shaker. “It has had a long day. Could use the validation.”
She huffs, and the rose of her beautiful cheeks climbs another shade.
The helpless flicker at the corner of her mouth tells me I have won this exchange without her permission.
Her ears are pink under the wet hair, and she is, in a dining hall full of bored Alphas, the only object in the room I have the faintest interest in.
“You’re ridiculous,” she mutters.
“You’re cute when you blush.”
She kicks me under the table.
Not hard. An indignant little tap from the toe of her boot against my shin, and I take it without complaint because, honestly, I deserved it.
Her gaze drops to my untouched plate.
“You haven’t eaten anything.”
“I noticed.”
“What happened to the bar is on the floor, O’Shea, you have a banana, you absolute hypocrite.”
“Different context.” I shrug, lean back, fold my hands behind my head. “You had not eaten in roughly a calendar year. I had a substantial breakfast. Furthermore, I am not currently hungry.” I let the corner of my mouth tip up. “I am, in fact, deeply satisfied.”
I wink.
She splutters. Actual juice-into-glass spluttering that requires a paper napkin and a redirection of the conversation, and the sound she makes after is somewhere between a laugh and a death threat.
“You,” she manages, “are a problem.”
“I am told. Frequently.”
She glances around the dining hall, then, properly, the way a goalie sweeps the rink to clock everyone on the ice. Her shoulders go a degree tighter, and I do not have to track her eyes to know what she is seeing.
We have an audience.
The kind that pretends to read menus while it watches.
Two tables of hockey adjacents to our left.
A clump of figure skating girls near the windows, not quite hiding their phones.
A row of upperclass Alphas at the back wall doing the slow stink-eye since I sat down with a damp pink-haired Omega and a tray of three lunches.
Iris’s scent shifts faintly. Frosted strawberry threading thin under stress, and that, I refuse to allow.
“Aren’t you,” she says, careful, eyes still tracking the room, “the least bit worried about your reputation here? This place is, you know.” She waves a hand, a small dry gesture that takes in the marble columns and the cathedral windows and the bronze statue of the legend mid-stride visible through the lobby. “Elite.”
“Elite,” I echo, tasting the word the same way she did.
“A word that does a tremendous amount of unpaid labor in this building.” I shrug.
“People are nosy by occupation, Pinky. None of them are paying my bills or signing my scholarship, so the volume of their opinions has, frankly, no bearing on the contents of my afternoon.”
She studies me. Properly. Storm-grey through the pink fringe, doing the long, surgical read she did on the ice when she was deciding whether to give me my point.
“You actually mean that.”
“I rarely say things I do not mean. Inefficient.”
She drops her eyes back to her glass.
The careful settle of a woman recalibrating her threat map.
“So,” I say, before she can put any more walls back up while I am sitting here, “are you actually settled, or are you still in that lovely floating-hostage phase where the building has not formally admitted you exist?”
She winces.
“Define settled.”
“Slept in a bed. Knows where the bed lives. Has more than three working possessions in the bed’s vicinity.”
“Technically,” she says, with the offended dignity of a cat being asked when it last drank water, “I have not yet been assigned a dorm. Luggage is at the main office. Tryouts were, ah, immediate.”
My eyebrows climb.
“O’Shea. Should we maybe go figure that out before main admin closes for the day.”
You can tell she wasn’t expecting that as she blinks at me far too innocently.
“They close?”
“The useful one closes,” I confirm, sliding her water glass closer on reflex. “There is a twenty-four-hour desk on the east end of campus, but the staff over there function strictly as a customer service exhibit, in that they are technically present and functionally unable to help.”
She nods, slow, processing.
I rise, gather her plates without asking because asking would invite an argument and she has eaten now, the argument can wait for a less critical battlefield.
“You want anything else? Dessert. A small cow as offering?”
“I am satisfied,” she says, almost solemn. “Thank you. For bringing me here. So I know where it is.”
“I can give you the full tour later,” I tell her, and I mean it more than the lazy tone advertises. She lifts her eyes and catches the difference. “Hockey wing. Rink complex. The good coffee cart they pretend is on the map and is in fact in a basement.”
“Sold,” she says, mild, and goes back to her juice while I cart the plates away.
The walk to the bussing station takes me through the gauntlet of the hockey adjacents, and the moment my back is to her the voices climb just enough to be heard. Just enough. The exact volume of men who want me to hear and want plausible deniability about it.
“— charity lunch, or is he taking actual pity shots at the Omega goalie —”
“— Twenty-One’s scoring rate must be at an all-time low if he’s sniffing around —”
I set the plates down on the conveyor without acknowledging a single syllable.
The only chirp that ever lands is the one you swing at.
Give it nothing, it loses its calories. I have been a man who does not feed the noise since I was eleven and got razzed for the size of my mother’s name on the back of my first jersey.
Useful, separately, that none of them appear to have a clue what happened in the women’s showers, and I would like to keep it that way for as long as the universe will let me.
Walk through. Eyes forward. She is at the table.
Iris has her phone out by the time I get back.
Her brow is creased, and her thumb is jabbing at the home screen with rising violence, and there is a small put-upon pout on her mouth that does something both unprofessional and undeniable to me.
I drop into the chair beside her instead of across from her, lean in close enough that my shoulder grazes hers, and look down at the screen.
“I really should have gotten a new phone before I came here,” she mutters. “Mother of god. No service. No service at all. This thing is a paperweight.”
“You will not get service here,” I tell her.
She turns her head to look at me, and the move puts our faces a startled inch apart.
Neither of us moves.
Her scent washes up over me, strawberry gone warm from sun through the dining-hall window and clean shampoo from the locker room shower and the faintest, infuriating trace of me still pressed into the hair at her temple. My jaw tightens. I do not lean in.
The not-leaning costs something, and she watches me pay it.
The corner of her mouth tilts.
And I find, to my mild surprise, that I do not mind the cost at all.