Chapter 7 #2
I’m surely entertaining the group chats at this rate.
Surely the student body are going to be working overtime to show pics of our closeness from a distance to entertain these bored suckers.
The group chats will be popping by the evening, or hell.
They’ll make social banners hoping it’ll trend and make them famous for a day.
Either way, I’m sure this instance will be entertainment for the student body.
I can confidently say, I am not embarrassed of Iris O’Shea, in private or in public, and at some point in the last six hours that has stopped being a position and started being a fact about me.
Dangerously.
“Why will it not work?” she asks, soft, eyes still on mine.
“North Star is a closed network.” I make myself sit back, just enough to let us both breathe. “Carrier service is blocked on most of the campus footprint. It is how they get the freshmen.”
“How they get the freshmen?”
“The school has its own provider. Branded plans. Branded handsets. You enroll, you pay, you are issued a device that works on the elite network they have constructed, congratulations, you are a North Star citizen.”
Her face does something complicated.
“So I need to scuff up for a new phone.”
“In the polite terminology, yes.”
She blows out a breath, taps the dead screen once more, and shrugs.
“Fine. I can probably find a side hustle around here. Tutoring, equipment laundry, whatever. Save up a few weeks, sort it out.”
There is no whine in it. No bid for sympathy.
The shrug of a woman who has been solving her own logistics since she was old enough to lace skates, and the matter-of-factness of it makes a small protective thing flare hot in my chest that I am, again, going to have to file for later.
I let it sit a beat.
Then, casual, because she will scent a heavy question coming and shut it down.
“You have a lot of people back home? Friends, I mean. Outside the team.”
She laughs. Short. Surprised.
Not a happy sound.
“No, not really. Just the team, mostly. None of them have even texted to check in since I landed.” Her thumb taps the dead phone. “Most people in this sport don’t love Omegas. If I disappear, that is one less spot at the top to fight over.”
My jaw works.
“Pinky. That is an ego problem on their end. Not a worth problem on yours.”
Her head comes up. Slow. Storm-grey full on me, surprised again, and then softening at the edges in a way I am almost certain she has not consciously approved.
“Okay,” she says, after a moment. Just a singke word.
She rises before either of us can do anything else with it.
We head out through the main concourse.
I let her walk in front of me because that is the basic geometry of a corridor, and because I have learned, in one day, that putting myself ahead of Iris O’Shea without a reason is the fastest way to lose her cooperation.
The afternoon class shuffle is in full ugly bloom.
Students pour out of the lecture halls in two opposing tides, hockey bags and backpacks and figure skating girls still in their warmups, and the corridor narrows at the choke point past the library into a packed, shoulder-to-shoulder push.
Cologne, perfume, wet wool, vending-machine pastry, burnt cafeteria coffee, all laid over the unkillable hum of too many Alphas in too small a space.
I watch her square her shoulders and wade into it, watch her get bumped twice in the first ten steps, and I let that happen exactly that many times before I move.
My hand finds hers without ceremony. Fingers slotted between fingers, my grip firm, hers startled and then accepting. I draw her gently past me into the lead position and step ahead, putting my shoulder where the next bump was going to land.
The corridor parts in front of us as if I am skating it. People know the jerseys. People know the names on the back of them. The traffic moves for me even when I am not asking it to, and today, specifically, I am happy to weaponize that for the pink-haired Omega trailing in my wake.
We come out the other side of the choke point near the admin wing and I drift to a stop, but I do not let go of her hand.
Because I secretly do not want to.
She does not let go of mine, either.
Notes it. Smirks.
“You know,” she murmurs, eyes drifting down to our joined hands, “you are going to give the entire student body the very strong impression that you are dating the new goalie.”
“Mm.” I cock my head. “What if that is, in fact, the precise impression I would like to give them.”
Her smirk twitches into something more dangerous.
“Tempting,” she says. “Your team will hate it, though. Men, as a rule, do not particularly care for a dominant woman.”
“Most men,” I correct, low, stepping into her space deliberately so she has to tip her chin up to hold the look, “do not, no. I am extremely particular about the women I bother with. And, Iris,” her name, deliberate, just the way she gave me mine in the shower, “I meant every word I said back there.”
Her breath catches. The smirk softens.
Strawberry warms a degree against my throat, sweet enough to ruin a man.
“Santori.”
The voice does not come from far away, and it does not climb to be heard. It lands in the middle of my chest like a check from behind. Low. Irish. Unhurried.
The voice of a man who has never once in his life needed volume to be obeyed.
“Unless you have decided your career path is to love-bomb our new goalie in a public hallway, I suggest you join your pack. There are drills we agreed you would attend, before you went disappearing on me when I sent you to confirm the showers were running.”
I lift my head. Slow. Not letting go of Iris’ hand.
Coach Declan stands in the mouth of the corridor with Rémi at his left shoulder and Jude at his right, the three of them arranged in the tactical formation that means a senior staff member is being escorted somewhere by his most reliable upperclassmen, and is using the trip to clean up a problem along the way.
Coach’s face is the locked-down neutral I have known since the day I met him, jaw set, mouth flat, the small muscle at the corner of his eye doing the only work his expression is willing to do.
Iris turns to look with me.
And the temperature of her hand in mine changes in roughly a quarter of a second.
Cold. Not the embarrassed cold of a woman caught flirting in a hallway. The other cold. The deliberate, practiced cold of someone who has had walls and is now hauling them back up from the basement and bolting them into the studs. Her shoulders square. Her chin lifts.
The storm-grey goes flat and unreadable, and the wicked little tilt at the corner of her mouth I have been carefully harvesting all afternoon vanishes as though switched off at the breaker.
I scan the three of them in a breath.
Rémi, first, because Rémi is always the easiest read for a person who knows where to look.
Quiet, planted, hands loose at his sides, but the eyes are doing the thing they do when something has caught his attention sideways.
He is intrigued. Deeply. A deeply intrigued Rémi is a man already running scenarios in his head.
Jude, next. Captain face. Set jaw.
The very small narrowing of those amber-warm eyes that, on Jude Kavanagh, is the equivalent of a lesser man throwing his stick across the rink.
He is not pleased that my hand is wrapped around hers, or that I have by every available read claimed something in a hallway before I have had so much as a five-minute meeting with him about it.
That is going to be a conversation later.
Coach. Last.
And here is where the readings stop being straightforward.
Coach Declan is irritated, which I expected. He is irritated because I vanished off a chore he assigned me. That would irritate any coach. It is the surface reading, and a perfectly clean explanation for the muscle ticking in his jaw and the small flat line of his mouth.
Except.
The irritation is not pointed at me.
I have been on the receiving end of pointed irritation from Coach Declan for two seasons running, and I know the shape of it cold.
This is a different geometry. His eyes are not on me.
They are on her. Specifically, on her, then on the line of my hand in hers, then back to her face, and they linger about three beats longer than a senior coach has any professional reason to linger on a freshman goalie.
Huh.
That is not irritation. Or rather, it is irritation about the surface, layered over something quieter and uglier that the man is doing a frankly impressive job of keeping pinned down.
Two seasons of reading Coach Declan have given me a working dictionary for his face, and the word my dictionary is currently producing for the look he is aiming at our joined hands is one I do not love.
Jealous.
Which makes no sense.
Unless…
I cut my eyes back to Iris.
Stoic. Locked. Building. Walls all the way up and the lights off behind them, and that is the second piece of the puzzle that did not fit until just now, because no freshman goalie hauls up that kind of fortification on the simple sight of a coach.
You do that for a man you have history with.
You do that for a man you have spent five years building those walls against.
They have history. The kind that left damage.
I file that, hard, and I make my face into the lazy, untouchable thing it does best.
“On my way, Coach,” I say, easy.
I do not let go of her hand. I dig my free hand into my joggers pocket, come up with my phone, thumb the screen on, and pass it to her instead.
She frowns at it.
“What—”
“Passcode is five two five two.” Low. For her.
“Text Jude once you have figured out the dorm situation. He will come help carry your bag up. The Omega dorms are in the west tower, and rumor has it the lift is decorative more than functional, so unless you are dying to drag a suitcase up four flights of stairs, you take the assist.”
She turns the phone slowly in her hand.
“But— you need this.”
“For what?” I tip my chin toward Jude and Rémi. “The only people I text live right there. Plus one annual check-in to my mother, which I do strictly for the cardio of her replying with three voice notes. There are games on it. Admin is slow. You will be bored.”
Her mouth twitches.
The smallest flicker.
I lift my hand, slow, in front of all of them, and run my fingers gently through the damp pink at her temple. Her eyes flick up to mine and stay there. I let my palm trail down her jaw, her neck, the bare nape at her hairline, slow, deliberate, the unhurried language of a man planting a flag.
My hand drops to the small of her back and rests there for the length of a breath.
Public. Witnessed.
Mine.
I duck my head, mouth grazing the shell of her ear, and drop my voice to where only she can catch it.
“You text me. Or I will come find you, the second Coach is finished with whatever cruelty he has scheduled for me on the ice.”
She huffs out a breath that is almost a laugh.
“Fine,” she murmurs back. “Go.”
I wave at her, lazy, two fingers off my temple, and I turn and walk.
Jude’s eyebrow climbs the second I reach them. Rémi falls into stride at my left and waits exactly long enough to be polite.
“Did you give her your phone,” Rémi murmurs.
“Mine does not work in this building anyway. Hers does not work in this country. She has admin to wrestle, dorms to find, an entire side hustle to invent. I do not want her stranded without a way to reach a human.”
I cut my eyes to Jude.
“I told her to text you when she has the room number. Keep your notifications on. Phone on loud.”
Jude says nothing.
The set of his jaw does not soften. He pulls his phone out of his pocket without looking at it, thumbs the side switch up off silent in a single practiced motion, and slides it back into his joggers.
The faintest twitch at the corner of Rémi’s mouth is the closest he comes to a smile.
“Talk later,” Jude says. Two words.
The captain version, not the friend version, but I have known him long enough to hear the difference between a closed door and one left on the latch, and this one is on the latch.
“Yep.”
I glance one last time over my shoulder.
Iris is already moving, my phone tucked into her back pocket, the pink head bobbing toward the heavy oak doors of the administration wing.
Coach Declan is still standing where he stood, hands behind his back, watching her go, and his face has not changed by a single millimeter.
The pink crown bobs once. The heavy oak swings shut behind her.
And Coach’s eyes do not leave the place she was standing in for a full beat after she is gone.
Yeah. They have history.
The damaging kind, with old fingerprints all over it.
I do not yet know the shape of the wreck, or what it means for the three of us, for Jude and Rémi and the careful, patient pack-ship we have been building since we were boys.
I do not yet know what it means for the strange, fast, undeniable thing that has wired itself into my chest in the space of a single day.
But I am, simply, curious to see what happens next.