Chapter 10
Temporary
~IRIS~
“W — w — what?”
It is the first time in my adult life I have heard myself genuinely stutter.
The kind of stutter that lives in cartoons.
The kind a woman with my mileage on her does not produce, because by twenty-four the vocal cords have been beaten into a sort of professional cynicism that does not let unrehearsed sounds slip out in public.
Apparently, the cords were not briefed for this.
I am still kneeling on the rug beside my hard-sided case, the pen Rémi offered me three minutes ago held suspended an inch above a line on a piece of college bureaucracy I now know was designed to ensure no one like me ever signs it.
The form has not moved. Neither have I. The kettle of blood that has been quietly simmering in my chest since I read the small print has just been ladled, in a single sentence, somewhere considerably warmer and more dangerous than my sternum.
Did he just —
He just —
Matteo and Jude are staring at Rémi as if their brother has just walked into the living room and announced he is buying a tugboat.
Or perhaps a small, exotic carnivore. Their twin expressions of arrested disbelief, on two faces I have already started cataloguing for tell, are some of the best evidence yet that this is, in fact, a real thing that is happening on a real rug in a real common room.
Rémi himself is the calmest object in the room. Hip propped against the edge of his woodworking bench, flour still smeared on one forearm, towel slung over his shoulder. He shrugs at his housemates as though he has just suggested they pick up takeout.
“Look at the form,” he says, low and even. “Read the clause. Tell me what part of that is not designed to make any Omega in this league fail.”
Matteo opens his mouth. Closes it. Tilts his head.
“Follow the math,” Rémi continues, in the patient cadence of a man laying tools out in order.
“An Omega cannot play unless she is packed. She cannot be housed unless she is packed. Which means she cannot exist on a roster unless the men around her, on that roster, agree to be her pack before she has played a single sanctioned minute.”
“No wonder there has never been an Omega on this team,” Jude says, quiet, the captain doing the math in his own voice.
“No wonder there has never been an Omega in this league.” Rémi’s pale eyes flick to Jude, then to Matteo, then back. “How many Omega applications has Coach Declan flagged this past year?”
“He’s mentioned it,” Jude says. “More than once. He cannot understand why the program never advances them through.”
“The other two coaches dismiss it every time we bring it up,” Matteo adds, the lazy edge dropping clean out of his voice. “Wave it off as a paperwork issue. We move on.”
“Or,” Rémi says, and the single word is a screw turning slowly in a piece of wood, “those two coaches have made the rules themselves, and would rather none of us ask.”
The kitchen at the back of the house is humming faintly to itself, the oven timer ticking down on whatever Rémi has in there.
Cinnamon and butter are still in the air, threaded now with the cooler honey-spice of Jude’s beeswax candles.
The whole room smells, absurdly, like home, while three Alphas calmly work out that the institution housing me has been quietly built to expel me before I have laced a skate.
Are we sure this is happening, O’Shea, or have you finally hit your head one too many times on a crossbar.
Rémi turns to me.
“So,” he says. “We sign your form as a temporary pack. You get your housing. You get to play. We get to do quietly what no one in this program seems willing to do out loud, which is find out whether those rules sit with administration, with the other two coaches, or with someone higher.”
“We go in under the radar,” Matteo says, picking up the thread, brightening as a plan takes shape.
“Let the other team think we’re indulging the pink-haired walk-in.
Let the other coaches assume we’re a stunt.
Let everybody underestimate the entire arrangement until we have receipts and a goalie with a pulse on the roster. ”
“Element of surprise,” Jude says, and the corner of his mouth, the one I have been catalogued long enough now to know moves at a discount, lifts a millimeter. “Which, professionally, has never not worked in our favor.”
All three of them look at me.
Three Alphas. Three different scents banking together in the warm air of the common room — amber bourbon, pine and snow, burnt-orange smoke — a chord I have not consented to anyone playing in my chest, and that my body has decided is, on a strictly involuntary basis, the most reassuring chord it has ever heard.
I have spent my entire adult life around Alphas.
Locker rooms. Long bus rides. Cold rinks at five in the morning.
I have never, not once, had three of them turn the full weight of their attention onto me at the same time and watched my own body react like a tuning fork that had been waiting all afternoon to be struck.
The base of my spine has gone warm. The small hairs on my forearms are doing a thing I am refusing to acknowledge.
The part of my brain in charge of professional composure has filed a polite complaint and gone to lie down.
“You,” I manage. “Are you sure?”
“Sure,” Rémi says.
“You three are not even slightly worried,” I press, looking between them, “about your reputations. Your draft prospects. The fact that the entire campus will, by dinner tomorrow, be telling each other a version of this story that does not flatter any of you?”
Matteo laughs. He pushes off the couch arm and ambles across the rug, dropping into a crouch in front of me until his face is level with mine, hazel eyes lit gold at the edges and far too close, the burnt-orange of him spilling warm over my shoulders.
“Pinky.” Soft. Almost fond. “Did you forget you’re the grand prize here.”
I feel my face heat. There is no governing it.
“You’re a jeweler,” I mutter, holding his stupid gold-flecked stare because backing down has never been an option I budget for. “Showing off a collection.”
His grin breaks open.
“Honestly, sweetheart? Yes. And if I am, you’re the rarest stone in the tray.”
“Oh my God.” Jude, from the other side of the room. “Romantic smooth talker. We are housing a romantic smooth talker. Get up off the rug, Santori.”
Matteo does not get up off the rug.
He winks at me first, slow and unrepentant, and then he gets up off the rug.
And I, the unfortunate idiot, yawn.
It betrays me before I can clamp my jaw shut. A long, undignified, full-body yawn, the kind that arrives without permission and tells the entire room exactly how long it has been since I last sat down.
Rémi straightens up off the bench.
“You are done for the day,” he says. Not a question. “Go rest. Logistics tomorrow. Jude will run the form back over to admin on his way to the coaches’ debrief.”
“Sign the dotted line,” Jude adds. “We handle the rest.”
I look up at the three of them. Three large men, arranged with no apparent coordination around the small kneeling shape of me on a rug in a farmhouse common room, and the absurd, dangerous warmth gathering behind my sternum is something I will be examining at length later, somewhere I am not also being looked at.
“Are you really, really sure.”
Three heads nod, perfectly in unison, like they rehearsed it at recess.
I sigh.
“Fine. Okay.” I lower the pen, find the line, and sign in the looping scrawl I have used since I was sixteen. “Iris O’Shea, of sound mind and questionable judgment, accepts the temporary packship of three idiots she has known for nine collective hours. Y’all better not cower out on me.”
“Cowards do not get assigned to my house,” Jude says, very dry.
“Cowards do not get assigned to my
Rémi simply tips his chin at me. Which, on the Rémi scale, I am beginning to suspect translates to a small standing ovation.
I cap the pen and pass it back to him, fingers brushing his palm in the exchange, and the cool pine-and-snow of him slides up my wrist like air at the top of a mountain, settling something at the base of my throat I had not realized was unsettled.
Then I remember.
I dig in my coat pocket and pull out Matteo’s phone, holding it out to him on a flat palm.
“Here. You can have it back. You actually need it.”
He does not take it.
He looks at it. Then at me. Then crosses his arms.
“Keep it.”
“Matteo.”
“Keep it, Pinky. I’m clearly fine. Anyone I need to talk to is either in this room or my mother. You, on the other hand, may yet require a means to text people. Or, you know. Doom-scroll. Recreationally.”
“I do enjoy a strong doom-scroll,” I admit, in the smallest voice I have used all afternoon. “Though, candidly, I haven’t got anyone to text either. Nobody has actually checked in on me since I landed, so. Phone or no phone, the inbox is going to look the same.”
It comes out lighter than I mean it. The way these things have to come out, when you are saying them on someone else’s rug. The way you have to say a true thing when you have not finished sorting out how angry you are about it being true.
There is a small, telling silence.
Rémi’s pale eyes have gone fractionally tighter. Jude’s shoulders have come down a degree they were not high to begin with. Matteo, for once, has nothing immediate to say, which is its own answer.
“Your old team,” Jude says, after a beat, careful, “knows you got out, right? They know you’re here?”
“Oh, sure. They know.” I tip a shoulder. “I think I was, in retrospect, more of a placeholder than I’d allowed myself to notice. Useful while I was there. Out of sight, out of inbox.”
The look that passes between Jude and Rémi over the top of my head is not subtle, and yet neither of them comments. I appreciate it more than I should.