Chapter 10 #2
“Keep the phone,” Matteo repeats, gentler this time. “If you need any of us, that’s how. We’ll sort the phone situation properly on the weekend. Bookstore. Plan an outing. I’ll let you pick the case.”
My eyes prickle, which is unacceptable, so I yawn again to give myself something else to do with my face.
“Okay,” I mumble, and slide the phone back into my pocket. “Weekend. Case.”
I push myself to my feet. The duffel and the case have already been ferried somewhere, presumably the storage room I am about to start calling home, which means I am free to do the only remaining piece of administrative business I have left in me for the day, which is fall over.
“Tomorrow,” I add, as I drift toward the hallway Rémi has pointed me at, “I’ll go look at the job board. Some sort of side hustle. I can pay rent here, by the way, just give me a week or two to get on my feet.”
Matteo opens his mouth. I see it. He has a comment loaded.
He, for once in his life, chooses not to fire it.
Jude’s eyes flick to Rémi’s. Rémi’s flick back.
Some captain-and-quartermaster exchange happens at a frequency I am not invited to.
I lift a hand in a small wave and head for the back of the house, leaving the three of them in the warm cinnamon-and-cedar of the common room without me, and the small private part of my chest that has been alone on a bench all afternoon notices, with quiet astonishment, that the leaving is harder than the staying would have been.
Temporary, O’Shea. Temporary.
Do not get cute about a word like that.
— ? —
~RéMI~
The hallway swallows the pink head, the click of a door closes behind her, and the common room goes, in the specific way our common rooms always go after a guest leaves, abruptly larger and quieter and ours again.
I do not move at first.
Jude moves. Captain habits. He gathers the case and the duffel I had set against the wall and disappears down the back hall to deposit them outside the storage door, gentle as you would set down a bird with a broken wing.
I lift the towel off my shoulder. Walk to the kitchen.
Check the oven, where the loaf I have been ignoring for a quarter of an hour is at the edge of being ready and will be perfect on the bench in another six minutes.
I crouch, look through the glass at the deep gold of the crust, and let my mind do the thing it has done all my life when something larger than me has just happened: I bake.
Cinnamon. Butter. The yeasted warmth of bread that has spent the afternoon proving on the counter under a clean tea towel.
The kitchen is the room in this house that smells most like the room I grew up in, the one in Trois-Rivières where my mother taught me, when my hands were the size of bird claws, that you knead patience into dough whether you have any to spare or not.
Matteo follows me. Of course he does. Matteo follows anyone who looks like they are not in the mood for company. It is one of his charms and one of his crimes.
Jude comes in last, drying his hands on the cuff of his hoodie sleeve, and props himself against the counter opposite me. He looks at Matteo first — quick, dismissive, the captain noting where the noise lives — and then his eyes settle on me.
“Why.”
Not a question. A demand for evidence.
“Why.”
“Why did you do that, Rémi.” Jude’s voice is even, the not-angry voice he uses when he is paying very close attention.
“You never interfere. In two years living in this house with you, I have seen you intervene in a team matter exactly twice, both of them medical, both of them mine. And just now you offered to bond a stranger.”
Yes, I think. I did.
I shrug.
It is what my shoulders do when my mouth declines to keep up. Matteo, hip propped on the island, makes the small affectionate noise he reserves for what he calls my
“I am not certain,” I say, eventually. Honest, because lying to my captain takes more energy than I have at this hour.
“Only that I have watched her since she crossed the threshold of the rink this morning, and I have not yet seen her ask for one single thing. Not a chair. Not water. Not a softer call from a referee. I watched a woman with that much drive get pinned to a clause in a piece of bureaucracy designed to put her on a plane home, and something in me declined to find that acceptable.”
Jude is quiet. So I keep going, which is unusual for me, but apparently the dough has loosened my tongue.
“You and I have stood in a lot of locker rooms, Jude. We have seen what happens to the talented ones the institution does not want. They quit, or they get smaller, or they bargain pieces of themselves away until there is nothing of the original athlete left on the ice. She has not quit. She has not gotten smaller. She walked across that quad with two bags I would not have asked her to lift, and she sat down at our paperwork and signed her name without crying. That is rare. It deserves a wall.”
I rise from the oven. Wipe my hands.
“She does not deserve to be snuffed out by a handful of administrators who would rather not see an Omega shine on a sheet of ice. We have the means to change that. So let us change it.”
Jude looks at me for a long, slow beat.
I have known the precise weight of Jude Kavanagh’s long, slow beats since we were eighteen years old and he was the freshman who offered me half his sandwich on the first day of preseason because he had clocked, before any of the coaches did, that I had spent my entire dorm allowance on protein powder and forgotten to budget for lunch.
The weight is heavy. It always has been. It does not crush. It weighs.
He nods once. Closes the file.
“All right.”
“All right,” I agree.
“Great.” Matteo claps once, brightly, the small percussive sound a man makes when he wants to skate the conversation onto a different rink.
“Glad we’re aligned. Important meeting. Productive use of everyone’s afternoon.
While you both have me, however, I would like to formally lodge, for the record —”
“Santori.”
“— that I still get first dibs.”
Jude pinches the bridge of his nose.
I lean on the counter and let my eyebrow climb. Slowly, because it is the only piece of my face that has ever cooperated with the goal of looking unimpressed.
“Dibs,” I repeat, because I have to. “On a person.”
“On an attention budget,” Matteo corrects. “An affection allocation. A first-pick of pursuit. I am being entirely civilized about this.”
“You,” Jude says, without lifting his head from his pinched nose, “are a menace and have always been a menace, and I do not know why I let you live under this roof.”
“Because I bring the only working sense of joy in this house, Jude, and you would be a small, sad man without me. Tell him, Rémi.”
“He brings noise,” I tell Jude, neutrally. “We can debate what flavor.”
“I bring
“It is the third one I worry about,” Jude mutters.
“Correctly. You always have.” Matteo pushes off the island, ambling toward the doorway in that loose long-legged way of his that means he has decided the conversation is over and intends to leave you with the bill.
“Anyway. Lovely meeting. Glad we got the temporary-pack docket settled. I am off to be a productive member of this team and run drills like a good little winger, which, as Coach reminded me earlier, I did not do enough of today.”
He gets two steps from the kitchen doorway.
Stops.
Turns his head halfway over his shoulder, with the careful theatrical lightness of a man delivering a line he has been waiting twenty minutes to drop, and adds:
“Oh. By the way. We fucked.”
Silence.
Pure. Total. The kitchen clock pickles three full seconds out of the air.
Somewhere down the hall a door clicks shut, and somewhere in the oven a loaf finishes proving, and somewhere in the back of my own skull a tally sheet I did not know I was keeping flips a card from one column to another and the math, abruptly, reads different.
My eyebrow, the one that has cooperated my whole life with the goal of looking unimpressed, abandons its position and climbs into territory it has not visited since junior year of high school.
Jude does not pinch the bridge of his nose this time.
He covers his entire face with one large palm, the way a man does when he has decided the only honest response to news is to physically prevent his expression from contributing.
“Matteo,” Jude says, into his hand.
“Hm?”
“When.”
“Oh, the showers. Before lunch.” Bright, unbothered, as though reporting weather. “Anyway. I would have led with it, but the temporary-pack thing came up and I am, contrary to popular accusation, capable of reading a room.”
“Well,” Jude says, very slowly, lowering the hand from his face only enough to glare at the doorway, “fuck. We are actually doomed now.”
“Doomed?” Matteo, all wounded innocence.
“Doomed.” Jude does not break the glare. “Because you, Santori, have many talents, but commitment issues have never been one of them. You fall hard, you fall fast, and you fall in writing.”
Matteo laughs. Genuinely. The laugh of a man who has heard this assessment many times before and has, on every occasion, declined to refute it.
“True,” he allows, sunny. “But I do think I actually like her.”
“Santori.”
“Hm?”
“Do not say it.”
“Say what.”
“Do not say whatever you are about to say.”
Matteo grins. He throws us a small, mock-soldierly salute, pivots on his heel toward the hall, and starts whistling — cheerfully, tunefully, very specifically — the opening bars of the wedding march.
Over his shoulder, almost as an afterthought:
“Straight to the altar we go.”
He disappears into the corridor.
Jude removes the hand from his face entirely. Drops it to the counter. Stares at the empty doorway with the flat, contemplative dread of a man who has just heard a referee’s whistle inside his own head and recognized the call.
I, the quiet one, the bench-propper, the chin-tipper, the man who has had two romantic relationships in his entire adult life and ended both of them politely, lean against my counter and watch the corridor with my own face arranged carefully blank.
The oven timer pings.
I do not move to answer it.
Why, I think, calmly, do I feel like he is not joking with this one.