Chapter 14 #2
He pinches the bridge of his nose, but he is also smiling — the millimeter Rémi smile, the one I have to be paying attention for or it slides past unmarked — and he pads across the kitchen toward us in his bare feet. “What is she up to that involves being kidnapped?”
“I am right here, you know.”
Three men ignore me.
“Job-hunting,” Matteo informs Rémi over his shoulder. “It is going horribly.”
“It is not THAT bad.” I jab my pen at the closest flyer. “Look. Look at this one. Maid position. Local. Hourly.”
“Sex trafficking,” all three of them say in unison.
I freeze.
“… Excuse me?”
I jab at a second flyer. A bright red one with a stock-photo woman in a too-tight uniform. “Okay. Female firefighter recruitment.”
“Cosplay sex trafficking,” the chorus chimes.
“WHAT.”
“It is, Pinky.” Matteo, very serious. “There is not a fire station within forty miles. Where do you think she is firefighting?”
“You three are unhinged.” I scrabble for a different one, slap it down. “This one. This one. Cafe staff. Off-campus. Five minutes’ walk. You cannot — you absolutely cannot tell me a cafe is sex trafficking.”
There is a long, telling beat.
“The Omegas who serve at that place,” Rémi says, mildly, in the same tone you would use to discuss the weather, “generally do not last more than a week. There has been a campus advisory out about it for a year and a half. It is trafficking.”
“OH MY GOD.”
I throw the pen down. I throw my hands up. I drop my head into both of them in front of three Alphas in a kitchen at nine in the morning and emit a small, pure, professionally embarrassed wail into my own palms.
FUCK!
“Fuck!” Out loud, this time, scrubbed of any composure.
“Fuck. I need a job. I need a job now. I cannot borrow Matteo’s phone forever, I have three pairs of underwear to my name, I have barely any actual female clothing in this country so I am going to start looking like one of the lads by Wednesday, and I have to buy a new set of pads. ”
Jude’s expression does a small, neutral thing.
“… Pads,” he says, very carefully, “as in.”
I blink up at him. The flush hits me a beat behind comprehension, because I am, in this kitchen, surrounded by men, in a borrowed shirt and reading glasses with my legs crossed on the marble like an indecisive cat.
“Oh — oh, my God, goalie pads.” I wave my hand frantically. “Goalie pads. Hockey pads. The ones I strap to my legs and use to terrify wingers. Not, ah — not pads pads. I am an Omega, gentlemen. We do not get periods. We get Heats.”
“Ah.” Jude nods. Civil. Adult. The exact face a four-time-Eagle-Scout would make. “Carry on.”
“Though I do have to say,” I add, tipping my head, “the fact that you are this fluent in the vocabulary of menstrual products as a man is, frankly, a level-up on the curve. Color me impressed.”
Jude’s mouth tilts.
“He has four sisters,” Matteo announces, like a man delivering a press release.
“Four. All Omega-presenting except the youngest. He has been buying tampons in bulk for ten years. The man could write a thesis. He is, in this respect, more qualified than most Alphas I know, and that bar was already lying on the floor.”
“Four sisters,” I repeat.
Jude shrugs, easy. “Four.”
Filing that. Filing all of that. The eldest of four. Of course he is.
“What happened to your goalie pads,” Rémi says, and the lazy sleep has dropped clean out of his voice.
I sigh. I pull the glasses off and pinch the bridge of my own nose.
“I noticed this morning. Someone, somewhere between yesterday’s practice and this morning’s, has taken a knife or possibly a key to the inside straps of both my left and right pads.
I had to borrow two old ones out of the storage room to get through this morning’s skate, and gentlemen, those things reek.
Like someone died inside them in 1998. And they do not fit my body type, which means I have been blocking pucks on legs configured for someone roughly the build of Hargrove. ”
Rémi’s mouth thins. Matteo’s entire face goes still in a way that is, frankly, not promising for whichever sector-one defenseman did it. Jude does the small captain math behind his eyes and arrives at a number that involves probably calling Coach Declan before lunch.
“We will,” Jude says, flat, “handle the equipment situation.”
“What does handle mean.”
“It means, Pinky,” Matteo says, sweetly, “do not concern your beautiful brain.”
“And from now on,” Rémi adds, in that low even way of his, “your gear lives in our sector’s locker room. Not the Omega side. Ours.”
“Oh, sure.” I throw a hand up. “Wonderful. Lovely. I will simply pop my entire kit into the men’s changeroom every afternoon. Casually. Like that is a thing.”
“Yes,” the three of them say in unison.
“Guys.”
“You come find one of us when you are done changing,” Rémi continues, ignoring me.
“You hand your gear to whoever is on. We lock it in our sector. No one is going to play with your equipment if it is on our side, because that side is access-controlled. The Omega side is open foot traffic to anyone with a student ID, which is presumably how this happened in the first place. We are not allowed cameras in either changeroom. Lock and key is the only solution.”
“And from now on,” Matteo adds, raising a hand like a man requesting a turn on the soapbox, “one of us is with you when you change. Personally.”
I give him the flat stare.
“You,” I tell him, “are going to be a distraction. I do not have time to be distracted in the changeroom. That is my lock-in window.”
Matteo opens his mouth.
“Jude will do it,” he announces.
“Excuse me,” Jude says.
“You are the supervisor. You are the responsible one. You have four sisters. You have, on the record, established expertise in not being a distraction to a woman in a state of undress, whereas I, beloved roommates, must regretfully admit I would in fact be exactly that.”
“Matteo.” Rémi, weary.
“What. I am self-aware.”
“Why,” Jude asks, looking at Matteo, “are you so insistent.”
Matteo’s grin slides off. He turns his head to me, then to Jude, and something in his face goes still and careful, and the room, in a beat, gets cooler.
“Because,” he says, evenly, “three douches from the other sector tried to corner her in the girls’ changeroom on her first day after practice.
I used the excuse that Coach had sent me to check whether the hot water was running.
That was the cover. They had worse intentions than the cover I gave them. ”
Silence.
Rémi’s jaw moves once. Jude’s does not, but his eyes go to me, and the small searching captain-read he does is, briefly, alarming. I shrug.
“It was fine. I am a black belt. I can handle myself.”
Three heads turn.
“What,” Matteo.
“Black belt where,” Jude.
“Seriously,” Rémi.
“OH MY GOD.” I throw both hands up. “Stop underestimating meeeee. I have a black belt. Sankukai karate. Earned it when I was eighteen and very angry. Can we move on. Please. With your collective lives.”
I huff. I uncross my legs.
And I realize, in the same beat, that I have been on the kitchen island for the better part of forty minutes, my joints are stiff, and I am significantly higher off the floor than I have any business being for a graceful exit.
I rise onto my knees. I shift to a crouch. I look down at Matteo, who is now, conveniently, exactly the right height to be a problem.
“Down,” I tell him.
His grin breaks open like the sun.
“Oh, princess.” He stands up off the stool and steps in close. “Are we asking nicely.”
“Asking,” I say, calmly. “As an order.”
Something behind his eyes goes warm and entertained and a little dangerous, but to his credit he does not tease me about a single thing.
He simply offers up one bare arm, the inked one, and ducks his other behind my knees, and lifts me clean off the marble as though I weigh, by his calculation, exactly nothing, and lowers me to the kitchen floor in a single unhurried motion.
“Black belt my ass,” he mutters as my socks touch tile.
Then he leans down and presses a kiss against my temple, casual, almost absent-minded, the kind of kiss you give a person you have been in close quarters with for considerably longer than thirty-six hours, and the small honest part of my chest that I do not run by the rest of the committee files the kiss before my pride has even finished objecting.
I side-eye him. He smirks. I let him have it.
“Right.” I scoop the flyers into a stack and tap them on the marble to square the edges. “If I cannot get something on campus that does not involve being a casserole ingredient, I am taking the bus into town this morning and seeing what the local economy has on offer. Let me go change —”
Matteo’s arm winds around my waist.
He spins me, easy as anything, until my back is to his chest and my whole field of vision is the upside-down underside of his jaw, because he has dropped his chin to look down at me, and I have had to crane my neck up to find his face, and the angle, frankly, is doing my equilibrium no favors.
“You are not getting a job, Pinky.”
“Excuse me?”
“Our hockey schedule is not going to allow it. I am sorry. I will need you to receive that information.”
I plant a finger at the dead center of his chest. “Matteo Santori. I need a job. I cannot just exist on this campus on someone else’s phone for the rest of the term.”
“Why.”
“Why?” I sputter. “Essentials. Toothpaste. Soap. Laundry detergent. The blockers I am going to need to re-up with the Omega doctor at the clinic, which, by the way, are extremely expensive, especially the stronger formulary I am about to be put on, which I will need because clearly my old blockers were not equipped for whatever atmosphere this campus is generating. My scholarship covers tuition and a modest meal stipend. The meal stipend covers, at Minnesota grocery prices, approximately three weeks of food. Did you know a bar of Irish Spring at the gas station up the road costs five-ninety-nine? Five. Ninety-nine. At home, that bar of soap was a pound. I am still emotionally processing it.”
Matteo does not let me go.
“You,” he says, calmly, “are not working.”
“Matteo.”
“You need to go shopping? We are going shopping. Go change. We are taking Jude’s car.”
I crane harder. My neck reports a complaint.
“Wait.” I look at him upside down. I look across the kitchen at Jude.
I look at Rémi. Both of them are standing in their respective spots wearing the precise faces of men who have already had this entire conversation between them at some point in the last twelve hours and arrived at the same answer. “… We are going shopping?”
“Yup.” Jude takes another long pull off the water bottle. “You said you need essentials. Let us go get them.”
“But I do not have money.”
Rémi fishes his wallet out of his joggers without breaking eye contact and flips it open with one thumb. Three cards in a neat fan. He turns them toward me with the matter-of-factness of a man presenting receipts.
“Money right here,” he says. “Choice of Amex gold, platinum, or black, depending on how brave you are feeling.”
“B — b — but —”
The cards. Are right there. In a fan. Like a magic trick. Rémi Bellerose is doing a fan-of-credit-cards magic trick at me in his pyjamas.
“That is not my money,” I say, very weakly.
“Why,” Matteo asks at the underside of my chin, “would you spend your money in a pack, Pinky?”
“… But we are temporary.”
“Temporary, sure.” Matteo’s voice drops a fraction, deliberately, against the top of my hair. “Does not mean we are not responsible for you. So put a pin in the temporary, sweetheart, and go change.”
He lets me go. He lets me go and — because he is Matteo, and because he is Matteo — he gives the curve of my backside a light, departing slap on the way out, a small affectionate pat about the weight and intention of a dog being told it is a good dog, and I yelp out of pure surprise and snap my head around to glare at him.
He smirks, perfectly unrepentant.
“Go change, Pinky. We will pick up breakfast on the way. I am betting cash money that you have eaten exactly nothing this morning and have drunk approximately one swallow of water, which means you are running on the fumes of your own self-esteem and that is not a sustainable energy source.”
“That is not —”
My stomach growls.
It growls loudly. The kind of growl that has business at the back of an empty fridge. Three pairs of eyes land on my abdomen in unison, and three different expressions assemble themselves into the same general flavor of vindication.
“I can never fucking win,” I mutter to the marble.
Matteo chuckles. Rémi’s millimeter smile makes its appearance, the standing-ovation tilt I am starting to live for.
Jude lifts the water bottle in a small acknowledging toast, sets it down, and pads over to the cork-lidded canister to start the coffee ritual with the meditative slowness of a man who refuses to be hurried before caffeine.
“Let me drink some coffee,” he says, in the same level tone he uses to call line changes, “before we go.”