Chapter 16 #2
“ABOUT TIME,” Matteo announces, with the satisfaction of a man who has just received a delayed shipment.
He drops himself onto the couch on Rémi’s other side and aims his next sentence at Iris like a quarterback locating his tight end.
“Now steal Jude’s jersey and we are square, Pinky. Even on the wardrobe ledger.”
She smirks, slow.
Her eyes slide across the room to mine. The challenge in them is delighted and shameless.
“Do not,” I tell her, leveling the gaze of a captain who has run actual prison-yard discipline sessions in his time.
“Do not steal my jersey. I am, at present, in possession of exactly one functional jersey, because somebody on this couch decided to spill orange juice down my last one yesterday morning.”
Matteo lifts the popcorn bowl in a small, unrepentant toast.
“Regret nothing,” he says, serenely.
“Santori, I swear on my mother’s biscuit recipe —”
“Play the movie, Cap. Play the movie. The night is young, my opinions are unfiltered, and we have miles of plot to get through before Toy McTeenage Skater learns to skate with a man who is, statistically speaking, a known liability.”
I let it go. I press play.
The Cutting Edge unfolds on the screen in the colour-graded warmth of a film made before half the people in this room were born, and the living room of the sector-two house settles into a quiet I have not heard inside these walls in months.
It should be louder than this. We are four very loud people.
Matteo alone is normally a small noise tax on any room he occupies.
And yet the cumulative atmosphere we have produced — Rémi cross-legged at the coffee table toasting marshmallows on a slow rotation, Matteo stretched along the couch with one hand absentmindedly working the popcorn bowl, Iris quietly tucked between them with her eyes locked on the screen and her mouth doing the small subconscious flickers of a woman who is, somewhere in there, falling for both leads simultaneously — reads, on the inside, like a room with a heartbeat.
I sit in my wingback and watch it.
Peaceful.
This is what peaceful looks like. The thing you have been quietly engineering for two seasons. It looks like this.
Captains of my particular generation do not, in practice, give themselves time off.
We engineer the conditions in which the team functions.
We arrange the substrates of cohesion. We catch the things that other men drop, we keep our voices level when other men raise theirs, we sit in our designated wingbacks at the back of our designated living rooms and we hold the temperature of the room steady so the other men can let theirs slip.
That is, in fact, the trade. The captain does not get to be in the picture. The captain is the frame.
And the strange thing tonight, the thing I do not have a name for yet, is that the frame has decided, without consulting itself, that it would like to be in the picture too.
The room smells, against all of my professional better judgement, right.
Cedar smoke from Rémi’s small contained flame.
The toasted-sugar of a marshmallow surrendering its crust. Matteo’s war-crime popcorn, which is, despite my early skepticism, genuinely delicious.
Beeswax from the mantel candles. Iris’s frosted strawberry layered, now, with the unmistakable burnt-orange thread of the hoodie she is hiding inside, and underneath all of it, in the very weave of the couch fabric, the steady combined base of three Alphas who have been a unit for two years and have just, somehow, in the past week, become a four.
There has been an empty seat at our movie nights for four winters.
It is still empty. The fifth slot. Connor’s old chair, the one Rémi refinished in the basement the spring after and that nobody has sat in since.
But the room is full in a way it has not been in a long time, and the kid who learned to flap a dish towel at a screaming smoke alarm at the age of ten because nobody else in his postcode would, watches the four of us in the soft amber light and lets himself, for one minute and twelve seconds of a 1992 figure-skating soundtrack, simply have it.
Iris does not make it to the third act.
It happens slowly. I clock it in stages.
First the slight slackening of her grip on the popcorn handful she has not yet eaten.
Then the gradual sag of her shoulders into Rémi’s side, where she has, at some point in the second act, drifted half an inch closer than her dignity would have allowed her if she were awake.
Then the tilt of her head, undecided for a long moment, before it gives up and settles against the curve of his shoulder with the small private finality of a woman who has spent ten days running on fumes and has finally located a soft surface.
Her breathing evens out.
Rémi, on the couch beneath her, does not move. He simply takes the next stick out of his marshmallow rotation, sets it carefully aside, and goes still the way only Rémi can go still, the way large quiet animals go still when something small has chosen to sleep against them.
Matteo and I exchange the look.
Do not laugh. Do not laugh. The man on the couch will end you.
Matteo, holy mother, does not laugh. He simply lifts the popcorn bowl off his lap, slowly, and sets it on the rug. Reaches over the top of Iris’s sleeping head, very carefully, and uses one finger to lift a loose pink strand away from where it has flopped across her closed eye.
Rémi’s eyes meet his, briefly. Then his eyes meet mine.
None of us says a word.
The movie plays out the rest of the runtime in the changed quiet of three Alphas trying not to wake a small pink Omega who has, against every social contract of two pack-bonded houseguests of nine days, accidentally trusted a defenseman she barely knows enough to put her own head down on his shoulder.
The credits roll. The strings come up.
Rémi tilts his head a fraction, looking down at the top of hers, and then nods at me. Once.
“I will take her upstairs.”
“Got it.”
He moves with the deliberate slow grace of a man who has spent ten years not knocking things over.
One arm, careful, slides beneath the bend of her knees.
The other arm settles behind her shoulders.
He gathers her against his chest the way you gather a sleeping child off a sofa, and she does not stir — her cheek presses harder into his collarbone, her hand fists slightly in the fabric of his henley, and the rest of her settles into his hold with the bone-deep unconditional surrender of an exhausted person who has, somewhere in the dark of her sleeping brain, decided this is safe.
Rémi straightens to standing. He looks down at her in his arms, and the millimeter smile makes its appearance, and I see, on his face, in passing, the very specific expression of a man cataloguing a weight.
“Lighter than she looks,” he says, very quietly. “All muscle and defiance.”
Matteo and I both nod.
He starts for the hallway. Five steps in, something small and dark and rectangular slips out from inside the pouch of her hoodie and hits the rug with a soft thud.
Rémi pauses. “Something fell.”
“On it,” Matteo says, already crouching.
He scoops it up. It is a Kindle. A well-worn, scuffed-at-the-corners, battered-case e-reader that has clearly been her travel companion for some time. The screen, when he tilts it, has lit on the page she fell asleep on, and his eyebrows do a slow careful climb.
“Matteo,” I say. “Do not.”
“Oh, I am. Brace yourselves.” He clears his throat.
He squints at the screen with the exaggerated theatre of a man delivering a sommelier’s tasting note.
“The novel currently being consumed by our four-foot-eleven sleeping goalie is a romance, in case there was any doubt, and the title of said romance is —”
A small pause for effect.
“Knottingley Ever After.”
“Knottingley,” Rémi repeats, from the doorway, with the precise distinct enunciation of a man making sure he has heard the word correctly.
“Knottingley,” Matteo confirms. “As in. Knot. With a K. The literary subgenre of our entire existence. Pucking and knotting and presumably ever-aftering, in roughly equal measure.”
“Cute title,” I find myself saying, mildly.
“Oh, Cap.” Matteo locks the Kindle, slides it carefully back into the pouch of her hoodie against her sleeping body, and looks at me over the top of her head with an expression I am going to remember for a long time.
“It is more than cute. She deserves that. The whole back-cover blurb. Bonded and adored and unsubtly knotted in a cabin or a barn or whichever genre-appropriate locale the writer has cooked up. A genuine, on-the-record, Omega-edition happily ever after.”
Rémi, with Iris cradled against his chest, dips his chin a single degree. Confirmation.
I nod silently from my wingback. Some kind of agreement passes between the three of us without anyone needing to put a name on it, and Rémi turns, carefully, and carries her up the hallway toward the back wing of the house and her converted storage-room door, and the cedar-and-toasted-sugar warmth of the living room follows him in his wake.
Matteo lowers himself back onto the couch in the spot Iris just vacated.
Neither of us says anything for a minute.
Omega-edition happily ever after.
The phrase lands in the small private chamber of my chest and stays there, and I sit with it.
I sit with the fact that the woman now being carried up my hallway is reading, on the side, the genre I have personally watched two cousins and one auntie devour their way through, and that she does it not because she is some breathless romantic but because she, like every other woman the publishing industry has been quietly serving for thirty years, has been desperate for someone to write down the version of her own life where the ending is one she is allowed to keep.
Connor never got his happy ever after. He got nineteen years, a series of bad doctors’ prescriptions, a couch in a basement none of us could reach him on, and a final phone call I will not, until the day I die, stop replaying.
We three are still here. We are, somewhere between four winters ago and tonight, still here, and a small pink-haired Omega has just chosen, in her sleep, to put her head on a defenseman’s shoulder.
Everyone in this story deserves the version of the ending the books promise. Iris deserves it. Rémi deserves it. Matteo, God help me, deserves it. I deserve it.
Even Coach Declan, the King of Avoidance himself, deserves it. Even the man who taught me what a healthy pack looks like by being, for two seasons, exactly its inverse.
It is just sad how hard life makes the simple animal arithmetic of getting there.
Matteo, beside me, picks up a marshmallow Rémi has left on the table. Tosses it. Catches it. Looks at the dark hallway she disappeared into. Looks at me.
“We are going to give it to her, Cap.”
“Mm.”
“Omega-edition.”
“Yeah.”
“Knottingley ever after.”
I almost smile.
Almost.