Chapter 19 #2
“No shit, Sherlock.” I tilt my head. “Should I open a TED talk, Coach? Should I rent a small auditorium? Captain Obvious 101: Things My Former Coach Has Finally Decided To Notice About Me After Five Years Of Sustained Avoidance. Hands-on workshop component. Bring a notebook.”
“Iris.” Quieter. “You should trust that I had reasons.”
And there it is.
The same five-word architecture. Reasons. The bare unbroken stone of a man who has decided, in the small inner courtroom of his own ethics, that the reasons exempt him from offering them.
Something in me, very quiet, decides we are done with civility.
I lift my mask up off my face entirely, hook it onto the strap above my head, and step in.
Two steps. Inside the small reasonable distance any two professional adults would maintain at the back of a hockey bench.
The cedar-and-coffee-and-snow of him fills the small radius between us with the precise embarrassing density that has been mapping itself onto my nervous system since I was sixteen years old, and I refuse to acknowledge it, and I rise up onto the steel toes of my skates so that I have any chance of meeting his stupid green eyes at level.
He does not step back.
He does not, in fact, move at all.
“I,” I tell him, very low, very flat, into the four-inch radius of his stupid Irish face, “do not trust a man who decided to drop off the face of the earth and leave me behind on a Wednesday in October with no warning and no note, Coach.”
His jaw tics again.
“During these training hours,” I continue, my voice dropping further, the way it drops in the crease when I am calling a defensive switch I want only my pack to hear, “I will follow your orders. I will run your drills. I will accept your side-comments. I will tolerate your sudden, deeply professional interest in my health, my mechanics, my hip, and the cleanliness of my recovery angle.”
“Iris.”
“Outside of that, Coach, you do not get a say in anything. Not my packship. Not my dates. Not my caloric intake. Not the location of my phone on a bench. Not the boys whose contacts are saved in it. You do not insert yourself into the rest of my life on a whim, on a hallway run-in, on a glance at the screen of a device that does not belong to you. You do not get to step back into the picture, on your own schedule, because you have decided I am now interesting enough to be worth the trouble.”
I let it sit. A beat. Another beat.
“If you want a say,” I add, conversationally, my chin lifted, the storm-grey of my eyes locked onto his, “you are going to have to fucking grovel for it.”
There is silence.
Long. Cold. The kind of silence that has, in the past, ended fights.
His eyes — the green Irish eyes I have spent five years not letting myself remember the exact shade of — drop, for the briefest sliver of a second, to my mouth.
Up. Back to mine.
Oh.
Oh, you absolute son of a bitch.
“So. Are we having a spiritual break, or —”
The voice arrives from the ice behind me, easy and unhurried, and the small hot detonation that has been about to happen inside my chest gets, in the precise way it always gets, defused.
I turn.
Matteo Santori is standing on the rink-side of the boards in nothing but his skates, black running joggers, a tight grey long-sleeved compression top, the latest pair of sleek athletic gloves I have only seen him wear when he is going for a serious run, and the unmistakable expression of a man who has not been in the building long enough for his cheeks to lose the cold of the outside.
He is holding a bouquet of fresh-cut flowers.
And, in his other hand, a tall plastic cup of something thick and pink with a straw.
My entire face does the thing.
“Matteo. What are you doing here.”
“Someone,” he says, with the perfectly placid cheer of a man making polite morning conversation, his eyes sliding past me to land on Coach Declan with a smile that is, if not exactly weaponized, certainly publicly available, “decided this morning that training the goalie at four in the morning was more important than feeding her any actual breakfast first.”
Oh.
Oh, my winger is throwing hands. Professionally. At my coach.
I waddle the eight steps to the gate of the bench in the small ungainly hockey-pads waddle that is the only mobility setting available to me out of the crease, and I lean my forearms against the boards opposite him.
“Your obsession with my appetite,” I inform him, in the level voice of a woman determined to maintain her dignity, “will, at this rate, need to be the subject of a peer-reviewed medical study.”
“Hand it to academia.”
He offers the cup over the boards. I take it. The cold of the plastic against my bare palm is a small mercy. Strawberry banana. The smell of it, slow and creamy and ripe, climbs into my chest in a way that immediately confirms how empty my stomach has been since approximately yesterday evening.
“And these,” he says, lifting the bouquet, “were going to be a surprise for our actual first morning date. Which we will be having at some point, just for the record. But they are too fresh to keep in the car, so you have to at least smell them.”
I beam at him. I cannot help it.
The bouquet is small but extravagantly thought-out. Soft pink ranunculus. Sprigs of eucalyptus. A scatter of baby’s breath. Two coral-tipped roses I am almost certain were chosen because they roughly match my hair. The whole thing wrapped in cream-colored craft paper and tied with twine.
“How on earth did you get these. The campus florist is closed.”
“There is a small floral boutique on the corner of Main and Pine, between the rink and the diner. They do not officially open until six, but the owner has been there since five-thirty, decorating the front window. She was very confused when I rapped on the glass. She was less confused after I explained who they were for and offered cash. She wished me luck.”
“You actually bought me flowers.”
“Pinky.” He leans across the boards, threads one gloved hand under my jaw, and brushes his mouth against mine in the small light unhurried way a man who is intending many more kisses kisses you. “Flowers are the bare minimum.”
Oh.
Oh, that just landed in my chest like a brick.
My heart does an undignified flip. I duck my face into the bouquet to hide whatever it is doing on the outside, inhale, and the soft green sweetness of the eucalyptus and the ranunculus and the rose climb up into my nose in a way that is so disproportionately overwhelming I have to fight, with active discipline, not to make a sound.
I make a sound.
Small. Involuntary. A breathy little half-purr from the back of my throat I have absolutely zero authorization for.
Matteo’s eyes flicker. The hunger I have been trying to ignore since the moment he walked in surfaces for one undisguised second behind his pupil, and then he physically, visibly, talks himself out of acting on it. The wrist of his glove tightens against my jaw. He breathes out through his nose.
Noted. Filed. Filed in a folder for later research, ideally in a private room with no witnesses.
“Santori.” Coach Declan, behind me, voice level. “We need to get back to drills.”
Matteo’s eyes do not leave mine. “Do you want me to stay, Pinky? I can sit on the bench. I will be no trouble.”
“Go.” I push the bouquet back into his hand, gentle. “You were going to run. With the boys. Yes?”
“Jude and Rémi. Eight-mile loop. We will swing back and pick you up at the rink when you are done.”
“Go,” I repeat. “I am fine. Drink already done. Coach will be done with me in an hour and you can punish me into a calorie surplus afterward.”
He grins.
Then his grin, the lazy unrepentant rom-com grin of him, slides a quarter inch toward something with much sharper teeth, and he leans across the boards toward me one more time — close enough that the cedar-and-snow of Coach Declan, behind me, has nothing to do with the burnt-orange-and-cinnamon-sugar that is, suddenly, the only thing in my entire respiratory system — and he pitches his voice just loud enough that the man at center ice can perfectly clearly hear every syllable.
“And Pinky.”
“Mm.”
“Next time you decide to skip breakfast for an unscheduled goalie practice, sweetheart, I will not hesitate to put you over my lap and turn that perky little ass of yours pink to match the hair. Yes?”
MY ENTIRE FACE GOES VOLCANIC.
In this kitchen. In this rink. With my coach. Listening.
“SHOO,” I splutter, both palms flat against his chest, shoving him with the full force of a woman who is, at this moment, technically being held together by adrenaline and bouquet fumes. “SHOO. GO RUN.”
He laughs. Properly laughs. He leans his forehead briefly against mine, presses his mouth to the corner of my temple, and murmurs against the small soft place under my ear, “Be good. Drink the smoothie before you get back on the ice. Promise me.”
“I promise. Get off me. Run. Have your hobby.”
“Hobby,” he repeats, delighted, and disappears off the boards toward the rink exit, the bouquet tucked carefully into the crook of his arm.
The rink exit door swings shut behind him.
I do not turn around. I do not, in any visible way, react to the fact that Coach Declan is still standing somewhere behind me with whatever expression his face has decided to assemble in the past three minutes.
I lift the strawberry banana smoothie. I peel the wrapper off the straw with my teeth. I take a long, slow, deliberate pull.
It is, in the small petty private chamber of my chest, the best thing I have put in my mouth since I crossed customs at the airport.
Because Matteo Santori has, in the past nine minutes, done a thing that I am, only now, sitting on the boards of an empty pre-dawn rink with a borrowed bouquet still warm from his hand, realizing was a thing at all.
He stopped what he was doing.
He was in fitness gear. He was on his way to an eight-mile loop with the rest of his pack.
He had a route. He had a schedule. He had a thing he was already in the middle of.
And, somewhere between learning I was on the ice at four and arriving at the rink at four-twenty-seven, he detoured to a closed floral boutique, stood on a sidewalk in the cold rapping on the front window of a woman he had never met, paid for an extravagantly thought-out small bouquet, swung past a smoothie counter, and delivered both items to me at the gate of a hockey bench because, on the running tally inside his head, the calorie intake of a small pink-haired Omega had become a thing his morning would not feel correct without.
That is not the bare minimum.
That is intention.
The slow, deliberate, accumulating intention of an Alpha who has decided, without any visible deliberation, that the small comforts of the woman he is choosing are now standing instructions in his own daily routine.
Behind me, the silence of a coach who has just been thoroughly, deliberately, publicly out-Alphaed by his own winger at four in the morning rolls in the air like the residue of a hit nobody has yet acknowledged.
I take another slow pull of the smoothie.
And I let the small private chamber of my chest catch up with itself, very quietly, with the small honest assessment that has been forming there for two weeks and that I have, until now, refused to write down.
This.
This is what I have been yearning for.
An Alpha with intention.