Chapter 20 #2
“Okay, but the actual reason I have been chewing on this book all week,” she says, glancing at the screen of her Kindle, then up at me, “is the part I am at. Without spoiling the structure, the female lead is trying to talk to one of the male leads, and he has just gone, like, completely closed off. Stone cold, no warning. She does not know it, but he is going through an addiction spiral, and the reason he will not let her in is that he genuinely thinks he is going to disappoint her, and he would rather close the door than let her see what is on the other side of it.”
I do not move.
The wooden spoon is in my hand. The stew is at low heat.
The kitchen is, around us, warm and slow and gold-lit, and the woman across the island from me has, without any way of knowing it, just put a finger on the precise wound that has, for four winters, been the most carefully managed object in the small inner courtroom of my chest.
“Mm,” I say, level. “What part of it has you stuck on it.”
“Honestly? I have not even reached the resolution yet. It just — it makes me want to put myself in her shoes. If I were in a relationship with someone, and he was in that hole, and he would not let me in. What would I do. What would I be willing to absorb. What would I be willing to walk away from.”
“Okay.” My voice is steadier than I am, on the inside. “Would you. Date someone in active addiction.”
She frowns. Considers.
“It is not, technically, a choice you exactly make, right? You do not, with your morning coffee, decide, today I am going to fall in love with an addict. Addiction is something that happens, frequently to people you are already in love with. So I think the more useful framing is —”
She pauses. She picks her words.
“I do not blame people for needing an escape. Life sucks balls. The world is a lot. Some people land somewhere on the bell curve where the available escapes are reading and a hot bath and a cozy movie night, and some people land somewhere on the bell curve where the available escapes are, um, less clean. I do not think one set of people is morally superior to the other. I think people are doing what they can.”
I do not say anything.
She glances at the Kindle, then back up at me. She lifts the device. “Some could say I am, by clinical measure, addicted to reading.”
She turns the device so I can see the cover screen. The percentage in the corner, again. Seventy-seven.
“I read so that when I am not spiral-thinking about how I have to prove the world wrong about Omegas in net,” she says, soft, “I can get lost in stories about women being loved. Cherished. Taken care of in the small unspectacular daily way the women in my actual life have not, recently, been taken care of. I can have an afternoon like this one, with a man cooking his grandfather’s stew, having a real conversation, and read the version of the same afternoon written by someone who has, at the end, written down an ending where the woman gets to keep it. ”
She sets the Kindle down on the marble. She crosses the kitchen to the stools opposite me. She hoists herself up onto one with the slow careful pull of a woman whose hip is, very visibly, not happy, and she crosses one leg over the other.
Captain. Steady.
I lower the stove a click. I set the wooden spoon onto the marble rest. I walk to her side of the island.
“Because, here is the thing about my reading addiction.” Iris looks up at me.
“It is deemed a positive escape, culturally. Society pats us on the head for it. But just because it is deemed positive does not mean it is not still, structurally, an escape. The honest difference between mine and the heavier stuff is that the heavier stuff is deemed negative because it leads, statistically, to harmful realities. Drinking leads to liver disease and people in cars at the wrong times. Hard drugs lead to overdoses and the kind of phone calls nobody recovers from. Reading does not, by itself, harm anyone. Unless, of course, you take what you have learned in a book and you go use it for harm. If you read about serial killers in a textbook and decide the kids who made you cry in fifth grade should die, that is a personal accountability moment. We do not blame the book.”
I stop in front of her. I rest both palms on the island behind her, one on either side of her hips, the close considered captain posture I have not, in fact, allowed myself in this kitchen with her in this configuration before now.
She does not flinch. The grey of her eyes is locked on mine, steady, the small amused smirk at the corner of her mouth telling me she has not missed a single component of my body language.
“Good analogy,” I tell her, slow, “O’Shea.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
She tilts her head. Very deliberate. The grin breaks open at the corners.
“So, Captain. Would you ever date someone addicted to books.”
Oh, sweetheart.
That is a layup.
“I mean.” I let the corner of my mouth do the thing it does for her now. “Apparently, O’Shea, I am already dating a book addict.”
“Oh, really.”
“Mm.”
“And who, exactly, would the lucky reader in question be.”
I lift one hand off the island. I tuck a loose pink strand back behind her ear, slow, the strand that has been escaping the headband and dangling against the line of her jaw. My fingers linger on the soft skin of her cheek.
“I am not,” I say, very quietly, “the one who is bold and direct with love and emotions in the opening rounds. I move through it the way I move through everything else. Slow. With intention. I am explaining this now because I do not want you to be reading me wrong as a man reluctant to want you. The reluctance is not the language I speak. I speak the slow one.”
“Okay,” she breathes.
“Which is why I am about to tell you something I do not, generally, tell anyone before I have decided to keep them.”
My fingers, on her cheek, move down. Slow. Along the line of her jaw. Down the column of her throat. They stop at the small hollow at the base of her neck where her pulse, against my fingertip, is doing the considerably quicker thing her face is not letting me see.
She shivers. She does not move away.
“My best friend,” I tell her, soft, “ended up being an addict.”
Iris does not interrupt.
She does not perform a sympathy face. She does not reach for the wooden spoon of conventional wisdom about how to receive a sentence like the one I have just placed in her lap. She holds my eyes and lets me have the floor.
“His name was Connor.”
The name sits, the way it always sits, in the air between me and another person for one careful second, and then it settles. The kitchen, around us, takes it in.
“I honestly do not know,” I continue, with the dry self-indictment of a man who has had this thought at three in the morning for four winters, “if I would have stayed friends with him from the start if I had known, when I was eight years old and we met behind a beer-league rink, that he was going to be the one who got it. We were both the youngest two children of large stretched-thin families in the same postcode, and our parents had been parking us at the rink for cheap babysitting since we were five. By the time we were ten, we were inseparable. By the time we were fifteen, we had each been the one driving the other to the emergency room twice.”
“Was it obvious.” Iris’s voice is small. “The addiction. Was it obvious from the outside.”
“Not really.” My finger, against her pulse, has not moved.
“A drink here, a party there. Standard college vocabulary. Being on a Division One roster with the kind of pressure the world parks on a team like ours is, frankly, a lot, and we balanced it the way every roster in this country balances it. Drinks. Parties. Dancing. The occasional unwise fling.”
Her eyebrow lifts. “Occasional unwise flings, Captain.”
“For the record.” I let the corner of my mouth lift.
“I was never, in fact, the man bouncing girl to girl. It might be a strange admission for a male, and a stranger one for an Alpha, and the strangest of all for a captain, but I have not, in my entire adult life, found that mode of operating very interesting. I like to move with intention. Relationships included.”
Including, Pinky. Including this one.
She makes a small sound at the back of her throat. The kind of sound that is half-amused, half-helpless. I keep going.
“It did not get bad for Connor, in any visible way, until the pressure of the Elite track came at us. The window when scouts started circling and the whole roster was working on the edge. I did not know he had moved to the heavier stuff. I want to be honest about that with you. I did not know. I would have known, if I had been looking, but I was not looking. I was looking at the playoff bracket and the GPA requirement and my four sisters at home, and somewhere in there my best friend had started taking the things that put him to sleep instead of waking him up.”
I breathe out.
“And then, on a Tuesday in November, four winters ago, I got the phone call.”
Her eyes have started to do the thing.
“One minute he was here, O’Shea. Studying for an econ midterm with Rémi and Matteo in the kitchen on a Sunday night and complaining about his hangover.
The next, the call. He had not woken up.
The autopsy report used the words respiratory depression.
His mother called me before she called his sister, because Connor had, on his fridge, my name as the in-case-of.
He was twenty-one years old. His entire future poofed, just like that, off the front of a calendar. ”
Iris closes her eyes.
She does not say I am so sorry the way most people do, with the small reflexive verbal hand on the shoulder. She lets the silence be the silence. She lets me have the room with him for the small respectful beat the room would have allowed Connor himself, had Connor been in it.