Chapter 20 #3
Then she opens her eyes. They are bright. They are not pitying. They are doing the very specific small difference between sympathy and empathy that I have been able to clock on a face since I was nine years old and that I have, in two weeks, never seen her do badly.
“Damn,” she whispers. “Jude. I am genuinely sorry.”
“Thank you, O’Shea.”
She wrinkles her nose. The small inhale of a woman recalibrating to the air of the room.
“Jude.”
“Mm.”
“Is something burning.”
Fuck.
I am off her in a beat, around the island, and at the stove in three strides.
The bottom of the cast-iron has, in the four minutes I have spent with my finger against the pulse at her throat, gone past good caramelization into the precise dark scorched register of a base ruined by inattention.
I lift the lid. The smell hits me. I curse.
“Okay,” I tell her, clipped, “I have to transfer this to a clean pot. Hold on. Bottom is gone.”
“I will help. What do you need.”
She is already off the stool and crossing to the cabinets. Pads, with that careful favoring of her left hip, to the lower set, opens the right one on the first try, and pulls out the second-deepest enamelled pot in the house. She plants the empty pot on the burner beside mine. Lid off.
“Transfer,” she says, gesturing.
I transfer. Carefully. Stew goes ladle by ladle into the new pot, leaving the scorched layer at the bottom of the old one.
Iris turns the heat down a click without asking.
The right smell slowly reclaims the room.
Onions and rosemary and the slow umami of the beef and the dark malt of the Guinness coming back up from underneath the burnt that had, briefly, replaced it.
“Okay,” she breathes. “We are okay.”
“We are okay,” I agree.
“Teach me what you put in it.”
“Right now.”
“Walk me through. I want to know how you do this.”
So I do. I walk her through the seasonings in the order I added them.
The bay leaves first, into the hot oil. The thyme and rosemary stripped from the stems and crushed between my palms before they go in.
The pinch of mustard powder my grandfather always insisted on.
The slug of Guinness halfway through, to deglaze.
The splash of red wine at the end of hour two.
The three peppercorns I throw in whole, against every cooking-school recommendation, because grandpa did and because the recipe is, in the end, the recipe.
She listens. Properly. The careful attentive listen you only give to information you intend to actually use, and somewhere around peppercorn three she has reached for the wooden spoon on her own and started a slow methodical stir.
I step behind her.
Close enough that the amber-bourbon-and-vanilla of me is the only scent in her radius, that the heat of my chest is half an inch from her back, that the line of my body is along the line of hers without making contact.
My hands settle, slow, deliberate, on the curve of her hips.
Right side first, because the left is sore.
Right side only, because the left is sore.
She does not move.
She does not, in fact, miss a beat with the spoon. But the small quiet inhale she takes through her nose tells me everything about how the contact has landed.
“Taste,” I tell her, quiet, against the small soft place above her ear.
She lifts the spoon. Blows on it. Sips.
Tell me, Pinky.
Her shoulders lift.
“Jude.”
“Mm.”
“This is fucking amazing.”
Good girl.
Captain. Internal monologue. Tighter.
“It will be perfect once I bake the bread,” I tell her, brushing a thumb in a small slow circle against the bone of her hip. “Which is the next step. I will start that in twenty.”
She turns her head.
The corner of her cheek brushes the corner of my mouth before either of us has authorized the movement, and her storm-grey eyes lock onto mine at the close distance of a woman who has decided that the captain is, finally, scheming over the wrong information.
“So,” she murmurs, very low, the way she murmured at Coach Declan on a four-in-the-morning ice, except without any of the spite, “what exactly does one need to do to enter the dating graces of Captain Kavanagh.”
I do not chuckle.
A chuckle would, professionally, be the wrong move. I let the corner of my mouth lift, and I have, in the time it has taken her to ask the question, finished doing the captain math.
Patient Alpha. Patience over. Pull the trigger.
I lean in.
I do not lunge. I do not hurry. I press my mouth against hers. Tender. Firm. The kind of kiss you give a woman you have been waiting fourteen days to kiss and that you intend, on the inside of your own chest, to keep kissing for considerably longer than fourteen days.
Her breath catches against my mouth.
Her free hand, the one not holding the spoon, comes up automatically to fist in the front of my T-shirt. She does not pull me in. She does not push me away. She anchors herself there, the grip of a goalie locating a steady point in the kinetic chaos of a play, and she kisses me back.
Slow. Considered. The yes I have been waiting for, delivered the way I asked the question.
I pull back, half an inch.
“The real question, O’Shea,” I tell her, against her mouth, “is whether you can handle all three of us.”
She smirks.
It is a slow smirk. A storm-grey one. The taunt-and-challenge in it is the same thing I clocked on her face two weeks ago in a corridor and was, even then, fairly certain I had no professional defenses against.
“Challenge accepted, Captain.”
Oh, sweetheart.
Oh, you are going to be the death of me. All four of us.
I press my mouth against the side of her temple, slow. Squeeze her hips, gentle. The right one only. The left is, in my palm, very visibly knotted under the surface, and I am, frankly, not going to leave that conversation in the unhandled column.
“You need a registered massage therapist for that hip, O’Shea. There is a knot the size of a golf ball under the surface. You are stiff as a board.”
“Absolutely not.”
“No. I hate RMTs. Do you know how painful that is? They locate your most personal trauma in your trapezius and they press on it. With both thumbs. While you make eye contact with the ceiling. It is psychological warfare wearing a clinic license.”
“Painful, yes. The relief afterward, also yes.”
“Nevahhhh.” She shuffles, with the careful dignity of a goalie protecting her left side, over to the kitchen island, where she hoists herself onto a stool and crosses her legs with the small look of a woman declaring sovereign territory.
“Stubborn goalie.”
“Captain. The least you can do, after kissing me during your grandfather’s stew, is permit me a small dignified retreat on the question of trigger-point therapy.”
“Granted.”
She lifts her Kindle off the marble. She unlocks it. The cover screen comes up. Seventy-seven percent.
“Finish your book,” I tell her, mildly, returning to the stove and lowering the heat one more click. “I want to know what happens.”
Her face does something soft. Something that is not for the camera and is not, frankly, for my benefit either.
It is the face of a person who has been told, in a kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon by a man cooking her a stew older than either of them, that the small private thing she does in the gaps of her life is worth knowing the outcome of.
“On it,” she says, soft.
She lifts the device. Finds her page. Drops her shoulders an inch into the curve of the stool and starts reading.
I turn back to the stove. I lift the lid.
I stir, slow, the new pot. The kitchen reassembles itself around the slow malted dark of the beef and the rosemary and the careful rhythm of a man who is, for the first time in considerably longer than four winters, actively allowing himself to be in the picture rather than holding the frame around it.
Across the island, in my too-large season-end T-shirt and her messy bun, Iris O’Shea reads.
Captain.
You could really fall for O’Shea.
Or, captain, you are already falling for her, and you do not want to realize it.