Chapter 21 #2
“Go drill your goalies the way she has been drilled, sirs. Two weeks. Four-a.m. extras. Barely a day off. Let us see how the lot of your gentlemen perform under that schedule. Get back to me when you have data.”
Oh.
Oh, my Defenseman D.
Rémi exhales. The huff is small. Then he turns, very deliberately, on the steel toe of his skate, and skates the short distance across the ice to me.
He stops in front of my crease. He points with his stick toward the home tunnel.
“Shower. Now.”
Oh.
Oh, Defenseman D, you cannot say it in that voice, and that tone, in this register, in front of three coaches. We are going to have a problem.
My hands come up before any conscious part of me has authorized the motion.
The pads at the wrists of my goalie gloves come up to roughly shoulder height in the small universal surrender gesture, and I do not, in fact, contest the order.
I do not negotiate with it. I do not, in any of the small habitual ways I would, with anyone else in this building, ask for the underlying reasoning.
Manhandled by the defenseman. One hundred percent hot. Filed.
Filing. Filing the file. The folder is going to need a subfolder at this rate.
I leave my net. I skate toward the home tunnel without looking at Coach Declan, without looking at Matteo, without looking at any of the sector-one row of bodies who are, I can tell from the small drop in the rink temperature, watching the exact way the goalie does not negotiate with the defenseman who told her to shower.
I clip the gate behind me. I pull my mask off as I hit the rubber-matted tunnel. The cool of the corridor air hits my sweat-wet face in a small clean blow.
Rémi follows. One stride behind. Quiet.
I push through the door of the converted-utility-closet girls’ locker room.
The little space smells of bleach and the residue of the cleaner Jimmy passed over the bench at six this morning.
The single safety bulb in the corner is the only thing on.
I drop my mask on the bench. I peel off my left glove.
I sit down and pull at the laces of my left skate, the side with the sore hip.
Rémi closes the door behind us.
Three quiet steps and he is in front of me.
He drops to a crouch. The pine-and-snow of him fills the small radius of the locker room in the gentle even way it always does, and his hand, gloved still in the worn black leather of his training mitt, comes up to my forehead and presses the back of his bare wrist there with the steady careful authority of a man who has done this gesture many times in his life on many people.
“Iris,” he says, very quietly. “Are you about to go into Heat.”
I blink up at him.
Oh. Oh, that is the question.
“I —” I have to take a beat to actually consult the small inner gauge of my own body, which is, frankly, embarrassing for a twenty-four-year-old career Omega to have to do.
“No? I do not think so. My blockers are still working, as far as I can tell. I do not feel — I do not feel any of the standard signs. Not really. No fever I can register. No nausea. No skin sensitivity. No, ah — desire-spike.”
Rémi watches my face. He keeps the back of his wrist there for one more careful beat.
“Your scent is up,” he says. “For the record. Not by an alarming margin. But it is up.”
“Okay.” My voice has gone small. “Okay. I — I have an appointment with the Omega specialist at the campus clinic today at four anyway. I could go in early. Have them check.”
“Good.” He lets his wrist drop. Settles back on his heels. “Before that. Have you been sleeping.”
I close my eyes.
“No,” I admit, very quietly. “I have bouts of insomnia. Always have. The last three nights have not been good. I lie down. I close my eyes. The brain decides it is time for a comprehensive audit of every embarrassing thing I have said since I was nine. I get maybe an hour before Rémi’s six-a.m. alarm. ”
He nods. Slow.
“Right,” he says. “Go. Shower. Take your time. We will pass by the Omega specialist together and have them do bloodwork, just so we have data on the blockers. Probably the insomnia is the upstream issue, and the goalie performance is a downstream metric. But we will get a professional to confirm.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
I open my eyes.
Rémi is still crouched, his weight balanced on the toes of his skates with the small unspectacular grace of a defenseman who has spent fifteen years living on his blades, and his pale eyes are on mine.
“Thank you,” I whisper. “For — out there. For defending me. I do not want to play badly. I genuinely do not. Today was just. Off.”
He does not answer immediately.
Then he rises to a stand, and instead of stepping back, he steps directly into my space, and he pulls me out of the bench into a hug.
Oh.
It is, frankly, the kind of hug I have not been on the receiving end of since I was seventeen years old.
Full contact. Both arms around my back, the gloved one careful at the curve of my spine, the bare hand against the back of my neck.
He is, by my best estimate, six-foot-four to my five-five, and the angle of the hug puts my face squarely against the cold-damp fabric of his practice jersey, the pine-and-snow of his scent rising off the warm skin underneath, and the steady slow drum of his pulse a thumb’s width from my ear.
He presses a small unhurried kiss against the crown of my head.
Stand down, knees. Stand down. We are upright. We are professional.
“Okay,” Rémi murmurs, into my hair. “You need to stop fighting for perfection, Iris. You can have off days. Everyone else on this team has off days. The men on the other side of that gate just had an entire off day on national fucking practice ice and they have not, to their credit, stopped breathing. Your health, your sleep, your mechanical hip, the chemistry inside your body — those things are not optional. The performance is downstream. You are not, in this house, going to keep grinding yourself into glass shards for the comfort of men who are not, at the end of the day, the reason you came here.”
I do not, in any visible way, react.
But the small private chamber in my chest that has spent fourteen days carefully not crying in front of any of these men is doing, on the inside, the small honest collapse it does when somebody locates the wound the day after the wound has been bleeding.
“And, for the record,” he adds, quieter, into the crown of my hair, “nobody is going to bully you again on this ice. Not in front of me. Not in front of Matteo. Not in front of Jude. We will shut that down, today, tomorrow, the day after. As many times as it needs to be shut down. Yes?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Good girl. Go shower. I will leave you my hoodie.”
He pulls back. He doesn’t go far. His hand stays at the back of my neck for one more grounding beat. The corner of his mouth does the millimeter Rémi smile.
My face, traitor that it is, lights up.
“Oh, another one to add to the collection. Excellent. I am building an inventory.”
Rémi sighs through his nose. The sigh of a man calculating cubic feet.
“At this rate,” he says, mildly, “I am going to have to build you an actual dedicated closet. And a damn nest space.”
I frown up at him.
“What is a nest space.”
Rémi pauses.
It is, by Rémi standards, the longest pause I have seen him take. The careful pause of a man who has just registered that the question he received was not the question he was expecting to receive, and who is now adjusting his entire next sentence in real time.
What. What did I just say.
“Iris.”
“Yes.”
“Have you,” he asks, very carefully, “ever had a nest.”
I look up at him. My face, in the small soft yellow of the safety bulb, does the small honest thing it always does when I have just been asked a question that has, structurally, hit a gap in my education.
“I mean.” My voice is small. “I have read about them. In, um, books. Mostly the books we have been not discussing in this house. The romance novels reference them constantly. The female lead always has a nest, and the Alphas always say the word nest in a tone that suggests the nest is doing some emotional or scent-related work I am missing the deeper context of. I have, ah. Honestly. I have never had one. I do not really know what one actually is. My family did not exactly walk me through the Omega curriculum at presentation. There was no chapter discussion. The book stayed on the shelf.”
“Okay,” Rémi says, softly.
He has gone quieter. Why has he gone quieter.
Because something has just told him that the family that withdrew at thirteen never explained the Omega-specific architecture you have been living without for a decade.
And Rémi Bellerose, who has been building things with his hands since he was six years old, has just identified a missing structure in his house.
“I will explain after you shower,” Rémi says. “We will get you some food on the way to the clinic as well. They may want bloodwork. Bloodwork on an empty stomach is, in my opinion, a crime against decency.”
“Okay,” I whisper.
I stand. He is still close. The pine-and-snow of him is, in the small confines of this room, the only thing my respiratory system is currently processing.
I hug him.
Not the small polite goalie hug I have hugged Rémi Bellerose with twice in the past two weeks. The full pressed-into-his-chest hug of an exhausted small pink-haired Omega who has, on the inside, just had her cards quietly assembled and re-organized by a man who did the assembling without comment.
“Thank you, Rémi.”
He presses one warm hand against the back of my head. Brief. Steady. The kind of pressure a man uses to anchor a person against his chest for one more careful beat than the gesture strictly requires.
“Anytime, Iris.”