Chapter 22 #2
So I do. I walk him through it the way I walked through the geometry of the doctor’s sentences in the hallway.
The fever. The thermoregulatory drift versus the Heat-onset misread.
The blocker she has been on since sixteen.
The taper. The three-to-four-week window.
The natural counter-medications. The hydration.
The nap schedule. The weekly check-ins. The doctor’s personal line.
The fact that the doctor is, in my professional reading, an actively safe pair of hands.
Matteo listens. Properly.
Which is the part about Matteo Santori that most people in this country do not know to budget for.
The man can talk. He prefers to talk. Given a choice, he will fill any silence available.
But when the conversation actually requires him to absorb information, he does, and he absorbs the entire thing without interrupting once, and when I finish there is a small considered exhale on the other end of the line that tells me he has, in real time, just rebuilt his afternoon around the data set I gave him.
“Okay,” Matteo says, quiet. “One more thing. About the nest.”
“Santori.”
“Go.”
“We need to build her one. Back at the house. It is, per the doctor, not optional during the taper window. And it is also, separately, going to need to be the first one she has ever had.”
Silence again.
“She has never had a nest.”
“She has never had a nest. Confirmed in the locker room ninety minutes ago.”
“Rémi.”
“Yeah.”
“At the rate this afternoon is going,” Matteo says, very evenly, “I am genuinely going to walk into the house tonight, open her storage-room door, and burn the entire room down to the studs out of personal principle so we can put a proper one in.”
“Do not burn down our house.”
“Semantically.”
“Give me a few days. I can build her one. Properly. I have access to the cedar I have been holding in the garage for a different project. I will need Jude to distract her for a forty-eight-hour stretch while I do the carpentry and run the scent-soft fabrics through the wash.”
There is a beat.
Then Matteo, very quietly, says the thing I have been waiting for him to say.
“Okay. So. How are we telling Jude.”
I do not, immediately, answer.
Telling Jude is, structurally, the part of this conversation I have been steering around in my own head since the doctor pronounced the word withdrawal.
Our captain has, on the issue of pharmaceutical dependency in a person he loves, exactly one calibration setting, and the setting is vigilance.
It has been four winters since Connor and Jude’s vigilance has not, in any visible way, relaxed.
The man has not, to my knowledge, taken a recreational drink in three years.
He sleeps with his phone face-up on the bedside table.
He still, on every birthday Connor missed, drives the four hours to the cemetery alone.
And the captain is, on the specific subject of Iris O’Shea, starting to slip.
I have read it on his face all week. I read it on his face in the kitchen yesterday when he taught her to stir his grandfather’s stew and let her wear his last functional T-shirt.
I read it in the way he has, in the past two days, been the first one downstairs in the morning, every morning, with the coffee pot already on when she comes into the kitchen.
Dumping the phrase withdrawal cascade into that captain at this stage of the season, with the outbound game four days away, is, on the math, a controlled detonation we should be choosing the timing of.
“Silence for now,” I tell Matteo. “If Iris brings it up to him on her own, fine, we ease it in alongside her. We do not, in any case, dump it on him without her in the room. He is already tense about the game. The tension between the two halves of the house is at a level I am not enjoying.”
“You are telling me. That douche is still recovering from his black eye, by the way. I regret nothing.”
“You are going to be a bench-warmer if you keep acting that cocky.”
“Anything for Pinky.”
“… Yes.”
“See you back at the house, Bellerose. I will start prepping dinner.”
“Good.”
Click.
I drop the phone back into my pocket. I press my thumb against the bridge of my nose for one careful beat, and then I push back into the exam room.
The doctor is at the small side counter, writing up the new prescription with the precise unhurried penmanship of a woman who has not, in twenty years, sent a single illegible script to a pharmacist. Iris is on the exam table, still in the hoodie, the covers pulled up to her chest now, sulking, in the small unmistakable physical posture of an Omega who has decided that sulking is the only protest currently within her budget.
The doctor lifts the slip and turns. “If you have any questions, my personal line is on the back of the prescription. Text or call. Twenty-four-seven. Do not hesitate.”
“Thank you.”
“Of course.”
She nods to Iris, gives me a small careful look in passing, and pulls the door quietly closed behind her.
Iris and I are alone in the small examination room.
She huffs. The huff is muffled by the hood she is still mostly inside. “You better,” she announces, “not scold me, Bellerose.”
I cross to the table.
I lift both my hands. I cup her cheeks. The skin under my palms is warmer than it should be, in a small steady way that the doctor has now given me a name for, and the grey of her eyes lifts up to mine over the curl of her hood with the cautious wary watch of a woman waiting to be told off.
“Iris,” I tell her, very quietly. “I was not, in fact, planning to scold you.”
She blinks.
“Oh.”
“Mm.”
She does not say anything for a beat. Her eyes are drooping.
I can read it on the small soft muscles around her temples, in the way her shoulders have stopped holding their captain-Omega posture and have started, in the small honest collapse of a person who is, for the first time in three nights, in a room she does not have to perform in, just allowed to sag.
“You do not feel good,” I observe, soft. “At all. Huh.”
She sighs.
She leans, the small five-degree lean of a woman conceding gravity.
I pull her in.
She comes, against my chest, the way she did in the locker room ninety minutes ago, except this time without any of the earlier-afternoon armor still on the outside of her.
Her cheek presses into the cold-damp fabric over my collarbone.
One small fist finds the front of my henley and stays there.
The pine-and-snow of my scent layers itself over the frosted strawberry of hers, and I can, against my own better professional judgment, feel her actively allow the contact — not the wary tolerance of a polite Omega permitting a hug, but the small full unguarded permission of a woman handing her weight to a man she has decided to trust.
Oh, Iris.
“I hate,” she whispers, into the fabric of my chest, “feeling like I am always on a fucking upscale battle.”
“Okay.”
Beat. Her fist tightens in the front of my henley.
“Rémi.”
“Mm.”
“Can we not tell Jude. About the blockers. About the withdrawal thing. Please.”
Oh.
Matteo told her about Connor.
Or Jude did, in the kitchen yesterday. The man cooked her a stew and gave her the name. We are all in the same conversation now.
“For now,” I tell her, into the crown of her hair. “For now we are not telling Jude. But you, Iris, will tell him eventually. You will not run from that conversation. He will need to hear it from you and not from us.”
“Mm-hm,” she breathes.
Her breath against the front of my shirt has gotten slower. The small fist of hers, in my henley, has gone slack.
I pull back, half an inch. Just enough to see her face.
Her eyes are closed.
Pinky.
I shift my arms. Slow. Careful. The lift is mostly economic — she weighs, against my shoulders, the precise nothing I clocked the night I carried her up from the movie-night couch, all muscle and defiance and small bony sleep-warm bird-weight — and I lay her back onto the paper-sheeted exam table the way you lay anything you do not want to wake into a thing that has been built to hold sleep.
There is a small folded note on the side counter.
I cross. I open it.
Mr. Bellerose — I gave her a mild relaxant in the IV port before we started bloodwork. She will be drowsy for an hour. Please feel free to use this room as long as you need it. The door locks from the inside.
— Dr. Halpern.
Oh, you saint.
I do not, generally, develop opinions about strangers in twenty-five minutes. I have just developed one about Dr. Halpern. I will be sending her, at season’s end, a quietly expensive bottle of something.
I cross back to the table. I dig in my pockets for my keys, my phone, my wallet. I set them on the side counter beside the note. I unlace my boots. I leave them under the table. I lock the door. The bolt clicks.
Then I climb, very carefully, onto the exam table behind her.
The table is, technically, single-Omega width.
The math is, in the small dry accounting of a man my size, generous.
I slide one arm under her neck. I curl my other around the small bowed bracket of her ribcage.
I pull her, gentle, against the line of my chest, and her sleeping body, against every adult instinct I have, settles into me with the same unguarded total surrender she gave me ninety seconds ago in the hug.
Her hair smells of frosted strawberry and the chemical-lavender of the clinic’s soap and, very faintly underneath, the pine-and-snow that has been on her for two weeks because she has been quietly stealing my laundry.
This.
This is the small unspectacular daily thing I have been waiting fourteen days to be allowed to give her.
I let my hand find the back of her head. The pink strands slide through my fingers. I stroke, slow, the way a man strokes the back of a small animal that has, against its better instincts, finally fallen asleep on him.
I think, briefly, about the architecture of the past four hours.
The puck to her cage. The chirp. The four-a.m. extras.
The blockers since sixteen. The thermoregulatory drift.
The withdrawal cascade in compressed form.
The captain who does not yet know. The nest that does not yet exist. The fact that, on the small inner accounting of every single one of these data points, Iris O’Shea has been quietly carrying every one of them on her own shoulders for a decade in the small inflexible way that the people who are eventually going to be ground into glass shards always carry them.
Not anymore.
I lean my forehead, gentle, against the back of her hair. I press, slow and unhurried, a kiss into the crown of her head. The pine-and-snow of me layers itself in there with the chemical-lavender and the frosted strawberry, and I let it.
“It is about time,” I murmur, very quietly, against her hair, “you let us carry the weight, Iris.”