Chapter 23
Slow And Steady
~IRIS~
“I am,” I announce, with the full weight of a woman who has prepared the legal opening of her own case, “not sick, Captain Kavanagh. And this, by the technical definitions of the criminal code of the state of Minnesota, is kidnapping.”
Jude does not look over.
He gives me the level passenger-side glance of a man who has, in the past forty minutes, already absorbed three iterations of this argument, and returns his eyes to the road.
The corner of his mouth has not moved, but I have been able to read his corner of mouth in stereo for two weeks now, and the millimeter it would lift if he were not currently piloting a vehicle is, in his face, only barely repressed.
“Kidnapping,” he repeats, evenly. “O’Shea.”
“Kidnapping.”
“Mm.”
“I lost the rock-paper-scissors round to ask you to tell me where we are going. Therefore the rock-paper-scissors round was binding. Therefore your refusal to disclose constitutes coercive captivity.”
“Iris.” Calm. “You played rock-paper-scissors against the dashboard of my car. You played by yourself. Against a fixed object. Your tally was, by my count, seven losses in a row, against the same wall.”
“Technicality.”
“Mm.”
I cuddle further into the blanket I have wrapped around my shoulders, the soft thermal one I had Matteo retrieve from the linen closet at five-thirty this morning before they sent me out the door, and I let my head tip against the side of the seat’s headrest.
This car, for the record, is a Tesla.
A Tesla is, I am learning in real time, the inside of a small luxury living room that has been mounted on tires, with a touchscreen the size of an iPad embedded in the dashboard, door handles that do not, structurally, look like door handles and that I had to be talked through opening from the outside this morning by a deeply patient captain, and a low ambient hum the precise pitch of a refrigerator quietly thinking about something important.
The interior smells of clean leather, the faint ozone of a battery doing very serious work three feet beneath my seat, and the warm-amber-bourbon scent of Jude, layered into the headrest of the driver’s seat in the way the scent of a man who has owned a car for two years bakes itself into the upholstery whether he intends it to or not.
Refusing to enjoy this. Cataloguing it. Filing it for later. Not enjoying it.
Matteo and Rémi, this morning, had a story.
The story was that Coach Declan called them at four a.m. and instructed them to spend the entire weekend back at the rink doing supplementary “team-player rotations” as a consequence for being, and I quote the captain, “rowdy.” Which is, on its face, complete bullshit, because the rowdiness in question was Matteo punching a sector-one chirp in the mouth and Rémi using the word rape at center ice with the equanimity of a man laying out a chessboard, and the only person on the staff anywhere in the building who would discipline an Alpha for protecting an Omega goalie on his roster is, with all due respect to the man, not Coach Declan O’Rourke.
So they lied to me. Cheerfully. To my face. At five-thirty in the morning.
And they put me into Jude’s passenger seat with a blanket and a kiss on the temple from each of them and waved me out of the driveway like I was being shipped off to summer camp.
Which means there is, somewhere in the past forty-eight hours, a plan I am not in the loop on.
Which I am, for the record, going to discover the exact specifications of, the moment I am not actively running a low-grade fever in a car going eighty on the interstate.
It has been six weeks since I walked into the building at North Star.
Six. The first official outbound game is four days away.
The Knights are coming for us, and the internal tension between sector one and sector two has gotten, somehow, worse since the puck-to-the-helmet incident, the on-ice fistfight, and the locker-room non-apology Brennan has not bothered to deliver.
And in the middle of all of it, I have, against every defensive instinct I have nurtured for ten years, started to fall for three men.
Not getting giddy. Not getting excited. Not, at any point this morning, allowing myself to register that the small private chamber of my chest has been, since approximately the strawberry-banana-smoothie sidewalk in late September, doing the small steady inconvenient thing it has historically only done in fiction.
The thing the romance writers write about.
The cozy thing. The slow-build thing. The thing where a woman, for the first time in her adult life, finds her life accidentally beginning to look like the kind of life she has been reading about on her Kindle.
Filing it. Not engaging with it. Catalog only.
Jude pulls off the interstate.
The exit ramp curves down into a small rest area that has, at one end, a row of gas pumps for the rest of the country and, at the other end, the small futuristic-looking line of white Tesla superchargers that has been on a screen on the touchscreen the entire drive in the form of an ETA.
He glides into a stall. The car negotiates its own parking with the small unhurried precision of a vehicle that has, frankly, been doing this conversation longer than either of us.
He gets out. He plugs the charger into the back side of the car with the small two-handed gesture I am, despite myself, watching with what I am professionally going to call goalie attentiveness. He comes back around to my window.
“What do you want.”
“Nothing.” Sulking, sealed in. “I need nothing. I require nothing. I am content. I will sit here. I will look out the window. I will not eat. I will absolutely not drink. I will be, in your custody, the most stubborn possible passenger.”
“O’Shea.”
“Deep, performative hiss.”
He smirks. The full corner of his mouth lifts the small uplift it has been doing for me only, for two days now, and I clock it, and I refuse to acknowledge clocking it.
“I will be right back, Pinky.”
He turns. He walks away across the small concrete lot toward the small attached gas-station-mart with the unhurried captain stride that is the exact same stride he uses to cross center ice, and I, in my borrowed blanket, in his Tesla, in his amber-bourbon-soaked passenger seat, sit and pretend not to track him with my eyes.
My phone dings.
I dig it out of the small zip pocket of the hoodie I am wearing under the blanket. The lock screen has a notification from a chat thread I have not, until this exact moment, been aware existed.
“THE PACK ”
Matteo: How is the kidnapping going.
Rémi: Estimated time of arrival to the destination.
Matteo: Plus visual confirmation that Pinky is still alive and not, in fact, lying low in a ditch.
Matteo: Pinky.
Matteo: Helloooo.
I stare at the chat thread. I scroll up. The thread was, by the timestamp at the top, created at five fifty-one this morning. I was, at five fifty-one this morning, in the passenger seat of this car, half-asleep, with a strawberry-pink phone in my hand.
How.
How did the chat get on the phone. Who added me. None of these men have my password.
Filing the mystery. Returning to the conversation.
I type back.
Iris: I have been kidnapped. I am dying. The Tesla has betrayed me by being comfortable. I am furious about all of it. I have been forced to sulk inside an objectively luxurious blanket.
Rémi: You realize Jude can read these.
Iris: I do not care.
Rémi: Have you eaten today.
Iris: No. Do not scold me, Bellerose. I am a sick person in active captivity and the two of you did nothing to prevent it. We are not going to revisit the failure of the rest of this pack to mount any kind of defensive intervention on my behalf this morning. Moving on.
Matteo: Fine. I will not scold. For now.
Jude: I have, for the record, just purchased her a sausage in a bun the length of a small forearm and a strawberry milkshake the volume of a small reservoir.
Iris: I hate him.
Jude: Okay.
Jude: I love when she is emotionally driven.
Iris: Fuck you, Captain.
Matteo: Damn, Pinky. I would, frankly, love to be spoken to in that register. Jude, bring her back so I can experience the small dignified taunt in person, please.
Jude: Santori, focus on your training.
Rémi: He is failing miserably.
Matteo: BELLEROSE. DO NOT RAT ME OUT.
Iris: You are not aiding me here, gentlemen.
Matteo: We will see you when you get back, Pinky. Focus on resting and enjoying the ride.
Iris: I DO NOT EVEN KNOW WHERE WE ARE GOING.
Rémi: It is a good surprise.
Iris: The fact that the two of you know and I do not should be a misdemeanor at minimum and a felony if pursued with enthusiasm. Filing complaints. Will follow up by email.
The driver’s door opens.
I look up, primed for a glare, mouth half-open, and the glare dies on my tongue.
Jude is holding, in one hand, a tall white plastic cup with a domed lid and the unmistakable soft pink tint of strawberry milkshake visible through the side.
In his other hand, wrapped in foil with the precise wrap of a man who has just been handed a sandwich by a counter person who knew how to wrap, is what is unquestionably a polish sausage in a bun, the top of which has the visible round outline of caramelized onion, the side of which has the visible thin yellow stripe of mustard, and the smell of which has, in the small unhurried way the universe takes care of an Omega who has not eaten since lunch yesterday, just hit my respiratory system with the full weight of unmediated joy.
Oh.
Captain. I take it back. I take all of it back.
“I love you,” I breathe.
“You hated me three minutes ago.” Setting the cup into the holder beside me. “I have the receipts.”
“I take it back. The hate is rescinded. Effective immediately. Backdated, if necessary.”
He smiles.