Chapter 23 #2
Properly, this time. Not the millimeter restrained captain-smile.
The full open-faced thing he does for me only, the small honest grin of a man who has not, frankly, smiled at any of the men in his own house in a comparable way at any point in the past two weeks, and the small private chamber of my chest does the small flip it does when the captain forgets to hold his frame in place.
“Eat, Pinky.”
“On it, sir.”
The sausage is, frankly, religious.
I work through it in the slow methodical way of an Omega who has just remembered, with mild surprise, that food is a thing.
The car charges in the small quiet hum of itself.
Jude sips a black coffee out of a paper cup and watches the highway in the side mirror.
The cab of the Tesla holds the warm savoury of caramelized onion and yeasty bun and the cold-sweet of strawberry, and the amber-bourbon of him, and the small steady pine-trace of the blanket I have wrapped around me, which I confirmed at mile twenty-eight by smell test belongs to Rémi.
“So,” I venture, around a sip of the milkshake, “are you nervous. About Friday’s game.”
Jude does not, immediately, answer.
Which is, by Jude standards, the answer.
“Yes,” he says, level. “We have played that team three times in the past two seasons. We have lost three times. They are not a beatable opponent in the conventional sense. They are a roster with senior-tier playoff experience, last year’s national-tournament finalists, and at least four players who are, on any honest scouting report, going to be in the Stanley Cup pool in the next eighteen months. ”
“Okay.” I tip my head against the headrest. “Do you think we have that. As a team. The same potential.”
Long pause.
Long enough that I, for one shameful second, want to retract the question.
“No,” Jude says, finally. “We do not. Not currently.”
Oh.
Honesty. I will, in fact, take it.
“I appreciate the honesty, Captain.”
“To be clear,” he continues, evenly, “it is not that we do not have the talent. We do. The dangerous part is that we do, and I can see it, and Coach Declan can see it, and the Saint Aldwin and conference-final scouting reports both quietly flag us as a roster with deep upside. The problem is that one half of this team is, professionally, committed to the project, and the other half of this team is, professionally, committed to itself. And the two halves are, right now, colliding in real time inside my building.”
“Did you bring it up to Coach.”
“Yes. We are sitting down together after this game and going line by line.”
Quiet.
I sip the milkshake. The strawberry hits the back of my throat in the small cold soothing way a strawberry milkshake is, in this country, professionally engineered to hit the back of an Omega’s throat, and I take a beat to decide whether I am going to ask the next question.
I ask it.
“It is because of me, isn’t it. The conflict. Why does it not just make sense, Captain, to get rid of the variable.”
Jude turns his head.
Properly. The full captain-look, undiluted, the green-gold of his eyes locked onto mine across the small interior of the parked car, and his voice when it comes is the precise level register he uses when he is about to put a sentence on the record in a way that will not, later, be available for renegotiation.
“O’Shea.”
“Mm.”
“You are not the variable in this equation. If those fuckers cannot adapt to the presence of a competent goaltender because the goaltender has, in their estimation, the wrong designation, then their mentality is what is holding this roster back. You are not the problem. They are.”
Oh.
“Okay,” I whisper.
“For the record,” he continues, “since I do not appear to have communicated this clearly enough at any prior point in the past six weeks, here is the line-by-line. Your reaction time on a high glove-side shot is, by my own private metrics, the fastest in this conference. Your post-integration is the cleanest I have seen at our level since I started watching tape at twelve. Your rebound control is, on average, sixty percent better than the league baseline. Your read on a forward’s shoulder is, frankly, alarming.
You have three flaws I will name only because I have promised you the honesty. ”
“Go on.” My voice is very small.
“One. You drop the left hip a quarter-beat early on the post-side. Coach D and I are already on this. Two. You over-commit on the first shot of a sequence approximately twelve percent of the time, which is, on the scale we are talking about, a fixable habit. Three.”
He pauses.
“You get in your own head on the ice. Sometimes. When the sector-one chirps get loud, or the conditions slip, or you are running on no sleep. The focus falters. The first two we can drill. The third one is the one we cannot drill away, because it is upstream of the ice. So we are, the three of us, currently engineering the conditions in the house in which the third flaw stops being a flaw.”
Oh.
Oh, Captain.
“For an additional example,” he adds, mildly, “I have noticed, in the past six weeks, that you have a tendency to look away during direct eye contact in any conversation that requires you to be read. You break the line of sight. You look at the floor. You look at the wall. You look at the third thing in the room. You used to do it constantly. You are, slowly, doing it less. Your confidence lies in the gaze, O’Shea. Hold it.”
I am, in the passenger seat of his car with a strawberry milkshake in my hand, doing it right now. I am looking at the gear stick. I lift my eyes back to his.
He nods. Small.
“There we go.”
“I am,” I admit, quietly, “surprised you noticed that.”
“O’Shea.” Soft. “I have noticed approximately everything.”
The small private chamber of my chest does the small honest collapse it has been doing intermittently for two weeks.
“I —” My voice gives out, briefly. I clear my throat.
I try again. “This is, ah. The first time. That somebody has, on the record, actually defended me. Or treated me as if I were cherishable. I have been on this campus for six weeks, and you three have, between you, defended me more times than the rest of my life combined.”
Jude’s eyes do not leave mine.
“I have been in,” I continue, carefully, “relationships. I will not lie about that. Situationships, mostly. The occasional bad three-month decision. The classic young-Omega tour of regrettable line items. The slow build of an actual packship, the kind where the men involved start, of their own accord, building actual structures into your life — that is, candidly, frightening for me, because it feels real. And I think I have been operating, somewhere on the inside, on the small unexamined assumption that I was not, in fact, deserving of that. So this is, ah. New. The new is harder than the bullshit.”
“Iris.” Jude’s voice has gone low.
“Mm.”
“You are,” he tells me, with the precise unhurried captain finality of a man putting a sentence on the record, “more than worthy of being cherished. The fact that you have not, until now, been cherished is the operational failure of the people upstream of you. It is not, structurally, your fault. And, for the record, the three of us are correcting that failure as of approximately six weeks ago. With intention.”
I smile.
Not the giddy traitor smile. The small careful one a person does when something has, on the inside, been quietly received and is going to require sitting with later, in private, with a closed door and possibly a glass of wine.
“So,” I venture, after a beat. “How do you actually like your relationships, Captain.”
“Slow.” Immediate. “Steady. Built. The way I like my coffee, my carpentry, and my grandfather’s stew.
I do not see the point of the alternative.
Maybe that reads as odd for a man in a country where everyone seems to be in a hurry to jump on each other at the first available opportunity.
I am not, in fact, anti-jumping. I am, however, fully against jumping without intention. ”
“So — to be clear — you do, in fact, like to.”
“Fuck. Yes.”
Oh.
“On the record,” he adds, mild, eyes back on the side mirror, “I fuck with the same approach I do most things. Slow. With intention. Thoroughly. And, when warranted, the captain delivers a sustained performance.”
Captain. Captain. You absolute son of a bitch.
Filing. Filing. The file is going to need its own subfolder.
“Okay,” I manage, around the rim of my milkshake, “that is going to live in my head, sir. I just want to flag that. That is going to be there, undisturbed, until I die.”
He smirks.
“I like,” I add, after a beat, more honestly than I planned to, “that I do not feel pressured. With any of you. The three of you are very different from each other, and the difference is, on the inside, the most settled I have ever felt. I am not, at any point in the past two weeks, being asked to be more than I am.”
“Good,” he says, simply.
The car pings. The dashboard lights up with the small confirmation chime of a battery that has, in the past nineteen minutes of conversation, finished its work without our supervision.
“Okay,” Jude says, gentle. “Relax. Take your medicine — the new one. Sip the water. We have a few hours’ drive to the destination, and you have been awake since five-thirty on the back of three bad nights, so the appropriate course of action is for you to sleep through the next stretch.”
“Where are we going,” I try, one more time, hopeful.
“Go to sleep, Pinky.”
Damn it. Worth one more shot.
He cracks the door. He gets out to unplug the car.
I watch him through the side window, in his black hoodie and the dark wash jeans and the toothpick-clean line of his back, doing the precise unhurried movements of a man who has, on a Wednesday afternoon at a charging station off the interstate, decided that the next two hundred miles of his life are going to be quiet and unsupervised.
I dig the small pill organizer Rémi packed for me out of the front pouch of my hoodie. I take the first of the new pills. I sip the water.
I sink back into the blanket.
Jude slides back into the driver’s seat. The Tesla, sensing him, brightens its dashboard a half-shade. He glances at me, registers that my eyes are already heavy, and the small uplift at the corner of his mouth does the small honest thing it does only for me now.
“Sleep,” he says, soft.
“Mm.”
The low refrigerator-hum of the electric motor lifts under the cab as he pulls back out of the charging stall.
The amber-bourbon-and-vanilla of him layers itself over the pine-and-snow of Rémi’s borrowed blanket.
The cool late-October sun comes through the passenger window in a long warm strip across my closed eyelids.
The seat heater, sensing my body temperature, ticks itself on one notch.
Safe.
This is what safe feels like.
I do not, for the first time in three nights, fight it.
By mile thirty-seven, with the interstate humming under the wheels and Jude’s hand resting easy at three on the wheel and the warm strip of sun moving slowly across my face, I am fast asleep, feeling safe.