Chapter 24
Divine
~JUDE~
“A WHOLE.”
Iris is, on the gravel path between the car and the front porch of my grandfather’s cabin, holding the strap of her overnight bag with one hand and pointing at the building in front of us with the other, in the small wide-stride, wide-eyed posture of a small woman whose nervous system has, after a three-hour nap and the first dose of her new medication, returned to the population with prejudice.
“ASS.”
“O’Shea.”
“CABIN?”
Pinky.
“Are you,” she demands, swinging her finger around to point at me with the same conviction, “by any chance secretly a billionaire. Have I been living with a Cap who can sponsor cabin weekends out of a personal expense account. Was Jude Kavanagh, eldest of four sisters, the captain who carries a working pantry of canned soup back at the house because he refuses to pay grocery delivery surcharges, in fact a closet billionaire the entire time. Have I been manipulated. Should I have been charging rent.”
The corner of my mouth lifts.
I do not, on principle, suppress it.
“Iris.”
“YES.”
“It is my grandfather’s cabin.”
Her arm slowly lowers. The pointing finger curls back into her palm.
The wide-eyed indignation reorganizes itself, in real time, into something a little quieter, a little more attentive, the small private clocking of a woman who has, in the past nineteen hours of road tripping with a captain, learned how to read the difference between when he is being casually informative and when he is, with measure, opening a door.
“Oh.”
“Oh.”
She follows me up the porch steps with the careful quiet of a guest who has, for the first time since I met her, decided not to mouth back.
The cabin is, as my grandfather built it in the spring of 1971, a low brown timber-frame structure set back forty feet from the small private inlet of the lake, with a long covered porch on the south face and a wide deck wrapping around to the back.
The wood-stain has aged to the soft greyed-out brown of a coastline at low tide.
The chimney is brick, original. The front door is the slab of unpainted cedar my grandfather hand-routed his own initials into on the day he hung it, and that has, in the fifty-four winters since, taken on the slow honest patina of a thing that has been touched by many hands and loved.
Iris stops at the foot of the porch.
She is, in the small angled afternoon light slanting through the trees, looking at the cabin in the precise way I was hoping she would look at the cabin, which is the small reverent look of a person who has just realized she is being shown something the man showing it to her does not, in fact, show very often.
“Captain.” Quiet. “You brought me somewhere that is genuinely serene to you.”
Yes.
Yes. I did. We are not, however, going to make a whole monologue out of it. We are going to absorb the moment, open the door, get the bags inside, and get the woman in front of you a shower.
“I come here,” I tell her, fishing the keychain out of the deep pocket of my jeans, “whenever things get loud enough at the house or in the building that I need to be brought back into alignment. Grandfather offered the keys to me when I made captain my sophomore year. I have used the cabin, on average, twice a season since.”
“And you brought me.”
“I brought you.”
Push down the small embarrassed thing your sternum is doing about that, Kavanagh. You are a captain. Pinky is going to spend the entire forty-eight hours making jokes about it. Brace for the jokes.
“For the record,” I add, swinging open the front door and stepping aside to let her in first, “my grandfather is also aware of you.”
Iris stops, halfway across the threshold, with her overnight bag still in one hand and her eyes the round wide grey of an Omega receiving information she did not prepare for.
“HUH?”
“Mm.”
“HOW?”
“One, there is the small ongoing trending phenomenon on TikTok that has resulted in your face being the home page of the platform’s sports-hashtag stream for two weeks running.
He is, on the platform himself, an unlikely user.
He has the app on the iPad my eldest sister loaded for him at Christmas.
Two, he has remained, in his quietly nosy retirement, deeply involved in the operational politics of college hockey, which means he watches our games, reads our scouting reports, and has, on the matter of his own grandson’s captaincy, opinions.
Three, he is a major sponsor of the Knot-Pucking League Organization.
Which, I will warn you in advance, means that the first question he is going to want to ask you when you eventually meet him is going to be about KPLO development funding. ”
“KPLO.”
“KPLO.”
“Henderson at admin name-dropped it once at the housing desk in passing. I went looking for it on the website. There is, in the public-facing internet, almost nothing about it. Which struck me as, ah. Suspicious.”
“It is not suspicious. It is intentional. The organization keeps a low public profile for strategic reasons that I will gladly walk you through later, but my grandfather is one of the founding sponsors and a quietly significant funder of the merit scholarships that financed, among others, the airplane ticket that brought you to Minnesota.”
I have just delivered a piece of information that is going to land in her in approximately three seconds.
Three.
Two.
One.
Iris’s mouth opens. She does not, in the end, find words. She shuts it again. She tips her head against the door jamb. She closes her eyes for a small breath the way a person closes her eyes when she is filing a thing she will need to come back to.
“Okay,” she whispers.
“Okay,” I agree.
“Genuinely. Wow. We will return to that.”
“We will return to that.”
I move us inside. I drop our bags at the foot of the back-bedroom hallway.
The cabin smells exactly the way the cabin always smells — cedar walls that have, for fifty-four winters, slowly released their resin into every fabric in the building; the cold sweet woodsmoke of a fireplace that has not been lit since I was last here in August; beeswax, because my grandmother, while she was alive, made the candles for every room and the wax of them is, somehow, still in the architecture; the faint warm yeasty trace of bread that has not been baked in this kitchen in nine months and that I can, all the same, smell when I close my eyes; and, very faintly, the cold mineral breath of the lake coming in through the window screens on the east wall.
“Shower,” I tell her, jerking my chin down the back-bedroom hallway. “Guest bathroom is the second door on the right. Towels are stocked, soap is in the niche. I will get a fire going in the meantime. When you are out and in comfortable clothes, we will start the actual weekend.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Pinky. Do not say it like that in this cabin.
She has no idea what she just did. Reset. Reset, captain.
She vanishes down the hallway with her overnight bag. The shower starts a minute later. I crouch at the fireplace, build the small steady tipi of kindling and birch bark I have built in this fireplace four hundred times in my adult life, strike the long match, and watch the flame catch.
Then I go to the small fridge under the cabin’s island counter, dig out one of the local pale ales my grandfather keeps stocked, crack it, and lean against the counter with the cold bottle against my palm to wait for her.
The shower turns off. A pause. The small soft sounds of a woman drying her hair on a towel and pulling on something soft.
Then the bathroom door opens. Bare feet on the cedar floor. The pad-pad-pad of her coming down the hallway.
She turns into the kitchen.
I, for the record, nearly choke on my beer.
Kavanagh.
Kavanagh, that is your old varsity jersey. From the wall of the upstairs guest room. The one I hung as a piece of decor when I was twenty-one and forgot about. Three sizes too big on her. Hitting her at mid-thigh.
Kavanagh. Breathe. You are a grown professional captain. Breathe.
She grins.
The slow guilty mastermind grin of an Omega who has located a hidden item by professional process of elimination and is, at this exact moment, prepared to defend her acquisition in court.
“O’Shea.” Carefully. “I know I hid that.”
“Oh, I know you hid it.” Hand on hip. “You hid it under a frame on the wall of the guest bedroom in your grandfather’s cabin, which is the most quintessentially Captain-Kavanagh hiding place a man has ever produced, and I want you to know that I located it within two minutes of entering the shower.
And it has now been in active contact with my respiratory system for the duration of getting dressed.
So it has my boogers on it. So I have to keep it.
To prevent the transmission of disease. To you.
Specifically. As a public-health measure. ”
I laugh.
Properly. The full-chest laugh I have not done at a roommate joke in considerably longer than my pack would believe if you polled them, and Iris’s grin breaks open at the corners with the delighted reception of a woman who has, for the first time, gotten me there.
“You think,” I tell her, setting the beer down on the counter, “I am, in any way, scared of your boogers, Pinky.”
“I think a clever Omega should not have to be afraid of being challenged on a sound public-health argument.”
“Fair.”
She giggles. Properly giggles. The small bright giggle of a woman who is, against my own best professional judgement, the most beautiful living object in this cabin in his grandfather’s jersey at four-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon, and she pads over to me on her bare feet and stops in my space with the easy comfort of a woman who has, in the past two weeks, decided that my space is a place she is in fact allowed.
She takes the beer out of my hand.