Chapter 24 #2
She tips her head back. She takes a long, deliberate, throat-bobbing pull of it, holds it on her tongue for the brief amused beat of a woman tasting craft beer for the first time in a while, swallows, and hands the bottle back to me with the small triumphant smirk of a woman who has just won a bet she had not, until thirty seconds ago, formally entered.
“No,” she says, easily, “but I like to test such a theory.”
Oh.
Oh, Captain. The captain accepts.
I keep my eyes on hers. I lift the bottle. I tip it back and swig the rest of it in one slow steady pull, the way the man who taught me how to drink a beer taught me how to drink a beer, without breaking eye contact with her once.
“I,” I tell her, lowering the empty bottle, “love a good challenge.”
“So do I,” she purrs. “But, fair warning, sir. I am, frankly, very good at beer pong. And I have, against every assumption a man might make based on my body weight, an extremely high tolerance. Do not, on a wet Wednesday at your grandfather’s cabin, tempt me into something you are going to regret.”
“O’Shea.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“You have, with that one sentence, tempted me into approximately four things I am professionally going to ignore for the moment, and one I am going to act on.”
“Oh?”
“Come.”
I reach into the fridge, pull out two more bottles, and walk her through the kitchen toward the back of the cabin.
I open the slider to the back deck and step aside.
And I watch her see it for the first time.
The deck wraps around the back of the cabin in a long cedar arc, twelve feet deep, with three Adirondack chairs my grandfather built in 1976 lined up along the rail.
The cabin sits on a small private inlet of the lake, ringed by mature pine and the soft red-gold of October birch, the water glass-still at this time of day, the small clear ripples around the dock the precise lazy ripples a lake makes when the only thing in it is the lake.
The sun, already low, throws a long warm strip of copper across the surface and catches in the tops of the trees on the far shore in a way that I have, in the eleven years I have been coming here, never gotten over.
Iris stops at the rail.
Her bare feet on the cedar planking. The borrowed jersey moving against the backs of her thighs in the small evening breeze.
Her hair, still damp from the shower, lifting at the temples.
Her grey eyes the round wide grey of an Omega who has just been handed a thing the man handing it to her has been quietly carrying for himself.
“Oh,” she whispers.
Pinky.
I cross to her. I crack both bottles against the rail with the small expert flick of a man who has been opening beers without an opener since he was sixteen. I hand her hers. She takes it, eyes still on the water.
We clink.
“To the cabin.”
“To the cabin.”
She sips. I sip. The cold malt of the local pale ale lays itself over the warm honest air of the deck, the soft pine-and-water of the inlet, the burnt-amber of my own scent in the rim of the bottle.
“Okay.” She tips her chin at me. “KPLO. Tell me everything. Why is it underground? What does it actually do? Why is your grandfather paying for plane tickets for small Yorkshire goalies?”
“Operationally,” I begin, leaning my forearms on the deck rail, “the Knot-Pucking League Organization was founded in 1987 by a group of older Alphas, my grandfather included, who had been quietly horrified by the fact that the country’s most lucrative organized sport had, structurally, no infrastructure for Omegas.
Not at the youth level, not at the collegiate level, certainly not at the professional.
They put up the founding capital, built a private merit-scholarship program, and have, for thirty-eight years, been quietly identifying Omega athletes with the talent ceiling to break through, and funding the airfare and tuition required to put them inside the buildings that did not, on paper, want them. ”
“Which is why,” Iris says, slowly, “it does not advertise.”
“Which is why it does not advertise. Loud advertising would draw the kind of administrative pushback that would shut down the funding channels. Quiet operations let the scholarships go where they need to go without the institutional friction of a press release.”
She is quiet for a beat. The sun has dropped another notch. The strip of copper on the lake has lengthened.
“Not a lot of Alphas,” she says, finally, “want to actually help Omegas.”
“Mm.” I take a sip. “I understand the data point. I have been on the receiving end of locker-room conversation in this country for fifteen years. I will, however, say this. That is all ego, O’Shea.
A true man is not threatened by an Omega.
A true man is threatened by his own lack.
And if you do not, in the small inner ledger, lack, you are simply not in a position to be threatened. ”
She turns her head.
She looks at me for a long unhurried beat over the rim of the beer bottle.
And then she smiles.
It is, by my professional standards, the most beautiful single facial expression I have personally been on the receiving end of in my adult life.
It is not the giddy traitor smile she does when Matteo is being Matteo.
It is not the small careful smirk she does for me in kitchens.
It is the rare, fully unguarded, lake-light smile of an Omega who has just been told, on the record, on a back deck of a cabin she had no business being inside, that the man saying it actually means it.
My hand is in my pocket before I have authorized the motion.
“Stay still.”
“Hm?”
“Iris. Stay still for one second.”
I pull out my phone. I open the camera. I tap.
The shutter sound clicks once. The phone catches her, leaned at the deck rail in my old varsity jersey with the lake behind her and the long copper light of October on her cheekbones, smiling the way she has just smiled, with her thumb wrapped around the neck of the bottle and her grey eyes the precise grey of the lake.
I lower the phone.
She blushes.
“Did I look,” she asks, scrunching her nose, “good?”
“O’Shea.”
“Yes.”
“You looked divine.”
Divine. I said the word out loud. We are not, under any circumstances, going to be unsaying it.
She turns the colour of her own hair, deeply, and looks down at the deck, and then back up at me from under her lashes in the small genuinely-unbalanced look of a woman who is not, in fact, very practiced at receiving direct praise.
“Oh.”
“If I had not, in fact, decided in seventh grade to be a competitively horrible person about hockey,” I add, mildly, looking back out at the lake, “I would, professionally, have gone into photography. I came to that conclusion at fifteen, decided it was not financially viable for my family, and put the camera in a drawer. I do not, generally, mention it.”
Iris’s eyebrows lift.
“Captain.”
“Mm.”
“You are full of surprises this weekend.”
“O’Shea, you have known me eight weeks.”
“Eight weeks is, in the right hands, a lifetime.”
She tips her bottle. Sips. Considers the lake.
“If,” she says, after a beat, “I had not, in fact, decided in fourth grade to be a competitively horrible person about hockey, I would have been an author.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Mm. Cozy romance. Specifically, badass Omegas willing to bravely dive out of heartbreak, dire circumstances, dramatic small-town inheritance disputes, the occasional dragon, and — the genre staple I personally hold near and dear — the messy emotional aftermath of a divorce.”
“Divorce.”
“Divorce. There is, sir, a thriving market in the cozy-divorce-Omega corner of contemporary romance, and I will fight any man who tries to dismiss it. The world needs stories about women who, having survived the small private catastrophe of a marriage going under, get on a train, move to a small village, open a bakery, find an actual pack of competent Alphas, fall stupidly in love by chapter twelve, and get the version of the ending the previous chapter denied them.”
“Your passion is, in fact, showing.”
“It is. I will not apologize.”
“Do not.”
We stand at the rail. We sip. The sun drops another notch and the strip of copper on the lake compresses into a small bright line on the far edge. The first chill of evening rolls in off the water, and Iris, against the cedar rail, takes a small involuntary half-shiver.
She does not, however, ask me for my jacket.
She simply leans into my side.
The five-degree concession of a woman who has decided that the captain at her elbow is the warmest object in the immediate radius, and that she is, in fact, allowed to use him for the function.
Her shoulder fits under mine. Her temple comes to rest just at the seam of my upper arm.
The frosted-strawberry of her hair rises into my shoulder.
The borrowed jersey of mine on her body presses against the line of my own ribs, the amber-bourbon and the strawberry mixed at the small radius where she has tucked herself in against me.
I shift my arm. I drop it, slow, around her shoulders. I pull her in.
She does not, in any visible way, react. Her cheek simply settles further into my chest. Her hand, the one not holding the bottle, comes up and rests, light, against the front of my shirt. Her breath evens.
The lake, in front of us, goes on being the lake.
Captain.
Captain. Steady. Internal monologue. Maintain.
It is not, in fact, going to maintain.
I have, in the eight weeks I have known Iris O’Shea, been doing the long quiet patient captain math — the same captain math I have been doing on this woman since the morning Matteo first walked into my kitchen and said the word Pinky out loud, the same captain math I was doing yesterday in a kitchen over a pot of my grandfather’s stew, the same captain math I was doing this morning at the wheel of a Tesla with a sausage in a bun and the small private chamber of my chest already, frankly, gone.
I am, on the back deck of my grandfather’s cabin, in the long copper October light, with a pink-haired Omega in my old varsity jersey tucked under my arm and her cheek against the line of my sternum, prepared to admit the math to the only person in the small private chamber of my own chest who needs to hear it.
You are not in fact still falling for her, Kavanagh.
You are, at this point, simply doing it.
I tip my head, gentle, against the crown of her hair. I let the small honest exhale out into the cool October air over the lake, and I let myself, for one unsupervised forty-eight-hour cabin window, simply have it.
I am, against every patient captain instinct I have trained into myself for fifteen years, really starting to fall hard for Iris O’Shea.