Chapter 25
Knottingley Style
~IRIS~
“You are lucky,” I announce, as the Tesla’s rear tires give up on the last forty feet of the driveway and slide, on the precise blade of ice that has formed under the new four inches of overnight powder, the final unhurried slow-motion arc into the open mouth of the team-house garage, “that we survived this drive, Captain Kavanagh.”
Jude eases off the accelerator. The car settles.
The garage door starts its slow rumbled close behind us.
The dashboard dings, in the small unbothered chime of a vehicle that has, in fact, just landed a six-hour drive home in a snowstorm with the same equanimity it had at the beginning of the trip, and Jude, in the driver’s seat, exhales.
“Dramatic,” he observes.
“Captain. Look outside.”
Outside the small rectangle of the garage window, the back lawn of the team house is unbroken white.
The trees are limned in soft hoar-frost. The driveway is a curve of glittering ice.
The temperature has, since we crossed the state line two hours ago, dropped forty degrees, and the Saturday-morning autumn that surrounded us on the cabin’s back deck has, somewhere in the past eighteen hours, evaporated into the precise binary winter wonderland this state is professionally famous for.
Two days ago Jude and I were drinking craft beer on a cedar deck in autumn light.
This morning we are in a snow globe.
Honestly, the precise weather flex this state’s climate just executed should be illegal.
It happened in stages.
First the lake. Then the long Saturday afternoon, beers in hand at the deck rail, with Jude telling me the actual history of his four sisters and the small flat over a laundromat where they grew up.
Then the moment Sunday morning when I came downstairs in his jersey and a pair of his sleep shorts and found him at the cabin stove making me eggs over easy with the precise unhurried patience of a man who has, in the past, made eggs for four small girls before school in a kitchen with one burner that worked.
Then the long quiet afternoon in the small library at the back of the cabin, where I finished my book — yes, that book — and walked him through the entire ending, scene by scene, while he sat on the leather couch opposite me with his arms folded and the small uplift at the corner of his mouth never quite leaving his face.
I showed him my Pinterest boards. The Hockey Houses with Warm Lights one.
The Apartments I Could Maybe Afford one.
The Bookshelves That Spark Joy one, which is, I will admit, embarrassing in scope.
He looked at every pin. He asked questions.
He pointed at the warm-lights board and asked, mildly, whether I had considered fairy lights on a four-poster as opposed to on a wall, and I registered that this was, for the first time in my adult life, a man being shown the inside of my decorating brain and not asking me to apologize for the contents.
Girlhood. I have never had one. I have always treated my own taste like an apology I was workshopping in private. This weekend I have, on the inside, conducted the first un-apologetic walking tour of my own brain a man has ever been invited to take with me.
File it. Privately. We will return to it later.
“Okay.” Jude kills the ignition. The cab of the Tesla holds the warm amber-bourbon-and-vanilla of him and the layered pine-and-snow of Rémi’s blanket I have been wearing for forty-eight hours and the faint cold-mineral breath of the new outside that just rolled in with us.
“I will grab the bags. You go inside. The mudroom door is the warmest entry. Strip the coat and the boots there.”
“Roger that, Captain.”
I open the door. I climb out. I am wearing, for the record, his hoodie. The pink camisole I packed underneath it is fine. The hoodie, on top, has been on my body since Sunday evening and is now, by ownership convention of the past two weeks, mine.
I cross around the back of the car.
Jude is lifting our overnight bags out of the trunk in the small unhurried captain way he does everything, and I, in a motion that catches both of us slightly sideways, set my hand against the cuff of his sleeve and pull him into a hug.
He pauses, midmotion.
“O’Shea.”
“Captain.”
“What is this for.”
“I did not realize,” I admit, into the line of his collarbone through the soft fabric of his thermal, “until this weekend, that I had not stopped to smell the flowers in approximately six years. You gave me forty-eight hours of stopping to smell the flowers. Thank you for sharing a piece of what is, in fact, important to you with me.”
Jude does not, for one careful beat, move.
Then he sets both bags down on the garage floor, frees both his hands, and folds me properly into him.
The bourbon-and-vanilla of him layers itself over the pine of the borrowed blanket I have left in the car.
The warm honest weight of his arms across my back settles me into the small unspectacular way I have, with three different men this season, started to recognize as the home-arrived feeling.
“I would do it again, Pinky.”
I tip my face up. He bends his face down.
I rise onto the toes of my socked feet on the cold concrete and I kiss him, firm, the slow considered kiss I am, by now, learning is the only kind he knows how to give.
His arms come around my waist. The kiss extends.
There is a small low pleased hum from him into my mouth that I am going to remember at inopportune moments for the rest of the season, and then his hand drops, with a small unrepentant captain confidence, to the curve of my backside, and squeezes once.
“You,” he tells me, against my mouth, “are going to catch a cold in this garage if you keep this up. Get inside the house, like a good Omega, before I have to be irresponsible about it.”
Oh.
“Yes, Alpha,” I murmur.
The corner of his mouth does the captain thing. I press one final small peck to the corner of his lips, pull back, and pad across the garage to the mudroom door with the small dignified hip-swish of an Omega who has, for the record, just been called a good one.
The mudroom is warm. The cedar floor under my socks is heated.
The whole interior of the team house smells, in the way the team house never smells, of woodsmoke from a fire that has been going in the living-room hearth all morning and the warm yeasty something Matteo or Rémi has been baking somewhere on the other side of the building.
I peel out of my coat and my boots and pad through into the main hallway in just the borrowed hoodie and leggings.
The common room is on my left. Three sector-two bodies — Hargrove, Linder, Petrov — are leaned in various postures around the pool table in the middle of a Sunday-morning game.
The break has just been taken. There is a coffee mug on the rail of the table.
Hargrove has his back to me. Linder is bent over the felt, lining up. Petrov is the one who clocks me first.
“Oh,” Petrov says.
Linder straightens. The two of them, in the small simultaneous reading of two roommates who have been seeing me at breakfast for two months, register the precise garment on my body.
“O’Shea,” Hargrove says, turning. “Is that the Cap’s hoodie.”
I lift my middle finger, mildly, and keep walking.
Drinks splutter. Petrov makes the small wounded noise a man makes when something he was actively swallowing has, with no warning, become the wrong choice. Linder, bent over the pool table, has dropped his cue and is openly laughing into the felt.
“WHY,” Hargrove demands at my back, in the wounded-philosopher voice of a man making a serious anthropological inquiry, “DO ALL FEMALES STEAL OUR SHIT.”
“It is a sign of ownership,” Linder calls out, wiping his face. “Them owning us. Not the other way around. I have, in fact, written a paper on this.”
I lift the middle finger over my shoulder one more time, for the public record. “Give your captain a medal of honor, boys.”
“CAPTAIN, IF YOU CAN HEAR ME,” Hargrove yells through the house, “CONFIRMATION REQUEST.”
Jude, from somewhere down the hallway, calls back, easy: “Yes.”
More splutters.
Oh, this house. I love this house.
I follow the warm yeasty trail into the kitchen.
Matteo is at the island in grey sweatpants and the same faded thermal he was wearing the day he ambushed me with popcorn, hair damp at the temples.
Rémi is at the oven in a dark henley with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, sliding what appears to be a small tray of fresh-baked something out of the oven with a tea-towel-wrapped hand.
The kitchen smells of butter and brown sugar and rising bread and the cool dry pine that follows Rémi around like a personal weather system.
“GENTLEMEN.”
Both heads come up.
Matteo’s entire face transforms with the immediate undisguised brightness of a winger who has not laid eyes on his Omega in roughly forty-five hours, and he is across the kitchen and in my space before I have finished registering the cross.
“Pinky.”
“Santo—”
He kisses me. Properly. The unhurried winger kiss of a man who has been waiting forty-five hours to do exactly this, and his hands come up to cradle my jaw with the small possessive Italian deftness I have learned is his preferred grip.
“You smell nice,” he murmurs against my mouth, dropping a kiss to the corner of my lips, a second down to my jaw, a third to the small warm spot just under my ear where my scent gland is.
I groan.
“Santori. Do not, do not, do not tease me before I have greeted Rémi.”
“Fine. Reluctantly.”
He lets me go. He slaps my ass on the way out of my space, light and unrepentant, and announces, to the rest of the kitchen, “I claim cuddle time tonight. Public record.”
Rémi, at the oven, sets the tray down. He does not look up immediately. “I did the actual work this weekend, Santori. You get the cuddle time. That is bullshit.”