Chapter 25 #2
“Work?” I tilt my head, in the small genuine confusion of a woman who has been told nothing.
They both glance at me. The kind of glance that, on a married couple, would be a small telegraphic something between them. Rémi just shrugs.
“What work, Rémi.”
“Come here, Iris.”
I, against every adult instinct I have ever cultivated as a person who does not skip, skip across the kitchen to him.
My socked feet do the precise giddy little half-skip half-hop of a small Omega who has, on the back of forty-eight hours of being cherished, forgotten how to be self-conscious in front of three men.
I hug Rémi from the front. Properly. Both arms around his waist, my cheek against his chest, the pine-and-snow of him layering itself over the small warm baked-bread of the kitchen.
“Welcome home, Iris.”
“Thank you, defenseman.”
He tips his head down. I tip mine up. The kiss is, on his part, soft — a careful unhurried defensive lay of his mouth against mine in the small low-key Rémi register he does everything else in.
I rise onto my tiptoes. I kiss him longer.
I let the small initiative of the angle press the next beat of the kiss into him, and Rémi, against the line of his entire established character, groans.
Quiet. Half-suppressed. The kind of small unguarded sound a defenseman produces when an Omega has, in his own kitchen at noon on a Sunday, chosen to deepen a kiss without his explicit prompting, and his hand comes up to the curve of my hip and rests there with the precise control of a man who has decided, against the rest of the data, to keep this respectable.
Oh.
Filing. The folder is, frankly, in crisis.
“You two cannot do that in this kitchen unless I am invited to participate,” Matteo announces from behind me, in the cheerful pitch of a winger choosing to escalate, “and I would like to formally put my name on the list of available participants for future iterations.”
I snicker into Rémi’s mouth.
Rémi breaks the kiss with the visible reluctance of a man overriding a strong personal preference, and presses his forehead, briefly, against the crown of my head. “Go upstairs, Iris. Get comfortable. We will tell you the rest after.”
“After what?”
“After you go upstairs.”
I climb the back stairs.
And I stop, three steps in, because the upstairs hallway is not, in any structural way, the upstairs hallway I left on Saturday morning.
The whole layout has been opened. The narrow run-down corridor with the wood-panelled wallpaper from 1986 has been stripped, refinished, and repainted a soft creamed-white.
The hardwood floor has been refinished. Two new wall sconces in brushed brass have been installed.
The smell on the air is fresh paint, sawdust, beeswax, and the very clean pine I now know is Rémi’s personal weather system, baked into the lumber of the construction.
And at the far end of the corridor, where the door of my converted utility-closet bedroom used to be, there is, instead, a wide new door painted a soft pale rose-pink with a hand-carved teal-and-pink wreath at its center, woven from cursive wooden letters that spell the name IRIS.
No.
No, no, no.
I walk down the hallway with my hand against the wall the way a person walks down a hallway in a dream.
I close my fingers around the brass knob.
I push the door open.
Inside.
The room is enormous. Twice the size of the storage closet that lived here on Saturday.
They have, somehow, knocked through a wall.
There is a four-poster bed in the centre of the room, painted soft cream, with a canopy of sheer pale-pink curtains drawn back at the corners and looped with twine.
Fairy lights have been threaded along the entire architecture of the canopy in the precise way I sketched on the Pinterest board I showed Jude yesterday.
The bedding is white linen with a soft pink throw at the foot.
On the wall opposite, a bookshelf has been built into the studs from floor to ceiling.
Six shelves of new books — my Goodreads Tbr.
Every cozy romance I have ever screenshotted and not been able to afford.
Some arranged by spine color in a gradient.
Some face-out, covers presented. Small ceramic pots between them holding tiny succulents.
On the right wall, a built-in writing desk with a small brass lamp and a stack of notebooks.
And in the corner, framed by two tall windows catching the snow-light off the lawn in a long soft-white wash, a small low platform built into the floor, padded with approximately six layers of cream and pink knitted throws and weighted blankets and the softest fabric a defenseman with a wallet has been able to source.
Pillows. Two small lamps with amber bulbs.
Built-in shelves holding tea kettles, candles, lavender bundles, and a stack of journals.
There is a small wooden sign on a brass hook hanging at the top.
Iris’s Cozy Nest.
Oh.
Oh, you motherfuckers.
And then.
Meow.
Small. From the precise vicinity of my own ankle.
I look down. There is, sitting on the cedar floor at my feet, a kitten. Maybe eight weeks old. A very small smoke-grey tabby with the round serious eyes of a predator who has, for the moment, chosen to ally herself with the human nearest the door. Her ears flick. Her tail, slowly, taps the floor.
She rises. She rubs the side of her tiny head against the bone of my ankle.
Sweet baby Jesus.
I lower into a crouch with the slow careful descent of a woman who is afraid the small creature on her floor is going to dematerialize.
I scoop her up. She fits in the palm of one hand.
She is, against my palm, ridiculously warm and small and unimpressed, and her tiny weight rolls itself into the curve of my hand with the small confident relax of a creature who has decided this is, in fact, her person.
“What,” I whisper, “in the cute heavens did you appear from.”
“To be clear,” Matteo says from the doorway, “the kitten was not on the original list of surprises.”
I turn. He is leaning in the doorway with Rémi behind him propping a shoulder against the hallway wall, and Jude has just crested the back stairs with his arms crossed across his chest and the small captain-look of a man surveying a project he was, in fact, the distraction half of.
“SOMEONE,” Matteo continues, accusingly, jerking a thumb back at Rémi, “could not leave the kitten in the wild when he stumbled upon her in the woods Saturday afternoon, an hour after you two left the cabin, while he was, and I quote, cutting cedar for the nest platform.”
“You found,” Jude addresses Rémi, with the level-flat of a captain trying very hard to register zero opinions, “a fucking kitten.”
Rémi shrugs. “I was minding my business, building our Omega’s empire. The kitten decided I was a jungle gym. She climbed me. I was, frankly, structurally outmaneuvered.”
“Rémi.” Jude. “What is it with you and animals. This is the third time. You found your dog at home in a ditch behind a gas station. Your cat let himself into your mother’s house. You are an animal magnet. I do not understand the mechanic.”
“I am a calming presence.”
“You are an animal magnet.”
“Same thing.”
I look down at the kitten in my hands.
My eyes, traitor that they are, do the warm precise thing they have been doing on and off for forty-eight hours, and a small honest tear breaks loose without my permission and lands, with the small undignified plop of a Saturday morning in the cabin, on the cedar floor between my socks.
Do not.
Do not, in fact, cry in front of three Alphas on a Sunday morning over a kitten and an interior decorating project.
Too late.
“You guys,” I whisper. “You seriously did all of this. For someone like me.”
Three heads come up.
“Iris.” Jude’s voice has gone careful.
“You deserve to be spoiled, Pinky,” Matteo says, with the precise unbothered conviction of a man stating a small obvious fact. “That is, frankly, an extremely easy conclusion to reach about you. None of us is sweating about it.”
“It was not difficult, Iris,” Rémi adds, mildly. “It simply needed the time. We had the time, the labour, and the wallet. The only missing variable was you out of the house long enough for the saws to get loud.”
Matteo crosses the room. He hooks one finger under my chin, lifts it, and presses a kiss against the corner of my mouth. “Do you like it.”
“I love it.”
“Okay. For the public record — Rémi did all the actual carpentry. Bob the Builder of this house is one hundred percent his department. My contribution was the fashion eye in the decorating phase. Curtains, throw colours, the brass sconces. I take full credit for the brass sconces.”
“Noted.”
The kitten, on my palm, decides the conversation is too long for her budget. She climbs Matteo. Right up the front of his thermal. She lodges herself on his shoulder, tucks her tail around her front paws, and meows once, imperiously.
“Oh,” Matteo says, delighted. “You.”
Rémi crosses in. The kitten, having clocked the second tall man, leaves Matteo’s shoulder for Rémi’s the way a small unimpressed sovereign moves between thrones. She settles on Rémi’s shoulder. She meows once at me.
“She seems pleased with the housing arrangement,” Rémi observes. “If you love the kitten, Iris, she is yours to name.”
My entire face lights up. I sniff. I lift one finger.
“I,” I announce, with full theatrical weight, “will name her something that screams world domination.”
“No,” the three of them say in unison.
“You gave me the reins. I will name her whatever I like.”
I crouch. I scoop the kitten back off Rémi’s shoulder.
I lift her, both hands, up over my head in the precise Lion-King-circle-of-life elevation I have, in this calendar year, witnessed precisely zero other adult humans perform in real life.
The kitten goes limp the way kittens go limp when they have been lifted by an Omega who is making a decision.
“Boudicca, daughter of the Iceni, queen of the North Wind, scourge of any winger who dares chirp her mother in a practice setting. I name thee.”
They stare.
“She thinks,” Matteo says, very quietly, to the room, “this is the Lion King.”
“You should write a chant in old Iceni Celtic,” Rémi notes, the millimeter smile making its full appearance, “that translates roughly to this is a kitten. Disney got sued for the original. We can get sued for the homage. Round trip.”
“Wait.” I lower the kitten. “WHAT lawsuit.”
“Some comedian,” Jude says, with the dry recitation of a man who has, in fact, been following the case, “went on a podcast and pointed out that the Zulu chant at the top of Circle of Life translates, in English, to the precise four-word sentence here comes a lion. The original songwriter sued him for damaging the song’s mystique. Settlement pending.”
“Oh my God,” I whisper. “THAT IS PLAYING DIRTY.”
“Mm,” the three of them agree, in chorus.
“Okay.” Rémi puts one hand on my shoulder.
“Iris. The kitten is yours. The room is yours. The nest is yours. We have to check with Coach Declan and the front office about the campus pet policy, because none of us actually know whether we are allowed to keep an animal in a team house. Jude and Matteo will handle that this afternoon. I will stay back and make sure neither of you burns down the kitchen while you break the room in.”
“Yes, Defenseman.”
I cross to him. I hug him properly. He bends his head and presses a kiss to the crown of mine. The kitten, sandwiched between us, makes a small affronted noise.
I cross to Matteo next. He scoops me into a full bear-hug that lifts me, briefly, three inches off the floor and sets me back down.
Then I cross to Jude.
“You,” I tell him, fisting the front of his thermal in one hand and the small heated outrage of a betrayed houseguest in the other, “are a sneaky snake, Captain Kavanagh. The cabin. The lake. The Pinterest interrogation. The whole production. Forty-eight hours of distraction. I should sue.”
“Sneaky,” he agrees, mild. “Yes. Never going to betray you, however. There is a difference.”
He drops a kiss on my forehead. I let him.
The three of them peel out. The two on errand-duty head down the back stairs with the small unhurried captain-and-winger stride of men running a Sunday-afternoon clerical operation. Rémi, on his way down, throws one final look back at me from the doorway.
“And Iris.”
“Mm.”
“Welcome home. Go relax. Enjoy your new room. Enjoy your nest.”
He shuts the door, gentle.
I am alone in the room with Boudicca, daughter of the Iceni, on my shoulder, the soft afternoon snow-light from the two windows washing the cedar floor in a long pale slant, and the small unmistakable pine-and-cream-paint-and-beeswax of the new room around me.
I lower myself onto the edge of the four-poster bed.
I look around at the fairy lights, the bookshelf, the cozy nest in the corner with my name on it.
I let it land. I let it land the way I have been refusing to let things land at me for the past ten years — not the cataloguing landing, not the filing landing, not the registered-but-not-engaged-with landing.
The honest landing.
Maybe.
Maybe I am, against every careful private precaution I have taken with myself for ten years, allowed to dare to dream of a happily ever after.
Knottingley style.