Chapter 26
Cruising Altitude
~RéMI~
The gate agent scans my boarding pass with the small unbothered beep of a machine doing the small unbothered job a machine does eight hundred times a day.
I am, as of this scan, professionally about to die.
Composed face. Composed face. The captain three bodies back is reading you right now. Do not.
My palms are sweating against the strap of my carry-on.
I have, in the past ninety minutes, made four professionally unnecessary visits to the small terminal-side bathroom.
I have, in the past forty-five minutes, swallowed the small white anxiety pill the team physician prescribed me at the start of my freshman year, and it has, so far, returned approximately fifteen percent of the calm it is supposed to deliver.
The Trois-Rivières-bred Catholic upbringing my mother gifted me at age six is, somewhere on the back of my tongue, beginning to draft the small private Hail Mary I will, against the strict atheist convictions of my adult life, in fact say silently to myself the moment the wheels leave the ground.
The boarding tunnel smells of jet fuel and industrial floor wax and the small chemical-citrus of the airline’s gate-side hand sanitizer.
Breathe. Through the nose. Out through the nose. One foot. The next foot. You have done this fifty-three times in your adult life. The plane is, mechanically, a tube. The tube is, statistically, the safest tube on earth.
The tube is at thirty-five thousand feet, Rémi.
Shut up.
A small warm hand slides into mine.
I stop, mid-aisle, the soft press of the small fingers between mine the precise grip of a small person who has decided, with no prior consultation, that the man whose hand she has just taken is in fact her property for the next four hours.
I look down.
Iris is squinting up at me from approximately my collarbone, her head tilted at the precise small angle of a goalie reading an unfamiliar shooter’s shoulder, and her free hand is curled around the strap of her own carry-on.
Her hair is in two soft pigtail braids that fall against the front of my dark-grey sweater — mine, by acquisition, three sizes too big on her, draping at the wrists, hanging halfway down her thighs over the small precise outline of a pair of new black lululemon tights she has, in the past four days, been wearing with such evident pleasure that Matteo has made me give him a status update on her wardrobe inventory twice.
Pigtails.
She is in pigtails on the way to a Friday road game. The captain three bodies back is not going to survive it.
Also, professionally, the week alone in her new nest has made the precise structural difference I drew on the napkin the night I started the cedar work.
Two weeks ago she was running a low-grade fever on the bench.
Today she is, by Coach Declan’s own private metrics, the most rested goalie in the building.
Nobody outside this house, except admin and Dr. Halpern, knows what we built in the upstairs hallway.
We agreed, the three of us, that the small private architecture would remain small and private, because the small private architecture is, structurally, hers.
Even Boudicca — admin signed off on the kitten with prejudice last Tuesday, on the grounds that the kitten was found on campus property and therefore campus property’s problem — is, this weekend, staying at Dr. Halpern’s house under temporary supervision, because none of us was prepared to leave a small grey unsupervised dictator inside the team house for three days unattended.
“Why,” Iris says, mildly, “did you stop, defenseman.”
“Hm.”
“You look,” she observes, narrowing her eyes, “kinda pale.”
“Mm.”
“Rémi.”
“Iris.”
She squeezes my hand. The squeeze is, for the small width of the hand doing the squeezing, surprisingly authoritative.
“You,” she says, gently, “do not like flying.”
Identified. Filed. Inventoried.
“No,” I admit, quietly, into the airspace between us. “I do not.”
Her face, in the small overhead light of the boarding tunnel, does the precise inverse of what every adult Alpha in the small private chamber of my chest has been doing on every flight of my career, which is to soften.
“Okay,” she announces, with the small bright Florence-Nightingale-in-pigtail-braids efficiency of a small Omega receiving a mission.
“Here is the plan. You will sit next to me. I will hold your hand for the entire flight. You can squeeze it whenever a noise concerns you. I will narrate any noises whose source I personally understand. I will, in fact, sing to you if you need it. I do not sing well. That is not the point. Are we agreed.”
“We are agreed.”
Oh, Iris.
She tugs me, the small unhurried tug of an Omega assuming professional custody of an Alpha, the rest of the way down the tunnel.
Her ponytail-braids bounce against my chest as she walks.
The frosted-strawberry of her hair is right at my sternum, layered now with the faint cedar of my own sweater off her, and somewhere on the inside of my chest the small lit panel of anxiety lights drops, on its own, three notches.
How.
How does an Omega the size of one of my legs manage that mechanic.
“For the record,” she continues, brightly, “I am not, in fact, afraid of flying. I love it. I have, in the small private course of my whole life, basically never been allowed to travel, so any opportunity to put my body inside a metal tube and be hurled at five hundred miles an hour at a piece of geography I have only ever seen in pictures registers, in my own personal joy ledger, as a five-star experience. The probability of mechanical failure is, statistically, lower than the probability of being t-boned by a distracted driver on the way to a downtown grocery run. I tell myself that fact every time I board. I also pop a Gravol so I do not, ah, embarrass myself in the small chemical washroom of any economy flight, because economy washrooms are, by the laws of cubic feet, an act of war on the human dignity, and I cannot, on a goalie’s budget, afford the upgrade. Economy will, in the end, do.”
I, against the small lit panel of my own anxiety, do the millimeter thing at the corner of my mouth.
Pinky.
We hit the small turn in the cabin where the aisle splits left and right. Iris, charmingly oblivious, starts to tug us right.
I redirect us, gently, to the left.
She stops.
She looks at the left aisle. She looks at me. Her brow gathers into the small confused furrow of a small Omega who has, in the past forty-five days, learned that her assumptions about how her life works are, with increasing frequency, professionally wrong.
“Defenseman.”
“Mm.”
“Why are you taking me left.”
“Team policy. Elite-level senior travel for the conference is, by the bylaws of the league, first class. The roster, on every official outbound flight, sits in front. You, on this particular outbound flight, are, mechanically, on the roster. Therefore, you sit in front. Therefore, also, the washroom you are concerned about is, on the upgraded cabin, the wide one.”
Iris’s entire face goes still.
Then her mouth opens. The grey of her eyes widens.
The small confident captain-Omega posture she has been maintaining for the past four days at a Friday-game intensity flickers, very briefly, into the small wide-eyed soft delighted thing she does when a small unsuspected piece of luxury has, against her own internal accounting, just become available to her.
“No,” she breathes. “Fuckin’. Way.”
“Fuckin’. Way. Also.”
“Rémi.”
“Yes, Iris.”
“Correction on the previous monologue. Economy is not, in fact, going to do today.”
“It is not. There is also, structurally, a second piece of news. You are the only Omega on this manifest. The cabin operates a designation-specific lavatory at the front of first class. Which means, by elimination, the wide one is, for the entirety of the flight, yours alone.”
She is, on the inside, vibrating.
“Okay,” Iris whispers, in a small private register that is almost more for the universe than for me.
“I am, statistically, going to lose my mind today. I am going to write a small private gratitude essay about the wide one. Possibly two essays. The captain three rows back is going to think I have been kidnapped by joy.”
“Iris.”
“Rémi.”
“It is a washroom.”
“It is, defenseman,” Iris informs me, with the dead-serious conviction of a small Omega correcting a factual error, “a washroom in which I will, for once in my adult life, not have to perform the small undignified physical contortion of a person trying to wash their hands without elbowing the wall. It is a milestone. We are going to honor the milestone with the proper amount of reverence. I will not, in fact, be taking notes from you on the cubic-foot tolerances of small petite Omegas, sir, with all due respect to your considerable height. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.”
My anxiety panel, somewhere on the inside, drops another four notches.
I steer us to row two. Iris into the window seat, me into the aisle.
Matteo and Jude slide into the row behind us with the small unhurried professional gait of two roster members who have, between them, taken approximately four hundred of these flights and are, on the boarding-process front, exactly as bored as I am tense.