20. Everett
“Heads up,” Priya says without even a hello. I stop where I’m standing, my phone to my ear with the fridge door open and a carton of milk in my hand.
“Go on.”
“Callahan came to the office this morning. He asked for your address.”
I put the milk down on the counter. My first instinct is to ask why. I know why.
He didn’t reply to the email. It was the first thing I checked when I woke up this morning. Is he going to do it the old-fashioned way and send me a letter?
Then, of course, he could be coming here, but that’s unlikely. It’s a continent away and the season is still going. He can’t leave the country now.
“I didn’t give it to him,” Priya continues. There’s a pause. I hear her take a breath. “He told me why he wanted it.”
The kitchen is very quiet. I feel a flush of guilt.
She heard it from him and not from me. I’ve known her for years.
She’s probably the one person I am closest to, although I’m not sure what that says about me.
I don’t really have other friends. I spend my life working.
It’s what I’ve always found easiest. Priya might be the closest thing I have to a best friend, but I’m under no illusions that I’m not the closest person to her.
She’s a workaholic, but she still has a family and friends.
Family and friends whom I got her to leave behind so she could take over the running of the team because I was too scared to stay.
I owe her.
“Sorry for not telling you yet, Priya. I’ve only just confirmed it and—” Why not? Let’s go for full honesty. “I’m still reeling.”
“It’s okay, Everett. I understand. I really do.
I’d hate to be an omega. Life really kicks you in the balls.
And don’t get me started on alphas and all their shit.
Take your time with whatever you need. Happy to help with whatever you need.
” She pauses. “Unfortunately, what you need to do is work out what you are going to do with Callahan when he arrives.”
So… not a letter.
“He’s not coming here?”
“Pretty sure of it. He’s said and I quote, ‘I’ll walk every damned street in that city to find him if I have to.’”
My stomach flips over. Again.
But Priya doesn’t know that. She continues, oblivious.
“And Belanger has just forwarded me a leave request. And the word ‘request’ there is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Apparently, he just told Belanger he was taking off. No actual request. The reason is a family emergency. There’s a 9:05 direct flight tonight. I suspect he’ll be on it.”
I lean against the counter. My stomach turns over, and it isn’t the baby. I don’t know what to say.
Then, because Priya has never in her life left a loose end: “Do you want me to arrange anything at this end? A hotel for him?”
“No. I’ll deal with it.”
“Okay, and Everett?”
“Yeah?”
“You need anything, just ask.”
The tired part of me, the one that doesn’t like letting people in, is tempted to reply with, “That’s what I pay you for,” but that’s not what she means and we both know it.
“Thanks, Priya. I appreciate that.”
I also want to ask her what he looked like. I don’t. I say goodbye and put the phone face down on the counter and stand there for far too long staring into space.
The obvious thing to do is nothing.
He doesn’t have my address. All he has, apparently, is a great deal of confidence.
He won’t find me and he can’t stay forever. Sooner or later, he’ll give up and go home.
That’ll be the easiest for me.
It’s also the most cowardly, but I’m not sure what to do. I don’t want to see him.
Actually, that’s a dirty lie. I do want to see him. I don’t want to want to see him.
The baby means that I’ve been given no real choice. For better or worse, Callahan is my child’s father and I’m going to have to deal with that.
I don’t always go into the office, but today it feels like a good idea. Having people around and inane office chatter seems like it’ll distract me from the man who is on his way now toward me.
It doesn’t. Instead, I’m the one who’s distracted. It’s a complete waste of a day and I get barely anything done.
I go home instead, run a bath and think about Brody Callahan wheeling his suitcase through the crowds at Heathrow, sniffing the air like a bloodhound.
When I get out, I dry off and pull on a T-shirt that sits snugger across the middle than it used to. I lie in bed and run my hands over the curve of my belly.
I never imagined getting pregnant. I know a lot of omegas dream of it, but I never have.
It’s not that I’m against having children. Somehow, it’s simply not something that I’ve ever thought about.
I think about it now. I don’t know if it’s hormones or something else, but I want this one. Something inside me is so fiercely protective of it that I can’t stand it.
I’m not putting my baby through the endless cycle of desperate approval and rejections that my father put me through.
It’s not going to happen. And I don’t care about its designation. I’ll love him or her, whether they’re alpha, omega or beta.
At half past one I’m still awake.
At two I get up and stand on the terrace in the cold with my phone in my hand. The river is black. A single barge goes down on the tide with one lamp lit at the stern.
Nine-oh-five his time is five past two here. He is either in the air or about to be.
I open messages on my phone. His number is still saved under Callahan, which is how the Bureau’s app entered it and how I never bothered to change it.
There’s nothing in the message thread. We spent two weeks in the same house and never sent each other a single message.
I type out my address. Street, number, the bit about the buzzer being the top button and the top floor being six flights. I delete the part about the flights.
Then I stand there like an idiot with my thumb over the send button while the barge slides out of sight under the bridge.
I send it.
It stays on one tick. Sent, not delivered.
I don’t think he’s blocked me. Not if he’s coming all the way here.
He’s probably on the plane. His phone will be on flight mode, somewhere over the Atlantic.
I go back inside and get into bed and put the phone on the nightstand, screen up, and lie there looking at it.
Somewhere over the dark ocean, Brody Callahan is coming to London to find me, and I have just made it easier for him, and I don’t know if I did that because it was sensible or because I wanted to.
At six the sky goes from black to charcoal. I check the phone.
One tick.
I get up and make myself a cup of peppermint tea and take it back to bed with me.
At twenty past seven I check again.
Two ticks.
Delivered. Not read yet. He’s landed, then. Heathrow, wheels down, phone back on, my address arriving on his screen while he’s still in his seat waiting for the doors.
I put the tea down. My hands are not steady, which is ridiculous. He is a man in an airport. He is not in my flat. He is thirty miles away and there is an entire city between us.
At quarter to eight the ticks go blue.
Read.
I stand there and wait for something else to happen. Nothing does. He’s read it.
Ten minutes go by. I’m going to have to decide what to wear and just at a time when half my clothes are suddenly far too tight.
There is no chance I am going to work today. I am suddenly far more nervous than I have any right to be.
It’s stupid. I know Callahan. Intimately. And I made a decision about him.
I don’t want him or anything he stands for.
At eight the phone goes.
I’ll arrive around 11. I think. Still need to work out how the Tube works and how long it takes.
That’s it. Nothing else. No hello. Not one word about anything.
I nearly text back. Piccadilly line, change at Green Park. I get as far as the second word.
I don’t send it. If I start telling him which line to take, I don’t know what I’ll be telling him next.
I go around the flat like someone is coming to value it.
It’s a stupid thing to do and I do it anyway.
Cushions. The stack of files on the dining table.
I put the pregnancy test in the bathroom bin, wrapped in tissue, and then I take it out again and put it in the kitchen bin under the tea bags, because the bathroom bin is the first place anyone would look.
Then I stand in the middle of the living room and hear myself and stop.
He’s not going to look in the bins. He’s going to look at me.
I have lived here nine years. I bought this flat with the first real money I ever made, and I bought it for the terrace and the light and the fact that there is nothing in it, not one single thing, that has anything to do with ice or sticks or my father.
No photographs. No jerseys. When the sports package went on the television, I put it under a profile called Guest, as if that made a difference.
This flat is the one place on earth that hockey never got into.
In three hours the biggest hockey player I have ever seen is going to walk up my stairs.
I keep thinking of him wheeling a case along the platform at Green Park with a hundred commuters flowing round him.
He’ll be too big for the carriage door. He’ll have to duck.
No one is going to recognize him. Probably.
Professional hockey isn’t a thing here like it is back home.
He’s nobody here. In this city he’s just a big American with a beat-up face and no idea where he’s going.
He is walking into my city, my flat, my hockey-free life.
And I should be at work. It’s a damned Tuesday. I’ve never taken a Tuesday off in my life, not unless it was heat-related and only then because no omega on this planet would ever go to work when they’re in heat.
Home on a Tuesday. That’s my life gone mad already.
I stop with a cushion in my hands.
Tuesday.
Tuesday isn’t just a thing for me. This Tuesday is an important one. Today is an important one.
Barons at home to the Marauders. Cade Dorn’s first game back in that building since he put the Swedish boy on a stretcher.
The face-off is tonight. And he is on the Piccadilly line.
He’s missing it.
I put the cushion down very carefully.
Instead he has taken a plane to come visit me.
I don’t know what to do with that. He came because I sent him an email. He came for the baby.
I say it to the empty flat, out loud. “It’s not about me.”
The flat doesn’t answer so I go and find my coat.
*
There is no coffee in this flat.
I threw it out three weeks ago, a full bag of good beans, because I couldn’t stand to open the cupboard it lived in. I don’t miss it. My stomach doesn’t miss it.
But he drinks it. Black, no sugar, one large. I am not going to have him sit at my table with a glass of water while I drink peppermint tea like an invalid.
So I go down the six flights and out into the street.
It’s cold. Proper London cold, damp and gray and getting into the collar. I keep my coat done up and my head down and walk to the little grocer on the corner where I buy a bag of ground coffee and a carton of milk in case he’s changed his mind about black.
I walk back with the bag against my chest and my breath going up in front of me.
I take the stairs slower than I used to. That’s new too.
Back in the flat I put the coffee in the cupboard and shut it. Then I open it and take the bag out and put it next to the kettle, where a person could see it, and then I stand there hating myself, and leave it.
Half past ten.
I don’t sit down. I go out onto the terrace with a fresh mug of tea and stand at the rail.
From up here I can see the whole street. It runs down from the main road along the side of the old warehouses to the river. The tide is coming in. The water is high and brown against the wall.
I watch the corner where the street meets the road.
I know how this looks. A grown man leaning on a rail in the cold, watching a corner. My mother used to stand at the front window when my father was late home from the rink, before she finally left the bastard.
I swore I would never in my life stand at a window for a man.
A van. A cyclist. Two boys in school uniform who should be in school. Every time something moves at the corner my whole body goes tight.
Ten to eleven.
I think about the last time I saw him. The corridor outside the dressing room. He walked past me eight feet away and didn’t look. That’s the last thing I have of him. That, and the back of his neck as I left.
He didn’t want to look at me then. In ten minutes he’ll have to.
I don’t know which of us I’m more afraid for.
Five to.
A black cab comes down from the road, slows outside the wine bar, and moves on. My heart goes up with it and comes down. It wasn’t him. He said the Tube. He’ll walk from the station. It’s twelve minutes if you know the way, and he doesn’t, so he’ll be lost—
Eleven.
Nothing.
Five past.
Then someone comes around the corner from the main road.
He’s a long way off but it is too big to be anyone else. He’s got a suitcase, dragging it behind him with one hand. It keeps catching on the curbstones and jerking his arm back, and every time it does he stops and yanks it straight and comes on.
He walks with his head down, checking the numbers on the buildings.
He looks tired.
He stops opposite the wine bar and looks up at the warehouses. Not at me. He hasn’t seen me.
I take the stairs faster than I’ve taken them in months. The hallway at the bottom has a wire glass panel in the door, and through the panel I can see the street. The street is empty.
He’s not there.
For one second I stand there with my hand on the latch and wonder if I am going mad.
Then a shape crosses the glass. I open the door.
The cold comes in first. Then him.
Woodsmoke. My body knows it before my head has finished catching up. My mouth floods. My knees go loose. It goes down my spine and settles low and warm.
He’s frozen on the step. His nostrils flare.
His pupils go wide and black in the gray light, and I watch him take me in, coat, face, the whole of me, and then I watch him breathe in and get the rest of it, everything I’ve been carrying since the summer, and his eyes come down to the buttons of my coat and stay there.
There is over six months between us. Six months and an entire ocean.
“Everett,” he says.
His voice sounds wrecked and it goes straight through me. God, I’ve wanted him.