Page 107 of Knottingley Ever After
“Because, here is the thing about my reading addiction.” Iris looks up at me. “It is deemed a positive escape, culturally. Society pats us on the head for it. But just because it is deemed positive does not mean it is not still, structurally, an escape. The honest difference between mine and the heavier stuff is that the heavier stuff is deemed negative because it leads, statistically, to harmful realities. Drinking leads to liver disease and people in cars at the wrong times. Hard drugs lead to overdoses and the kind of phone calls nobody recovers from. Reading does not, by itself, harm anyone. Unless, of course, you take what you have learned in a book and you go use it for harm. If you read about serial killers in a textbook and decide the kids who made you cry in fifth grade should die, that is a personal accountability moment. We do not blame the book.”
I stop in front of her. I rest both palms on the island behind her, one on either side of her hips, the close considered captain posture I have not, in fact, allowed myself in this kitchen with her in this configuration before now.
She does not flinch. The grey of her eyes is locked on mine, steady, the small amused smirk at the corner of her mouth telling me she has not missed a single component of my body language.
“Good analogy,” I tell her, slow, “O’Shea.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
She tilts her head. Very deliberate. The grin breaks open at the corners.
“So, Captain. Would you ever date someone addicted to books.”
Oh, sweetheart.
That is a layup.
“I mean.” I let the corner of my mouth do the thing it does for her now. “Apparently, O’Shea, I am already dating a book addict.”
“Oh, really.”
“Mm.”
“And who, exactly, would the lucky reader in question be.”
I lift one hand off the island. I tuck a loose pink strand back behind her ear, slow, the strand that has been escaping the headband and dangling against the line of her jaw. My fingers linger on the soft skin of her cheek.
“I am not,” I say, very quietly, “the one who is bold and direct with love and emotions in the opening rounds. I move through it the way I move through everything else. Slow. With intention. I am explaining this now because I do not want you to be reading me wrong as a man reluctant to want you. The reluctance is not the language I speak. I speak the slow one.”
“Okay,” she breathes.
“Which is why I am about to tell you something I do not, generally, tell anyone before I have decided to keep them.”
My fingers, on her cheek, move down. Slow. Along the line of her jaw. Down the column of her throat. They stop at the small hollow at the base of her neck where her pulse, against my fingertip, is doing the considerably quicker thing her face is not letting me see.
She shivers. She does not move away.
“My best friend,” I tell her, soft, “ended up being an addict.”
Iris does not interrupt.
She does not perform a sympathy face. She does not reach for the wooden spoon of conventional wisdom about how to receive a sentence like the one I have just placed in her lap. She holds my eyes and lets me have the floor.
“His name was Connor.”
The name sits, the way it always sits, in the air between me and another person for one careful second, and then it settles. The kitchen, around us, takes it in.
“I honestly do not know,” I continue, with the dry self-indictment of a man who has had this thought at three in the morning for four winters, “if I would have stayed friends with him from the start if I had known, when I was eight years old and we met behind a beer-league rink, that he was going to be the one who got it. We were both the youngest two children of large stretched-thin families in the same postcode, and our parents had been parking us at the rink for cheap babysitting since we were five. By the time we were ten, we were inseparable. By the time we were fifteen, we had each been the one driving the other to the emergency room twice.”
“Was it obvious.” Iris’s voice is small. “The addiction. Was it obvious from the outside.”
“Not really.” My finger, against her pulse, has not moved. “A drink here, a party there. Standard college vocabulary. Being on a Division One roster with the kind of pressure the world parks on a team like ours is, frankly, a lot, and we balanced it the way every roster in this country balances it. Drinks. Parties. Dancing. The occasional unwise fling.”
Her eyebrow lifts. “Occasional unwise flings, Captain.”
“For the record.” I let the corner of my mouth lift. “I was never, in fact, the man bouncing girl to girl. It might be a strange admission for a male, and a stranger one for an Alpha, and the strangest of all for a captain, but I have not, in my entire adult life, found that mode of operating very interesting. I like to move with intention. Relationships included.”
