Page 110 of Knottingley Ever After
Oh, sweetheart.
Oh, you are going to be the death of me. All four of us.
I press my mouth against the side of her temple, slow. Squeeze her hips, gentle. The right one only. The left is, in my palm, very visibly knotted under the surface, and I am, frankly, not going to leave that conversation in the unhandled column.
“You need a registered massage therapist for that hip, O’Shea. There is a knot the size of a golf ball under the surface. You are stiff as a board.”
“Absolutely not.”
“No. I hate RMTs. Do you know how painful that is? They locate your most personal trauma in your trapezius and theypresson it. With both thumbs. While you make eye contact with the ceiling. It is psychological warfare wearing a clinic license.”
“Painful, yes. The relief afterward, also yes.”
“Nevahhhh.” She shuffles, with the careful dignity of a goalie protecting her left side, over to the kitchen island, where she hoists herself onto a stool and crosses her legs with the small look of a woman declaring sovereign territory.
“Stubborn goalie.”
“Captain. The least you can do, after kissing me during your grandfather’s stew, is permit me a small dignified retreat on the question of trigger-point therapy.”
“Granted.”
She lifts her Kindle off the marble. She unlocks it. The cover screen comes up. Seventy-seven percent.
“Finish your book,” I tell her, mildly, returning to the stove and lowering the heat one more click. “I want to know what happens.”
Her face does something soft. Something that is not for the camera and is not, frankly, for my benefit either. It is the face of a person who has been told, in a kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon by a man cooking her a stew older than either of them, that the small private thing she does in the gaps of her life is worth knowing the outcome of.
“On it,” she says, soft.
She lifts the device. Finds her page. Drops her shoulders an inch into the curve of the stool and starts reading.
I turn back to the stove. I lift the lid. I stir, slow, the new pot. The kitchen reassembles itself around the slow malted dark of the beef and the rosemary and the careful rhythm of a man who is, for the first time in considerably longer than four winters, actively allowing himself to be in the picture rather than holding the frame around it.
Across the island, in my too-large season-end T-shirt and her messy bun, Iris O’Shea reads.
Captain.
You could really fall for O’Shea.
Or, captain, you are already falling for her, and you do not want to realize it.
CHAPTER 21
Our Omega
~IRIS~
The puck hits the front of my cage at roughly the same velocity at which a small fast-moving asteroid would hit the front of my cage.
There is a sharp percussivecrack,the precise mechanical complaint of carbon-fibre meeting vulcanized rubber, and the entire architecture of my skull rings the small tinny ring that, in any other context, would constitute a workplace incident report. The puck slides off the curve of my mask, hits the post, ricochets, and dies in the back of my net.
Goal.
On a puck that should not, by any sober measure, have made it to the net at all.
Goalie. Pipes. Glove. Five-hole. The wall. The wall is the entire reason there is a team to slow down.
Get up, Iris.
