Page 121 of Knottingley Ever After
It has been six weeks since I walked into the building at North Star. Six. The first official outbound game is four days away. The Knights are coming for us, and the internal tension between sector one and sector two has gotten, somehow, worse since the puck-to-the-helmet incident, the on-ice fistfight, and the locker-room non-apology Brennan has not bothered to deliver.
And in the middle of all of it, I have, against every defensive instinct I have nurtured for ten years, started to fall for three men.
Not getting giddy. Not getting excited. Not, at any point this morning, allowing myself to register that the small private chamber of my chest has been, since approximately the strawberry-banana-smoothie sidewalk in late September, doing the small steady inconvenient thing it has historically only done in fiction. The thing the romance writers write about. The cozy thing. The slow-build thing. The thing wherea woman, for the first time in her adult life, finds her life accidentally beginning to look like the kind of life she has been reading about on her Kindle.
Filing it. Not engaging with it. Catalog only.
Jude pulls off the interstate.
The exit ramp curves down into a small rest area that has, at one end, a row of gas pumps for the rest of the country and, at the other end, the small futuristic-looking line of white Tesla superchargers that has been on a screen on the touchscreen the entire drive in the form of an ETA. He glides into a stall. The car negotiates its own parking with the small unhurried precision of a vehicle that has, frankly, been doing this conversation longer than either of us.
He gets out. He plugs the charger into the back side of the car with the small two-handed gesture I am, despite myself, watching with what I am professionally going to call goalie attentiveness. He comes back around to my window.
“What do you want.”
“Nothing.” Sulking, sealed in. “I need nothing. I require nothing. I am content. I will sit here. I will look out the window. I will not eat. I will absolutely not drink. I will be, in your custody, the most stubborn possible passenger.”
“O’Shea.”
“Deep, performative hiss.”
He smirks. The full corner of his mouth lifts the small uplift it has been doing for me only, for two days now, and I clock it, and I refuse to acknowledge clocking it.
“I will be right back, Pinky.”
He turns. He walks away across the small concrete lot toward the small attached gas-station-mart with the unhurried captain stride that is the exact same stride he uses to cross center ice, and I, in my borrowed blanket, in his Tesla, in his amber-bourbon-soaked passenger seat, sit and pretend not to track him with my eyes.
My phone dings.
I dig it out of the small zip pocket of the hoodie I am wearing under the blanket. The lock screen has a notification from a chat thread I have not, until this exact moment, been aware existed.
“THE PACK ”
Matteo: How is the kidnapping going.
Rémi: Estimated time of arrival to the destination.
Matteo: Plus visual confirmation that Pinky is still alive and not, in fact, lying low in a ditch.
Matteo: Pinky.
Matteo: Helloooo.
I stare at the chat thread. I scroll up. The thread was, by the timestamp at the top, created at five fifty-one this morning. I was, at five fifty-one this morning, in the passenger seat of this car, half-asleep, with a strawberry-pink phone in my hand.
How.
How did the chat get on the phone. Who added me. None of these men have my password.
Filing the mystery. Returning to the conversation.
I type back.
Iris: I have been kidnapped. I am dying. The Tesla has betrayed me by being comfortable. I am furious about all of it. I have been forced to sulk inside an objectively luxurious blanket.
Rémi: You realize Jude can read these.
Iris: I do not care.
