Page 129 of Knottingley Ever After
“Mm.” I take a sip. “I understand the data point. I have been on the receiving end of locker-room conversation in this country for fifteen years. I will, however, say this. That is all ego, O’Shea. A true man is not threatened by an Omega. A true man is threatened by his own lack. And if you do not, in the small inner ledger, lack, you are simply not in a position to be threatened.”
She turns her head.
She looks at me for a long unhurried beat over the rim of the beer bottle.
And then she smiles.
It is, by my professional standards, the most beautiful single facial expression I have personally been on the receiving end of in my adult life.
It is not the giddy traitor smile she does when Matteo is being Matteo. It is not the small careful smirk she does for me in kitchens. It is the rare, fully unguarded, lake-light smile of an Omega who has just been told, on the record, on a back deck of a cabin she had no business being inside, that the man saying it actually means it.
My hand is in my pocket before I have authorized the motion.
“Stay still.”
“Hm?”
“Iris. Stay still for one second.”
I pull out my phone. I open the camera. I tap. The shutter sound clicks once. The phone catches her, leaned at the deck rail in my old varsity jersey with the lake behind her and the long copper light of October on her cheekbones, smiling the way she has just smiled, with her thumb wrapped around the neck of the bottle and her grey eyes the precise grey of the lake.
I lower the phone.
She blushes.
“Did I look,” she asks, scrunching her nose, “good?”
“O’Shea.”
“Yes.”
“You looked divine.”
Divine. I said the word out loud. We are not, under any circumstances, going to be unsaying it.
She turns the colour of her own hair, deeply, and looks down at the deck, and then back up at me from under her lashes in the small genuinely-unbalanced look of a woman who is not, in fact, very practiced at receiving direct praise.
“Oh.”
“If I had not, in fact, decided in seventh grade to be a competitively horrible person about hockey,” I add, mildly, looking back out at the lake, “I would, professionally, have gone into photography. I came to that conclusion at fifteen, decided it was not financially viable for my family, and put the camera in a drawer. I do not, generally, mention it.”
Iris’s eyebrows lift.
“Captain.”
“Mm.”
“You are full of surprises this weekend.”
“O’Shea, you have known me eight weeks.”
“Eight weeks is, in the right hands, a lifetime.”
She tips her bottle. Sips. Considers the lake.
“If,” she says, after a beat, “I had not, in fact, decided in fourth grade to be a competitively horrible person about hockey, I would have been an author.”
“Oh, yes?”
