Page 132 of Knottingley Ever After
Linder straightens. The two of them, in the small simultaneous reading of two roommates who have been seeing me at breakfast for two months, register the precise garment on my body.
“O’Shea,” Hargrove says, turning. “Is that the Cap’s hoodie.”
I lift my middle finger, mildly, and keep walking.
Drinks splutter. Petrov makes the small wounded noise a man makes when something he was actively swallowing has, with no warning, become the wrong choice. Linder, bent over the pool table, has dropped his cue and is openly laughing into the felt.
“WHY,” Hargrove demands at my back, in the wounded-philosopher voice of a man making a serious anthropological inquiry, “DO ALL FEMALES STEAL OUR SHIT.”
“It is a sign of ownership,” Linder calls out, wiping his face. “Them owning us. Not the other way around. I have, in fact, written a paper on this.”
I lift the middle finger over my shoulder one more time, for the public record. “Give your captain a medal of honor, boys.”
“CAPTAIN, IF YOU CAN HEAR ME,” Hargrove yells through the house, “CONFIRMATION REQUEST.”
Jude, from somewhere down the hallway, calls back, easy: “Yes.”
More splutters.
Oh, this house. I love this house.
I follow the warm yeasty trail into the kitchen.
Matteo is at the island in grey sweatpants and the same faded thermal he was wearing the day he ambushed me with popcorn, hair damp at the temples. Rémi is at the oven in a dark henley with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, sliding what appears to be a small tray of fresh-baked something out of the oven with a tea-towel-wrapped hand. The kitchen smells of butter and brown sugar and rising bread and the cool dry pine that follows Rémi around like a personal weather system.
“GENTLEMEN.”
Both heads come up.
Matteo’s entire face transforms with the immediate undisguised brightness of a winger who has not laid eyes on his Omega in roughly forty-five hours, and he is across the kitchen and in my space before I have finished registering the cross.
“Pinky.”
“Santo—”
He kisses me. Properly. The unhurried winger kiss of a man who has been waiting forty-five hours to do exactly this, and his hands come up to cradle my jaw with the small possessive Italian deftness I have learned is his preferred grip.
“You smell nice,” he murmurs against my mouth, dropping a kiss to the corner of my lips, a second down to my jaw, a third to the small warm spot just under my ear where my scent gland is.
I groan.
“Santori. Do not, do not, do not tease me before I have greeted Rémi.”
“Fine. Reluctantly.”
He lets me go. He slaps my ass on the way out of my space, light and unrepentant, and announces, to the rest of the kitchen, “I claim cuddle time tonight. Public record.”
Rémi, at the oven, sets the tray down. He does not look up immediately. “I did the actual work this weekend, Santori. You get the cuddle time. That is bullshit.”
“Work?” I tilt my head, in the small genuine confusion of a woman who has been told nothing.
They both glance at me. The kind of glance that, on a married couple, would be a small telegraphic something between them. Rémi just shrugs.
“What work, Rémi.”
“Come here, Iris.”
I, against every adult instinct I have ever cultivated as a person who does not skip, skip across the kitchen to him. My socked feet do the precise giddy little half-skip half-hop of a small Omega who has, on the back of forty-eight hours of being cherished, forgotten how to be self-conscious in front of three men.
