Page 41 of Knottingley Ever After
“Technically,” she says, with the offended dignity of a cat being asked when it last drank water, “I have not yet been assigned a dorm. Luggage is at the main office. Tryouts were, ah, immediate.”
My eyebrows climb.
“O’Shea. Should we maybe go figure that out before main admin closes for the day.”
You can tell she wasn’t expecting that as she blinks at me far too innocently.
“They close?”
“The useful one closes,” I confirm, sliding her water glass closer on reflex. “There is a twenty-four-hour desk on the east end of campus, but the staff over there function strictly as a customer service exhibit, in that they are technically present and functionally unable to help.”
She nods, slow, processing.
I rise, gather her plates without asking because asking would invite an argument and she has eaten now, the argument can wait for a less critical battlefield.
“You want anything else? Dessert. A small cow as offering?”
“I am satisfied,” she says, almost solemn. “Thank you. For bringing me here. So I know where it is.”
“I can give you the full tour later,” I tell her, and I mean it more than the lazy tone advertises. She lifts her eyes and catches the difference. “Hockey wing. Rink complex. The good coffee cart they pretend is on the map and is in fact in a basement.”
“Sold,” she says, mild, and goes back to her juice while I cart the plates away.
The walk to the bussing station takes me through the gauntlet of the hockey adjacents, and the moment my back is to her the voices climb just enough to be heard. Just enough. The exact volume of men who want me to hear and want plausible deniability about it.
“— charity lunch, or is he taking actual pity shots at the Omega goalie —”
“— Twenty-One’s scoring rate must be at an all-time low if he’s sniffing around —”
I set the plates down on the conveyor without acknowledging a single syllable. The only chirp that ever lands is the one you swing at. Give it nothing, it loses its calories. I have been a man who does not feed the noise since I was eleven and got razzed for the size of my mother’s name on the back of my first jersey.
Useful, separately, that none of them appear to have a clue what happened in the women’s showers, and I would like to keep it that way for as long as the universe will let me.
Walk through. Eyes forward. She is at the table.
Iris has her phone out by the time I get back.
Her brow is creased, and her thumb is jabbing at the home screen with rising violence, and there is a small put-upon pout on her mouth that does something both unprofessional and undeniable to me.
I drop into the chair beside her instead of across from her, lean in close enough that my shoulder grazes hers, and look down at the screen.
“I really should have gotten a new phone before I came here,” she mutters. “Mother of god. No service. No service at all. This thing is a paperweight.”
“You will not get service here,” I tell her.
She turns her head to look at me, and the move puts our faces a startled inch apart.
Neither of us moves.
Her scent washes up over me, strawberry gone warm from sun through the dining-hall window and clean shampoo from the locker room shower and the faintest, infuriating trace of me still pressed into the hair at her temple. My jaw tightens. I do not lean in.
The not-leaning costs something, and she watches me pay it.
The corner of her mouth tilts.
And I find, to my mild surprise, that I do not mind the cost at all.
I’m surely entertaining the group chats at this rate. Surely the student body are going to be working overtime to show pics of our closeness from a distance to entertain these bored suckers. The group chats will be popping by the evening, or hell. They’ll make social banners hoping it’ll trend and make them famous for a day. Either way, I’m sure this instance will be entertainment for the student body.
