Page 51 of Knottingley Ever After
Long enough that I think I have overplayed it, and the small mean part of my pride starts loading a retraction, and then the dots come back and the next message arrives with the unhurried gravity of a man who has decided exactly how he wants to receive a compliment.
Glad you like it, O’Shea.
I look up.
He is smiling. Properly. Not the line. The full mouth.
Across thirty feet of quad and a thinning maple, Jude Kavanagh is letting me have a real smile, and the warmth of it lands in my chest as physically as a hand pressed flat against my sternum, and the bench is, abruptly, not the worst place I have ever sat.
So,the next message reads,what’s the plan?
Plan?
Dorms. Or what.
I think about it. I think about the paper folded in the front pocket of my duffel. About box one, box two, and the red-pen note in the margin. About a sector that has refused me, a sector that has not been asked, and the captain of the second sector, currently standing across a quad waiting to see whether I am going to be honest with him or charming.
I look up to do both.
He is gone.
The brick wall stands empty. The patch of pavement where one ankle crossed over the other is filled now by a girl in a green scarf going the other way, and I sit on the bench with my mouth half open and a freshly typed message that has lost its audience, and I am, for one full beat, comically annoyed.
Are you kidding me?
My pout assembles itself entirely without permission.
“You need help with your luggage, or what?”
The voice arrives at my back, low and amber-warm, and I do not jump.
I want it on the record that I do not jump. I turn, slow and composed, like a woman who has known the whole time that a captain who watches faceoffs the way Jude Kavanagh watches them does not announce his approaches.
He is standing behind the bench.
Arms crossed. The hood pushed back now, so I can see the full face that has so far only been visible from across a rink and across a quad, and up close, he is even more settled than the distance suggested, the kind of broad, steady physical presence that takes up the space behind a piece of furniture and makes the furniture feel smaller for the occupancy.
His scent reaches me on the next breath.
Amber smoke. Bourbon vanilla. The low warm spice that, on the ice, read like a kitchen at the exact moment dinner is ready, and at conversational range reads like the kitchen has been your kitchen for so long you no longer notice you are hungry until you walk in.
It curls around me, settles, and the small private part of me that has been on its hind legs all afternoon lies down.
He is going for serious, the closed arms and the level mouth and the no-nonsense weight of his stance, but I clock the rest of the picture.
We are in a public quad.
He is the captain of the elite hockey program at the most-watched college in the state, and he has just trotted halfway across the campus to lean on a wall, then walked the rest of the way across it to plant himself behind the bench of the pink-haired Omega the other team has spent all day not shutting up about.
The serious persona is a stage.
The seriousness of whether to help me or not…is real.
I tip my head back further to look up at him.
“Uh … well,” I say, and my own voice comes out smaller than I would like and crooked at the same corner of my mouth he was smirking from a minute ago, “there’s a dilemma.”
Let’s see what happens when I trust in my new Captain.
