Page 87 of Knottingley Ever After
Captains of my particular generation do not, in practice, give themselves time off. We engineer the conditions in which the team functions. We arrange the substrates of cohesion. We catch the things that other men drop, we keep our voices level when other men raise theirs, we sit in our designated wingbacks at the back of our designated living rooms and we hold the temperature of the room steady so the other men can let theirs slip. That is, in fact, the trade. The captain does not get to be in the picture. The captain is the frame.
And the strange thing tonight, the thing I do not have a name for yet, is that the frame has decided, without consulting itself, that it would like to be in the picture too.
The room smells, against all of my professional better judgement,right.Cedar smoke from Rémi’s small contained flame. The toasted-sugar of a marshmallow surrendering its crust. Matteo’s war-crime popcorn, which is, despite my early skepticism, genuinely delicious. Beeswax from the mantel candles. Iris’s frosted strawberry layered, now, with the unmistakable burnt-orange thread of the hoodie she is hiding inside, and underneath all of it, in the very weave of the couch fabric, the steady combined base of three Alphas who have been a unit for two years and have just, somehow, in the past week, become a four.
There has been an empty seat at our movie nights for four winters.
It is still empty. The fifth slot. Connor’s old chair, the one Rémi refinished in the basement the spring after and that nobody has sat in since.
But the room is full in a way it has not been in a long time, and the kid who learned to flap a dish towel at a screaming smoke alarm at the age of ten because nobody else in his postcode would, watches the four of us in the soft amber light and lets himself, for one minute and twelve seconds of a 1992 figure-skating soundtrack, simply have it.
Iris does not make it to the third act.
It happens slowly. I clock it in stages. First the slight slackening of her grip on the popcorn handful she has not yet eaten. Then the gradual sag of her shoulders into Rémi’s side, where she has, at some point in the second act, drifted half an inch closer than her dignity would have allowed her if she were awake. Then the tilt of her head, undecided for a long moment, before it gives up and settles against the curve of his shoulder with the small private finality of a woman who has spent ten days running on fumes and has finally located a soft surface.
Her breathing evens out.
Rémi, on the couch beneath her, does not move. He simply takes the next stick out of his marshmallow rotation, sets it carefully aside, and goes still the way only Rémi can go still, the way large quiet animals go still when something small has chosen to sleep against them.
Matteo and I exchange the look.
Do not laugh. Do not laugh. The man on the couch will end you.
Matteo, holy mother, does not laugh. He simply lifts the popcorn bowl off his lap, slowly, and sets it on the rug. Reaches over the top of Iris’s sleeping head, very carefully, and uses onefinger to lift a loose pink strand away from where it has flopped across her closed eye.
Rémi’s eyes meet his, briefly. Then his eyes meet mine.
None of us says a word.
The movie plays out the rest of the runtime in the changed quiet of three Alphas trying not to wake a small pink Omega who has, against every social contract of two pack-bonded houseguests of nine days, accidentally trusted a defenseman she barely knows enough to put her own head down on his shoulder.
The credits roll. The strings come up.
Rémi tilts his head a fraction, looking down at the top of hers, and then nods at me. Once.
“I will take her upstairs.”
“Got it.”
He moves with the deliberate slow grace of a man who has spent ten years not knocking things over. One arm, careful, slides beneath the bend of her knees. The other arm settles behind her shoulders. He gathers her against his chest the way you gather a sleeping child off a sofa, and she does not stir — her cheek presses harder into his collarbone, her hand fists slightly in the fabric of his henley, and the rest of her settles into his hold with the bone-deep unconditional surrender of an exhausted person who has, somewhere in the dark of her sleeping brain, decided this is safe.
Rémi straightens to standing. He looks down at her in his arms, and the millimeter smile makes its appearance, and I see, on his face, in passing, the very specific expression of a man cataloguing a weight.
“Lighter than she looks,” he says, very quietly. “All muscle and defiance.”
Matteo and I both nod.
He starts for the hallway. Five steps in, something small and dark and rectangular slips out from inside the pouch of her hoodie and hits the rug with a soft thud.
Rémi pauses. “Something fell.”
“On it,” Matteo says, already crouching.
He scoops it up. It is a Kindle. A well-worn, scuffed-at-the-corners, battered-case e-reader that has clearly been her travel companion for some time. The screen, when he tilts it, has lit on the page she fell asleep on, and his eyebrows do a slow careful climb.
“Matteo,” I say. “Do not.”
“Oh, I am. Brace yourselves.” He clears his throat. He squints at the screen with the exaggerated theatre of a man delivering a sommelier’s tasting note. “The novel currently being consumed by our four-foot-eleven sleeping goalie is a romance, in case there was any doubt, and the title of said romance is —”
