Page 115 of Knottingley Ever After
“Okay,” I whisper.
I stand. He is still close. The pine-and-snow of him is, in the small confines of this room, the only thing my respiratory system is currently processing.
I hug him.
Not the small polite goalie hug I have hugged Rémi Bellerose with twice in the past two weeks. The full pressed-into-his-chest hug of an exhausted small pink-haired Omega who has, on the inside, just had her cards quietly assembled and re-organized by a man who did the assembling without comment.
“Thank you, Rémi.”
He presses one warm hand against the back of my head. Brief. Steady. The kind of pressure a man uses to anchor aperson against his chest for one more careful beat than the gesture strictly requires.
“Anytime, Iris.”
CHAPTER 22
Weight
~RÉMI~
“You are running a slight fever, Miss O’Shea.”
The doctor is a small woman in her early forties with a quiet voice and the steady reading-glasses-perched-low look of a professional who has, in the course of her career, watched approximately ten thousand Omegas try to talk their way off her exam table. She holds the digital thermometer up to the recessed light above the bed and reads the number off it for her own private confirmation. She sets it down.
I turn my head and look at Iris.
Iris, on the paper-sheeted exam table in my hoodie and her practice leggings, pulls the top half of the hoodie up over her nose and bottoms her eyes at me from the visible inch of face that remains, in the small undisguised pre-emptive crouch of a child who has been read the diagnosis and is preparing to be scolded.
Pinky.
“Doc.” Iris’s voice is muffled inside the hood. “Respectfully. Do not say another word in front of him before I have time to talk him down. He is going to scold me. He has the face.”
I do not have a face.
I am not going to scold her.
Maybe I have a face.
The doctor smiles. It is the small unsurprised smile of a woman who has seen this exact small Omega across this exact exam table fourteen hundred times in the course of her career. She turns her shoulders to me. “Can I have a word with you in the hallway. Briefly.”
“Yes.”
“I am not here,” Iris announces from inside the hood, pulling the covers on the exam table up to her sternum. “You cannot see me. I have achieved invisibility. This exam table is empty.”
The corner of my mouth does the millimeter thing it does when she is being herself. I give her a look. She is, by my reading, dead on her feet, but she is also, for at least the next eight minutes of in-room time, going to do the small pre-emptive theater of a woman trying to keep the temperature in the room from getting too serious. I leave her to it.
The hallway outside the exam room smells of institutional pine cleaner, the chemical-citrus floor wash they all use, and the warm baked-paper scent of a sterilizer that has been running since dawn. The doctor pulls the door three-quarters closed behind us and turns to face me.
I expect her to break off and walk me to the nurses’ station. She does not. She stays where she is.
I arch an eyebrow.
“If this is the funding conversation,” I tell her, “I can cover anything. Bloodwork, the new prescription, the weekly follow-ups, anything that needs ordering. You can put it on a card I will leave with reception.”
She shakes her head, mild. “Oh. No, Mr. Bellerose. Thank you. That is not what this conversation is.”
“Then.”
“The fact that you brought her here at all,” the doctor says, “already tells me everything I needed to know about whetherher pack is in support of treatment. I am not auditing your intentions. I want to talk with you first because I am about to give Miss O’Shea a piece of information she is going to be too proud to fully receive in real time, and I would like one adult in the pack to have heard it cold sober before she walks out the door.”
