Page 120 of Knottingley Ever After
This.
This is the small unspectacular daily thing I have been waiting fourteen days to be allowed to give her.
I let my hand find the back of her head. The pink strands slide through my fingers. I stroke, slow, the way a man strokes the back of a small animal that has, against its better instincts, finally fallen asleep on him.
I think, briefly, about the architecture of the past four hours. The puck to her cage. The chirp. The four-a.m. extras. The blockers since sixteen. The thermoregulatory drift. The withdrawal cascade in compressed form. The captain who does not yet know. The nest that does not yet exist. The fact that, on the small inner accounting of every single one of these data points, Iris O’Shea has been quietly carrying every one of them on her own shoulders for a decade in the small inflexible way that the people who are eventually going to be ground into glass shards always carry them.
Not anymore.
I lean my forehead, gentle, against the back of her hair. I press, slow and unhurried, a kiss into the crown of her head. The pine-and-snow of me layers itself in there with the chemical-lavender and the frosted strawberry, and I let it.
“It is about time,” I murmur, very quietly, against her hair, “you let us carry the weight, Iris.”
CHAPTER 23
Slow And Steady
~IRIS~
“I am,” I announce, with the full weight of a woman who has prepared the legal opening of her own case, “not sick, Captain Kavanagh. And this, by the technical definitions of the criminal code of the state of Minnesota, is kidnapping.”
Jude does not look over.
He gives me the level passenger-side glance of a man who has, in the past forty minutes, already absorbed three iterations of this argument, and returns his eyes to the road. The corner of his mouth has not moved, but I have been able to read his corner of mouth in stereo for two weeks now, and the millimeter it would lift if he were not currently piloting a vehicle is, in his face, only barely repressed.
“Kidnapping,” he repeats, evenly. “O’Shea.”
“Kidnapping.”
“Mm.”
“I lost the rock-paper-scissors round to ask you to tell me where we are going. Therefore the rock-paper-scissors round was binding. Therefore your refusal to disclose constitutes coercive captivity.”
“Iris.” Calm. “You played rock-paper-scissors against the dashboard of my car. You played by yourself. Against a fixed object. Your tally was, by my count, seven losses in a row, against the same wall.”
“Technicality.”
“Mm.”
I cuddle further into the blanket I have wrapped around my shoulders, the soft thermal one I had Matteo retrieve from the linen closet at five-thirty this morning before they sent me out the door, and I let my head tip against the side of the seat’s headrest.
This car, for the record, is a Tesla.
A Tesla is, I am learning in real time, the inside of a small luxury living room that has been mounted on tires, with a touchscreen the size of an iPad embedded in the dashboard, door handles that do not, structurally, look like door handles and that I had to be talked through opening from the outside this morning by a deeply patient captain, and a low ambient hum the precise pitch of a refrigerator quietly thinking about something important. The interior smells of clean leather, the faint ozone of a battery doing very serious work three feet beneath my seat, and the warm-amber-bourbon scent of Jude, layered into the headrest of the driver’s seat in the way the scent of a man who has owned a car for two years bakes itself into the upholstery whether he intends it to or not.
Refusing to enjoy this. Cataloguing it. Filing it for later. Not enjoying it.
Matteo and Rémi, this morning, had a story.
The story was that Coach Declan called them at four a.m. and instructed them to spend the entire weekend back at the rink doing supplementary “team-player rotations” as a consequence for being, and I quote the captain, “rowdy.” Which is, on its face, complete bullshit, because the rowdiness in question wasMatteo punching a sector-one chirp in the mouth and Rémi using the wordrapeat center ice with the equanimity of a man laying out a chessboard, and the only person on the staff anywhere in the building who would discipline an Alpha for protecting an Omega goalie on his roster is, with all due respect to the man, not Coach Declan O’Rourke.
So they lied to me. Cheerfully. To my face. At five-thirty in the morning.
And they put me into Jude’s passenger seat with a blanket and a kiss on the temple from each of them and waved me out of the driveway like I was being shipped off to summer camp.
Which means there is, somewhere in the past forty-eight hours, a plan I am not in the loop on.
Which I am, for the record, going to discover the exact specifications of, the moment I am not actively running a low-grade fever in a car going eighty on the interstate.
