Page 138 of Knottingley Ever After
“Correction on the previous monologue. Economy is not, in fact, going to do today.”
“It is not. There is also, structurally, a second piece of news. You are the only Omega on this manifest. The cabin operatesa designation-specific lavatory at the front of first class. Which means, by elimination, the wide one is, for the entirety of the flight, yours alone.”
She is, on the inside, vibrating.
“Okay,” Iris whispers, in a small private register that is almost more for the universe than for me. “I am, statistically, going to lose my mind today. I am going to write a small private gratitude essay about the wide one. Possibly two essays. The captain three rows back is going to think I have been kidnapped by joy.”
“Iris.”
“Rémi.”
“It is a washroom.”
“It is, defenseman,” Iris informs me, with the dead-serious conviction of a small Omega correcting a factual error, “a washroom in which I will, for once in my adult life, not have to perform the small undignified physical contortion of a person trying to wash their hands without elbowing the wall. It is a milestone. We are going to honor the milestone with the proper amount of reverence. I will not, in fact, be taking notes from you on the cubic-foot tolerances of small petite Omegas, sir, with all due respect to your considerable height. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.”
My anxiety panel, somewhere on the inside, drops another four notches.
I steer us to row two. Iris into the window seat, me into the aisle. Matteo and Jude slide into the row behind us with the small unhurried professional gait of two roster members who have, between them, taken approximately four hundred of these flights and are, on the boarding-process front, exactly as bored as I am tense.
Iris immediately begins narrating the cabin. The first-class blanket, in its clean little wrapper, is, in her opinion,presentable. The amenity kit on the seat-back is, professionally,delightful.The small bottle of water with a glass stopper is, structurally, the best object she has seen in any commercial environment all year. She is, on the small inner ledger, the chattiest she has been since the second hour of the Tesla drive, and her free hand has, without any clear authorization from her conscious brain, taken up casual permanent residency on my forearm where she now lightly squeezes me every ninety seconds in the small reassuring rhythm of a small Omega running a one-woman anxiety-management clinic.
The cabin doors close. The safety video starts. The cabin pressurizes. The plane, slow, begins to taxi.
Captain, the engines are louder than I remember.
Bellerose. Bellerose, hold.
Iris’s small thumb runs, slow, against the bone of my wrist. The frosted-strawberry of her hair has drifted, in the past three minutes, over against my shoulder, and the small careful Florence-Nightingale tone of her voice has dropped into the precise low private murmur of a person who has clocked that the body next to her is, in fact, not okay, and is in the process of making her own body the calmer one of the two.
She does not narrate the engine sounds.
She, instead, does the small unannounced thing of tilting her head fractionally so that the soft crown of her hair is, in the small considered geometry of an Omega managing an Alpha’s nervous system at altitude, in fact resting against the line of my jaw. The pine-and-cedar of my own sweater on her drifts up into my nose. The frosted-strawberry of her own scent layers itself underneath. The small private chamber of my chest, against every prior personal experience of takeoff, registers the layered scent as the small unmistakable signal ofsafe.
“Defenseman,” she murmurs. “You can close your eyes.”
“Mm.”
“Go on. The pill will catch up. I will wake you when the food arrives.”
“Okay.”
I close my eyes.
I let the back of my head rest against the leather of the headrest behind me, the small low pine and cedar of my own sweater rising off her shoulder beside mine and laying itself over the warm strawberry-frost of her hair. Her thumb keeps its slow steady stroke against the bone of my wrist. The engines climb. The cabin tilts. The wheels do the small mechanical complaint of leaving the ground.
And, against every prior experience I have had with takeoffs, I do not, in fact, register the takeoff itself.
Oh.
This is what other people feel.
I am, by the time the seatbelt sign clicks off at cruising altitude, asleep.
“He wants the chicken,” I hear, faintly, somewhere above my right ear, in the small bright voice of an Omega negotiating on behalf of a sleeping defenseman with the precise authority of a head of state.
“Ma’am, he is asleep, I can come back —”
“Chicken,” Iris repeats, firmly. “He is napping. I am his appointed proxy. Hand it over.”
