Page 137 of Knottingley Ever After
“Rémi.”
“Iris.”
She squeezes my hand. The squeeze is, for the small width of the hand doing the squeezing, surprisingly authoritative.
“You,” she says, gently, “do not like flying.”
Identified. Filed. Inventoried.
“No,” I admit, quietly, into the airspace between us. “I do not.”
Her face, in the small overhead light of the boarding tunnel, does the precise inverse of what every adult Alpha in the small private chamber of my chest has been doing on every flight of my career, which is to soften.
“Okay,” she announces, with the small bright Florence-Nightingale-in-pigtail-braids efficiency of a small Omega receiving a mission. “Here is the plan. You will sit next to me. I will hold your hand for the entire flight. You can squeeze it whenever a noise concerns you. I will narrate any noises whosesource I personally understand. I will, in fact, sing to you if you need it. I do not sing well. That is not the point. Are we agreed.”
“We are agreed.”
Oh, Iris.
She tugs me, the small unhurried tug of an Omega assuming professional custody of an Alpha, the rest of the way down the tunnel. Her ponytail-braids bounce against my chest as she walks. The frosted-strawberry of her hair is right at my sternum, layered now with the faint cedar of my own sweater off her, and somewhere on the inside of my chest the small lit panel of anxiety lights drops, on its own, three notches.
How.
How does an Omega the size of one of my legs manage that mechanic.
“For the record,” she continues, brightly, “I am not, in fact, afraid of flying. I love it. I have, in the small private course of my whole life, basically never been allowed to travel, so any opportunity to put my body inside a metal tube and be hurled at five hundred miles an hour at a piece of geography I have only ever seen in pictures registers, in my own personal joy ledger, as a five-star experience. The probability of mechanical failure is, statistically, lower than the probability of being t-boned by a distracted driver on the way to a downtown grocery run. I tell myself that fact every time I board. I also pop a Gravol so I do not, ah, embarrass myself in the small chemical washroom of any economy flight, because economy washrooms are, by the laws of cubic feet, an act of war on the human dignity, and I cannot, on a goalie’s budget, afford the upgrade. Economy will, in the end, do.”
I, against the small lit panel of my own anxiety, do the millimeter thing at the corner of my mouth.
Pinky.
We hit the small turn in the cabin where the aisle splits left and right. Iris, charmingly oblivious, starts to tug us right.
I redirect us, gently, to the left.
She stops.
She looks at the left aisle. She looks at me. Her brow gathers into the small confused furrow of a small Omega who has, in the past forty-five days, learned that her assumptions about how her life works are, with increasing frequency, professionally wrong.
“Defenseman.”
“Mm.”
“Why are you taking me left.”
“Team policy. Elite-level senior travel for the conference is, by the bylaws of the league, first class. The roster, on every official outbound flight, sits in front. You, on this particular outbound flight, are, mechanically, on the roster. Therefore, you sit in front. Therefore, also, the washroom you are concerned about is, on the upgraded cabin, the wide one.”
Iris’s entire face goes still.
Then her mouth opens. The grey of her eyes widens. The small confident captain-Omega posture she has been maintaining for the past four days at a Friday-game intensity flickers, very briefly, into the small wide-eyed soft delighted thing she does when a small unsuspected piece of luxury has, against her own internal accounting, just become available to her.
“No,” she breathes. “Fuckin’. Way.”
“Fuckin’. Way. Also.”
“Rémi.”
“Yes, Iris.”
