Page 140 of Knottingley Ever After
“Open.”
Oh.
Oh, no.
Oh, Iris.
I open. I chew. I look at her.
The captain math is, frankly, immediate.
Pros. The small spontaneous in-air rule-bending exercise would, in the small honest accounting of the past four days, be the precise reward an anxious defenseman has earned for surviving a takeoff he was, at gate-side, professionally about to die from. The small petite pink-haired Omega in the seat next to him has, with the precise calibration of a goalie reading a shooter’s shoulder, just delivered the proposal in the small confident half-step out of her usual soft-with-Rémi register and into the small bolder register I have, until now, only observed her use with Coach Declan in the rink corridor. The escalation is, structurally, a gift.
Cons. The plane is, on the small uncomfortable inventory of facts I would rather not catalogue, at thirty-five thousand feet. The probability of mechanical failure during the proposed window is, statistically, lower than the probability of a fender-bender in a downtown grocery run. The probability of death in any catastrophic scenario from this altitude is, also statistically, one hundred percent. If it goes badly, the mannerof going badly is, in the small dark humor of the universe, instantaneous.
Final calculation.
Instantaneous death, Rémi, at the peak of the precise pleasure currently being offered. Frankly. I have heard worse last days.
I let the corner of my mouth do the millimeter thing.
I turn my head, very slightly, on the leather of the headrest, and I lay the small dry private register of my voice against the shell of her ear with the same three-inch incline she gave me.
“Okay, Iris.”
“Okay.”
“If this is, in fact, your way of distracting an anxious defenseman from the small inconvenient fact that we are at cruising altitude.”
“Mm.”
“It is one hundred percent working.”
Her grey eyes flick to mine. The grin, slow and small and full of the small private mischief I have, since the morning she walked into the kitchen and called Matteo a hazard to navigation, been increasingly unable to defend myself against, breaks at the corner of her mouth.
She picks up the fork again. She loads a fifth small precise bite of chicken. She lifts it to my mouth with the bland sweet expression of a woman who has, frankly, exactly one thing on her mind and is going to make a defenseman wait for it.
“Eat first, defenseman.”
A wink. Slow. Deliberate. The full mischief of an Omega who has, on the back of forty-five days of slow careful courtship, decided that the time has, in fact, come.
Pinky.
I open. I chew. I swallow. I have, against every reasonable assumption a man would have made about my professionalappetite ninety minutes ago at gate-side, in fact developed two of them in the space of one flight. One of them is the small Michelin-proxy chicken on the tray between us, which I will, in the next nineteen minutes, eat with the slow careful attention my Omega has just instructed me to bring to it.
The other one is the small pink petite goalie in the seat next to me, in her two pigtail braids and her oversized cedar-scented sweater of mine and her new lululemon tights and her bold sweet bold sweet small private taunt at the shell of my ear, who has, on this particular flight at this particular altitude on this particular Friday afternoon, just promised the man she has been quietly cherishing for forty-five days a small dangerous good time in the air.
I have, on the small inner ledger of an anxious defenseman who has spent his entire adult life keeping his appetite carefully on the leash, the appetite for both.
The first one is, on the tray between us, plated and waiting.
The second one is the pink petite goalie next to me who is, with the slow patient cruelty of an Omega who knows exactly what she has just done to a man, lifting the fork for a sixth small precise bite, and I have, on the inside of my chest, the appetite for a pink petite goalie who is taunting me a good time in the air.
CHAPTER 27
Set Up
~IRIS~
