Page 15 of Knottingley Ever After
Two of them, maybe three, loud and male and getting louder, the lazy bark-and-rumble of men who own every hallway they walk through, and one of them says a word that detonates in my chest like a slapshot off the crossbar.
“—Voss says the figure-skating freak gotlost, swears she’s still wandering the hockey wing like a sad little —”
And I freeze, while the crimson man does not.
It is the single fastest thing I have witnessed off a sheet of ice.
One heartbeat he is leaning into me with his thumb on my cheek and the slow gold burn in his eyes, and the next, he has both hands on my shoulders and is steering me backward, firm and quiet and absolutely without ceremony, three steps into thedeep corner of the cupboard where the mops keep their grim vigil and the overhead light gives up entirely. He puts me in the dark. He puts his own body between me and the door, a wall of crimson hoodie and warm Alpha, and he does it so smoothly that I am tucked into the shadow with my back to cold concrete before my brain has finished forming the question.
“Stay,” he breathes, not even a whole word, just shaped air against my hairline.
I should bite him.
I want it on the record that biting him is my first instinct, because being told tostaylike a retriever is the kind of thing that usually buys an Alpha a bruise from me on principle.
I don’t bite him…
Because —and I hate this, I will be unpacking this for weeks— some animalistic, scent-deep, older-than-language part of me has taken one read of the situation and concluded that this particular Alpha, this stranger, is not standing in front of me as a cage.
He is standing there as a door I get to choose whether to open.
So I stay.
I press flat into the corner, into the bleach and the dark, and I breathe him instead of panic, and the door swings wide a second later and floods the room with corridor light that stops a clean yard short of where he’s hidden me.
“Santori.” A new voice. Bored, broad, faintly contemptuous. “The hell are you doing in the mop closet?”
Santori,I file, on pure reflex, because I am a goalie and a goalie always learns the names.All right. Santori.
“Tape,” Santori says, and the transformation in him is instant, total, and frankly unsettling to witness from eighteen inches away. The low burnt-sugar voice he was using on me is gone. This one is bright and loose and bored right back at them,the conversational equivalent of a man inspecting his own nails. “Jimmy swore on his mother that it was stashed in the aux. Jimmy is a fucking liar, and his mother should be ashamed. There is no tape,” he huffs and proceeds to add, “There is, however, a truly upsetting number of mops, if either of you has finally decided to pursue a trade.”
A snort.
“Weird flex, hiding in here.”
“It’s called peace and quiet. You should try it, Hargrove, your whole personality is a smoke alarm.” He shifts his weight, casual, and the move slides another half-inch of crimson between the light and me. “Were you actually after something, or is this just the part of the day where you follow me around hoping my taste rubs off?”
They bicker. He is good at it, fluent, the words coming easy and barbed and amused, and the whole time his back stays an unbroken line across the doorway, his heels planted, his shoulders squared in a way that has nothing in common with the loose performing slouch he wore walking in.
He is laughing. He is mocking a man named Hargrove’s haircut. He is also, with his entire body, quietly refusing to let anyone past him, and I stand in the dark behind that refusal with my heart going like a snare drum and a feeling rising in my chest that I decline, on principle, to examine.
“Whatever, man.” Hargrove, losing interest the way the well-armored always do. “Coach wants the room in ten.”
“Can’t wait. Tell Voss his cologne entered the building before he did. Again.”
Footsteps. Retreating. The corridor reabsorbing them.
And then the door wheezes shut, and the dark folds back over us, and Santori turns around in the small bleach-scented universe of the mop closet, looks at me with both eyebrows up,and a grin unspooling slowly across his face like he has just been handed me a present and dare in the same envelope.
“So,” he says.
“Don’t.” I am already moving, peeling myself off the wall, snatching up the abandoned left pad like it personally witnessed my shame. “Whatever sentence is loading behind that face, kill it. Mercy killing. I’ll hold your hand.”
“I hid you,” Matteo says, delighted, leaning back against the door now that it is his to lean on, arms folding, the picture of a man settling in. “In the dark. Like a contraband shipment. Like aFrench film.”
“No one asked you to.”
“You didn’tun-ask me either. I noticed. You went very still, very quiet, and you let me, which, given the threat assessment I’ve been running on you since I walked in, I’m genuinely touched.”
