Page 141 of Knottingley Ever After
Jude’s hand is warm around mine.
My free hand is, around the small waffle cone of vanilla-bean ice cream I bullied him into letting me buy at the small kiosk in the lobby, currently doing the small focused work of getting the last melting curve off the lip before it sacrifices itself to the patterned carpet of this hotel hallway.
His own cone, in his free hand, is, by my professional assessment, eighty percent untouched.
Stop staring at his cone.
It is, by every measure, the better cone. He got salted caramel. I should have gotten salted caramel. The vanilla was a strategic error executed under the duress of menu paralysis.
Stop. Staring.
Jude, beside me, walking down the wide carpeted second-floor hallway at the precise unhurried captain stride of a man who has, in the past hour, decided that a small pre-game walk with his goalie is an effective use of his Saturday afternoon, glances down at me.
His eyebrow lifts the small captain millimeter.
“O’Shea.”
“Mm.” Innocent face. Innocent face. “Yes, Captain.”
“You have, in the past sixty seconds, looked at my cone four times.”
“I have not.”
“Five times.”
“Slander.”
He shakes his head. The slow, fond, restrained shake of a captain who has, in the past four weeks, established the personal policy of not denying his goalie anything she has visibly wanted in the past sixty seconds, and he hands his cone, with the small unhurried surrender of a man who has known the outcome of this small interior negotiation since the moment he placed his order, over to me.
I squeal. Properly. The undignified vocal squeal of an Omega receiving salted caramel.
“THANK YOU.”
“Mm.”
“You are, on the record, the best Alpha currently produced by the entire human gene pool.”
“Two days ago, on this exact metric, you ranked Matteo first. Twenty-six hours ago you ranked Rémi first. I would like to flag the rotation for the official record.”
“You,” I inform him, around a triumphant lick of his salted caramel, “are, by the rule of the cone, the leader of the rankings for the next eighteen minutes.”
“Fair.”
He tugs me along by the hand toward the elevator at the end of the corridor.
“Iris.”
From behind us. Down the hall.
The voice is unfamiliar at the surface, the smooth professional carry of a man pitching across an open space without raising his voice. But somewhere on the small innerinventory of my own brain, the voice does the precise small ring of a long-buried filing cabinet sliding open without prior consultation.
Oh.
Oh, no.
Oh, no, that voice is from a different life.
Jude stops. He turns me, gently, by my hand, the precise unhurried hundred-and-eighty of a captain executing the small protective rotation of a man who has, in the half-second of the call, already decided where to put his body in the next image.
