Page 142 of Knottingley Ever After
Down the hall, walking toward us at the unhurried pace of a man who has, in the small private chamber of his career, never had to hurry, is a tall man in a charcoal wool suit cut by a tailor who would have charged the price of my entire spring tuition for the cut alone. His hair is the polished iron-grey of a man approaching fifty. His tie is the precise red of a person who knows precisely what red is going to do in any negotiation he is about to walk into. His shoes are, by the small unmistakable shine of them at this distance, the kind of shoe my mother used to calla London shoe,with the small dry implication that London shoes were worn by men who had not, in any visible way, earned them.
And I have, on the small inner ledger of an Omega who has not allowed herself to remember the small unwanted face in question in five years, in fact seen him before.
Marcus Vance.
Marcus Vance who, when I was nineteen, came to the rink behind my parents’ corner shop in Yorkshire after a small-town conference championship and offered me, in the small unhurried voice of a man making a fortune, my first ever piece of professional representation.
Marcus Vance who, three days after that offer, was gone.
Marcus Vance who, by all available accounts to my nineteen-year-old self, vanished, because my hometown coach had, in the kind of single quiet conversation Iris O’Shea was not, at nineteen, in the room for, told him I was —
Jude shifts.
The shift is, by the small physical accounting of an Omega who is, at this exact moment, holding the captain’s left hand with her right and an ice cream cone with the other, the precise quarter-step half-pivot a captain executes when the body in front of him is, on the small inner gauge, in a different category than the body next to him. He steps a half-inch ahead. His shoulder squares. His chin lifts the small captain micron. The amber-bourbon of his scent layers itself, fractionally warmer, over the line of my own.
Dominance posture. Filed.
Captain Kavanagh, defending.
“Marcus Vance,” Jude says, evenly.
I look up at Jude, very fast.
Jude does not look back. He keeps his eyes on Vance.
He knows him. The captain knows Marcus Vance by name.
Of course he does.
Vance, ten feet away now, smiles. The smile is the small unhurried approving smile of a man who has, on his own private gradient, been waiting some time for this exact corridor moment.
“Captain Kavanagh,” Vance says, warmly. “It is, on the record, a pleasure to see you in the flesh again. The last time was, what — two springs ago, the alumni gala? You have, since then, made an extraordinary jump. Your tape from October alone is, on my desk, the most analyzed I have run in eighteen months.”
Jude nods. The captain nod, neutral.
“I appreciate the praise. What do you need from O’Shea, Vance.”
“Oh.” Vance laughs. A small soft laugh, the kind a man uses to ease the temperature in a corridor down a notch. “Nothing tactical, Captain. I wanted, simply, to reintroduce myself. I do not believe Miss O’Shea, on the day we last met, was old enough to have committed my full name to memory.”
“We last met,” I say, carefully, finding my voice, “five years ago.”
“Indeed we did. I came to your rink in Yorkshire, the small one behind the old corner shop, the week after your conference championship. You were nineteen. You had, on every piece of available tape, just produced the cleanest forty-save game I had seen out of any Omega in any league in the country. I offered you, at that age, professional representation.”
“Okay,” I breathe.
“Your coach at the time,” Vance continues, the small considered cadence of a man laying out a careful set of cards on a small table, “Coach Declan O’Rourke, met with me at the rink office the morning after the offer was delivered. He told me, in a clear professional voice, that you werenot interested.I confirmed the response with him three separate ways. He was clear. He was final. He was, on the body language alone, a man I respected enough to take at his word. So I backed off.”
My breath stops, briefly, somewhere on the inside of my ribs.
Not interested.
Not. Interested.
“Not interested,” I repeat, slowly.
Vance’s brow gathers, briefly. The small considered pull of a man who has, in the half-second between my two-word repetition and his own next sentence, identified that the sentence he just delivered has, in fact, been new information to one of the two parties in the corridor.
“Miss O’Shea.”
