Page 148 of Knottingley Ever After
“Damn,” Jude whispers.
Rémi turns his head toward me, the small careful look of a man who has, in the past forty-five days, learned to read me in three frequencies at once.
“Iris,” he says, gently. “How are you feeling.”
Oh.
Defenseman D, do not, in fact, ask that of me right now, because the answer is, frankly, embarrassing.
I take a breath. I look at the screen. I look at the small bright photograph of Saoirse Boyne and Marcus Vance and the contract in their joined hands. I look at the small bright photograph in the article above it of Saoirse Boyne in goalie pads in front of a Coach Declan O’Rourke whose face I have not, in five years of knowing him, ever seen wear that small unguarded grin in real life.
“Kind of guilty,” I admit. “Honestly.”
“Go on,” Jude says, soft.
“I —” I take another breath. I am, on the small inner ledger of an Omega who has spent five years convincing herself the small ledger entry in question did not, in fact, exist, about to put a small piece of personal biography on the record in front of three Alphas in a hotel bed. “I may. Have had. A small. Embarrassingly small. Embarrassingly normal-for-the-age. Crush. On Coach Declan O’Rourke.”
The three of them blink at me.
Oh, please.
I am, on the record, in a hotel bed with the three men I am actively falling for. None of these three is going to take smallcompetitive offense at a five-year-old nineteen-year-old’s crush on a coach. Get a grip.
“Okay,” I add, quickly. “For the record. I do not have, on any honest professional measure, a flirt strategy. He never moved on it. He never made me feel anything but, in fact, professional. I have been clear with myself on that point for five years. But I was nineteen and I had eyes and I am, on the small inner accounting, also more confident now than I was then — which, I will admit, is the precise piece of information that has me reassessing the small private archive.”
“Mm,” Rémi says.
“I stand by old me. Old me was, structurally, fine. But on the new information available to me in this hotel room — the fact that the man had, just three months prior to meeting me, lost his Omega and possibly a first pregnancy to the exact small administrative tier that was, separately, also about to be circling the small not-yet-signed me —”
My voice gives out.
“Oh,” Matteo whispers.
“Maybe me being offered the same opportunity,” I finish, quiet, “was, on the small inner ledger of a man fresh in grief, the precise nightmare-mirror of what he had just buried. And that is why he told Vance I wasn’t interested. Not because he didn’t see me. But because seeing me clearly was, in the calculus of a man who had just lost his Omega to those same upper-tier hands, the precise opposite of doing right by me.”
“Iris.” Jude’s voice has gone very level.
“Mm.”
“On the small dry accounting of an outside party,” he says, “the man did the right structural call with the wrong communication delivery. He stepped between you and Vance and absorbed the small private decision on your behalf, on the assumption that you were not, at nineteen, in a position tomake the small dangerous adult choice yourself. He was, at the time, fresh in grief, six months into a transfer he did not want, and convinced that the same administrative tier that had killed Saoirse Boyne would, structurally, do it again. The decision was wrong in execution. The reasoning is, on a charitable read, defensible.”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Which does not mean we are, in the present tense, going to let him keep making that call without you in the room.”
“No,” I agree.
The hotel room is very, very quiet.
Matteo, after a beat, exhales, and closes the laptop screen. The room, suddenly, is only the small warm yellow of the overhead lamp on Rémi’s side and the steady breathing of the four of us.
“Okay,” Matteo says, evenly. “Here is the captain math of the rest of this night, gentlemen, ladies, Pinkies. We are, in three hours, sleeping. We are, in nine hours, in the locker room. We are, in eleven hours, on the ice against a roster with a Stanley Cup ceiling.”
“Okay.”
“However.” Matteo turns his head and looks, very directly, at me. “I would like, on the public record of this hotel bed, to not, in fact, close the door on the idea of you eventually being scouted to the senior leagues, Iris.”
I blink.
