Page 40 of Knottingley Ever After
“My apologies. I will look at the salt shaker.” I do not look at the salt shaker. “It has had a long day. Could use the validation.”
She huffs, and the rose of her beautiful cheeks climbs another shade. The helpless flicker at the corner of her mouth tells me I have won this exchange without her permission. Her ears are pink under the wet hair, and she is, in a dining hall full of bored Alphas, the only object in the room I have the faintest interest in.
“You’re ridiculous,” she mutters.
“You’re cute when you blush.”
She kicks me under the table.
Not hard. An indignant little tap from the toe of her boot against my shin, and I take it without complaint because, honestly, I deserved it.
Her gaze drops to my untouched plate.
“You haven’t eaten anything.”
“I noticed.”
“What happened tothe bar is on the floor, O’Shea, you have a banana,you absolute hypocrite.”
“Different context.” I shrug, lean back, fold my hands behind my head. “You had not eaten in roughly a calendar year. I had a substantial breakfast. Furthermore, I am not currently hungry.” I let the corner of my mouth tip up. “I am, in fact, deeply satisfied.”
I wink.
She splutters. Actual juice-into-glass spluttering that requires a paper napkin and a redirection of the conversation,and the sound she makes after is somewhere between a laugh and a death threat.
“You,” she manages, “are a problem.”
“I am told. Frequently.”
She glances around the dining hall, then, properly, the way a goalie sweeps the rink to clock everyone on the ice. Her shoulders go a degree tighter, and I do not have to track her eyes to know what she is seeing.
We have an audience.
The kind that pretends to read menus while it watches. Two tables of hockey adjacents to our left. A clump of figure skating girls near the windows, not quite hiding their phones. A row of upperclass Alphas at the back wall doing the slow stink-eye since I sat down with a damp pink-haired Omega and a tray of three lunches.
Iris’s scent shifts faintly. Frosted strawberry threading thin under stress, and that, I refuse to allow.
“Aren’t you,” she says, careful, eyes still tracking the room, “the least bit worried about your reputation here? This place is, you know.” She waves a hand, a small dry gesture that takes in the marble columns and the cathedral windows and the bronze statue of the legend mid-stride visible through the lobby. “Elite.”
“Elite,” I echo, tasting the word the same way she did. “A word that does a tremendous amount of unpaid labor in this building.” I shrug. “People are nosy by occupation, Pinky. None of them are paying my bills or signing my scholarship, so the volume of their opinions has, frankly, no bearing on the contents of my afternoon.”
She studies me.Properly.Storm-grey through the pink fringe, doing the long, surgical read she did on the ice when she was deciding whether to give me my point.
“You actually mean that.”
“I rarely say things I do not mean. Inefficient.”
She drops her eyes back to her glass.
The careful settle of a woman recalibrating her threat map.
“So,” I say, before she can put any more walls back up while I am sitting here, “are you actually settled, or are you still in that lovely floating-hostage phase where the building has not formally admitted you exist?”
She winces.
“Define settled.”
“Slept in a bed. Knows where the bed lives. Has more than three working possessions in the bed’s vicinity.”
