Page 48 of Knottingley Ever After
“Twenty-four hours,” I repeat.
“Twenty-four hours.”
“And if I want sector two polled, I have to —”
“Request it. In writing. To this office.” She taps the paper. “You would also have to find a means of communicating that request to the captain in question yourself, since formal channels would take longer than the deadline allows. We are bureaucrats, Miss O’Shea, not magicians.”
I look down at the paper.
Box one. Figure skating residence.
Box two.Hockey Team Housing — Sector to be confirmed.
The second box has, in red pen, a tiny handwritten note in the margin:requires sector approval.
I rise. I take the paper. I tuck it into the front pocket of my duffel with the same care I would tuck a goalie’s playbook.
“Thank you, Mrs. Henderson.”
“Go to the Heat Clinic today.” Without looking up. “Take your time on the housing. Twenty-four hours is more than people usually get.”
Yes.
It is a real spoiling of riches, Patricia.
The afternoon outside the admin building is colder than the morning was, but not by much. The sun has done what Minnesota suns apparently do, which is hang very low and very pale and provide approximately zero of the actual warming benefits the rest of the country associates with daylight. Students cut across the quad in fat puffer jackets, hot drinks fogging in their hands. The air smells of woodsmoke fromsomewhere, the diesel breath of a campus shuttle idling at the curb, and the faint, sharp animal of fresh-cut grass that has frozen and thawed one too many times this week.
I find a bench under a thinning maple. Drop my duffel. Sit.
And, for the first time since I cleared customs at the airport, I let myself stop.
The quad is busy. That is the part that arrests me. Boys in North Star letterman jackets, sleeves shoved to elbows despite the cold because they are twenty and immortal, drifting past in clusters of three and five.
A group of girls in the green scarves I now know belong to the figure skating program, laughing at something on a phone screen. Two guys clapping each other on the shoulder outside the coffee kiosk. A tall Alpha in a brown beanie palming the small of a willowy Omega’s back as they cross the path. Everyone here is in motion.
Everyone here is in groups. Everyone here is, by all visible evidence, having a perfectly fine day in the company of people who are glad they exist.
And I am the only thing on this bench.
It is a stranger feeling than I am ready for.
Because here is the part I do not say out loud: I have never been someone who admits to lonely. Lonely was for girls in the kind of movies my dad would have switched off after twenty minutes, muttering about wet paint. Lonely was for women who did not have a glove hand and a goal crease and a town that, however badly, knew their name.
I have spent my whole life with a team somewhere in the next room. That has always been enough. Or it has always been close enough to enough that I could not tell the difference.
And then I met Matteo Santori, and felt, in that one stupid suspended second, like I was the only person in his orbit. Likethere was a small private room being built in the air between us, and I had a chair in it.
I have not been able to put down the feeling since.
It is a problem, O’Shea.
It is a very specific problem with a name and a jersey number.
Maybe that is what is doing this.
Surely this bench is fine and I have simply gotten used, very fast, to the temperature of being looked at by someone who wants to look. Or maybe I am, in fact, more tired than I have allowed myself to be.
Tired of the constant fight.
