Page 61 of Knottingley Ever After
“True,” he allows, sunny. “But I do think I actually like her.”
“Santori.”
“Hm?”
“Do not say it.”
“Say what.”
“Do not say whatever you are about to say.”
Matteo grins. He throws us a small, mock-soldierly salute, pivots on his heel toward the hall, and starts whistling — cheerfully, tunefully, very specifically — the opening bars of the wedding march.
Over his shoulder, almost as an afterthought:
“Straight to the altar we go.”
He disappears into the corridor.
Jude removes the hand from his face entirely. Drops it to the counter. Stares at the empty doorway with the flat, contemplative dread of a man who has just heard a referee’s whistle inside his own head and recognized the call.
I, the quiet one, the bench-propper, the chin-tipper, the man who has had two romantic relationships in his entire adult life and ended both of them politely, lean against my counter and watch the corridor with my own face arranged carefully blank.
The oven timer pings.
I do not move to answer it.
Why,I think, calmly,do I feel like he is not joking with this one.
CHAPTER 11
The Coach In The Kitchen
~IRIS~
Five in the morning has been mine for as long as I can remember, and the first thing I do, even before I open my eyes, is run my hand along the mattress beneath me to confirm I am, in fact, on a mattress.
I am.
This is the surprising part.
I do not actually remember getting here.
The last thing on the inventory sheet was the couch in the common room around midnight. I had crawled up there with my borrowed phone, my own dead one, and the firm intention of doom-scrolling exactly seven minutes of cozy-apartment TikToks before I made myself climb the back hall to the converted storage room the boys had spent the previous afternoon turning into a bedroom. The seven minutes had become twenty. The twenty had become a vague, warm tunnel. Somewhere around two in the morning I have a single dim memory of being lifted, of a large quiet warmth that smelled like pine and snow tucking me against a chest the approximate size of a bookshelf, and then nothing.
Rémi carried me to bed.
I am going to die about this later.
For now, I roll onto my back and stare at a ceiling I have not yet committed to memory. The light filtering through the new blinds is the watery, pre-dawn blue of a Minnesota that has not decided whether it is going to bother with a sunrise this morning. The room around me smells of fresh paint, sawdust from where Rémi sanded down the trim, the slightly chemical tang of new bedding pulled from plastic, and underneath all of it, threaded into the bones of the house itself, the warm cedar-and-honey base that means I am still here. Still inside this farmhouse. Still inside this strange, sudden three-cornered pocket of men who have, in the past sixteen hours, materially altered the architecture of my life.
They built me a room. In an afternoon. Like it was nothing.
That is the part I keep returning to. The blue accent wall on the side opposite the window. The plain pine bookshelf Rémi had apparently been keeping in the basement for an occasion exactly like this one. The cheap reading lamp on the bedside table that I am fairly certain Matteo stole from his own bedroom because the shade is patterned with tiny embroidered foxes and there is no other explanation for it being in a hockey house. The folded set of clean sheets on the chair, taken out of a closet by men who knew which closet.
Generosity that comes that fast is hard to receive without flinching.
I push myself up to sit, and the first thing I notice is that I am not wearing the leggings and tank top I went to bed in.
