Page 74 of Knottingley Ever After
Solving a crime.
Crime is named Iris O’Shea’s checking account.
Will be with the gentleman in one moment.
I do not say any of this out loud, because I am, at this exact moment, holding a yellow-and-orange flyer eight inches from my nose, trying to decode whether the wordsflexible hours, generous compensation, must be discreetare simply a job description or whether they are also, possibly, a warning.
I have my legs crossed on the marble island in the absolute violation of every food-prep hygiene rule a sensible person knows, in nothing but Rémi’s ancient powder-blue t-shirt and a pair of black sleep shorts that, when I sit like this, hide approximately nothing. My laptop is open beside me. Myreading glasses, the tortoiseshell pair I have not bothered to wear in front of anyone in roughly a year, are sliding down my nose. There are seventeen — I have counted — separate campus flyers spread across the granite around me in a fanned arc, three more taped to my screen, and one stuck, somehow, to the bottom of my coffee mug.
It is nine in the morning on a Saturday.
The kitchen smells of last night’s bread cooled in its tin, of beeswax candles long since burned out, of fresh coffee that has just finished percolating, of a brand-new bag of grounds from the canister with the cork lid that I have not yet decided whether I am allowed to ask about. Underneath all of it, very faintly, the pine-and-snow that has been baked into the fibers of Rémi’s shirt for so long that even my own frosted-strawberry, sitting on top, cannot fully cover it.
I push the glasses back up my nose with one knuckle. I do not look up.
“Seriously, give me a second —”
And I look up.
It is the kind of looking up that goes wrong immediately.
Matteo Santori is leaning against the kitchen doorway with one shoulder against the frame, hands tucked into the pockets of grey sweatpants that ride so unforgivably low on his hipbones that I can clock, in the first half-second, the precise topographical line where the muscle of his lower stomach dives toward whatever is underneath the elastic, and the precise half-second after that, the symmetrical companion line on the other side, and the precise half-second after that, what people on the internet refer to in capital letters as aV.
He is also, I cannot help but observe with the dispassionate professionalism of a goalie scouting an opposing winger, completely shirtless.
Lean. Cut.
The dark spill of ink down the side of his ribs I half-glimpsed in the shower stall now in full, gorgeous, detailed display, a sprawl of fine line-work that I am going to lose entire nights of sleep cataloguing later. The hair on his head is in the precise rumpled disarray of a man who has just woken up and could not be bothered to address it. His scent has reached me a full beat before the rest of him does. Blood orange. Cinnamon sugar. The warm sleep-musk that arrives on a man’s skin in the first hour after his sheets, before he has put a shower or a cologne between his body and the rest of the building.
Oh, this is unfair.
Goalie. Focus. The flyer. The discreet flexible-hours flyer.
My eyes drift down. They stop. They have to be physically reminded that they live in a face that has functions other than the cataloguing of abdominal anatomy.
Matteo, of course, watches me check him out the way a man on a sun lounger watches the very nice clouds. Lazy. Pleased. Entirely without rush.
“Like what you see, Pinky?”
“Very much.” I drag my gaze back to his face with the dignity of a woman who has been caught and will not, on principle, pretend otherwise. “You are also, however, distracting me. So please consider this a five-star Yelp review of the chest and a polite request that you remove it from the doorway.”
“Five stars.” He brightens. “Can I get that in writing?”
“Oh, for fuc?—”
“If you two start eye-fucking in the kitchen,” Jude says, very flatly, from the open fridge, “I am leaving and I am taking the coffee with me.”
I jump.
I will swear in a court of law that I did not jump, but my left elbow betrays me and knocks a stack of three flyers clean off the island onto the floor.
Jude has, apparently, been there the entire time, head behind the fridge door, doing the silent surveying of a man who has already decided what he wants and is simply confirming it is in the place he left it. He straightens up with a chilled glass bottle of water in one hand and a level, unimpressed expression in the other, and the way his attention lands on me — the kitchen island, the shorts, the glasses, the shirt that is unmistakably not mine — is a kind of close-read that does not, for the record, do anything to lower the room’s overall temperature.
He is in a faded black tank top and grey gym shorts. His shoulders are damp at the strap line. His hair, normally pushed back, has the loose disorder of a man who has just done five miles in the cold and walked through the back door without bothering to do anything about it. He smells, in a way that I have to consciously decide not to react to, of clean sweat and amber-bourbon warmth and the bracing cold-on-wool ghost of a Minnesota morning that has clung to his run.
“Morning,” I manage.
“Morning.” He cracks the bottle, takes a long, slow pull, and does not break eye contact with me through any of it. “Whose shirt is that?”
