Page 75 of Knottingley Ever After
I blink down at the powder-blue fabric currently puddling around the tops of my thighs.
“Honestly, no idea. It was on the back of the couch when I came down. It smelled clean. I gave it a second chance at life.”
Jude scowls. It is, by Jude standards, an actual scowl, the kind that puts a small line right between his brows, and I do not get to enjoy it as long as I would have liked, because Matteo, behind me, makes the kind of noise a man makes when he has just received a gift he did not order.
“Totally Rémi’s,” Matteo announces, cheerfully, sliding fully into the kitchen at last. “Cap, do not pretend you do not recognize it. That is the powder-blue one Rémi has had sincehigh school. I bet he absolutely loathes the fact that it is on her body and not his.”
“Santori.” Jude, pleasant. “Go do your morning workout.”
“Nah.” Matteo hooks a stool with the toe of his bare foot, drags it across the floor, and arranges himself onto it with the satisfied settle of a man who has spotted dessert across the kitchen and is not, as the saying goes, going anywhere. “I have spotted something sweet sitting right in front of me. How am I supposed to walk away from that?”
“Shoo,” I tell him, jabbing my pen in the direction of the doorway. “I am trying to focus.”
“On what, exactly?” Jude asks, mild, settling against the island opposite me with the water bottle.
“Finding a job.” I sigh. I push the glasses up my nose, sweep an arm across the spread of flyers, and present the entire grim panorama. “I scoured the campus yesterday after practice. Every kiosk. Every board. Every laminated four-by-six pinned to a corkboard between an a-cappella audition and a missing cat. This is the result.”
Matteo and Jude exchange a look. It is a brief, telegraphic, eighteen-years-of-knowing-each-other look that I am beginning to learn how to read, and it says, plainly:hold the comment, let her finish.
They cross around to my side of the island.
“Did you narrow them down?” Jude says, picking up a flyer.
“Narrowing implies hope.” I push another at him. “I have, frankly, declined to embrace hope. They all look like shit.”
Matteo whistles through his teeth, lifting the yellow-and-orange one. “Yeah, Pinky. With this slate, I am going to be honest with you, your professional ceiling is McDonald’s, and I am being kind. Three of these are kidnappings in a font.”
“Oh come on.”
“You are getting kidnapped, sweetheart. I can see it in the kerning.”
“I am not getting kidnapped.”
“Who is kidnapping Iris?”
Rémi has materialized in the doorway.
He is in joggers and a long-sleeved henley the color of campfire smoke, both feet bare, his pale-blond hair sticking up in three different directions in the unmistakable architecture of someone who has been horizontal until thirty seconds ago. His eyes are at half-mast. His scent reaches me in a sleep-rumpled register I have not had yet, pine and snow and freshly laundered bedding, softer and warmer than the rink version.
He arches an eyebrow at the entire tableau.
“Why,” he says, with the careful neutrality of a man trying to assemble the morning into a sensible shape, “are you on the kitchen island. And wearing glasses.”
“Okay.” I sit up. I cross my arms. “Is the glasses thing really the most pressing question in this room, sir? Is it so wild that I wear glasses? You should not be judging the visually impaired, Rémi.”
“You are not visually impaired.”
“I absolutely am.” I push the tortoiseshell frames up. “Contacts for practice, anything where I am moving and need clean eyes, granted. But page work, screen work, anything that requires me to look at small letters for more than fifteen minutes? Glasses. I am a sad little nearsighted gremlin and I have been one since I was twelve.”
Rémi tilts his head, sleepily. He takes me in, the whole picture, and the half-mast eyes do not change but something behind them, the something I am starting to suspect lives a much fuller life than his face has ever admitted, sharpens.
“Is that my shirt.”
“Oh, here we go.” I lift the hem half an inch. “You abandoned it on the couch.”
“I abandoned it last week.”
“Finders keepers.”
