Then he rises to a stand, and instead of stepping back, he steps directly into my space, and he pulls me out of the bench into a hug.
Oh.
It is, frankly, the kind of hug I have not been on the receiving end of since I was seventeen years old. Full contact. Both arms around my back, the gloved one careful at the curve of my spine, the bare hand against the back of my neck. He is, by my best estimate, six-foot-four to my five-five, and the angle of the hug puts my face squarely against the cold-damp fabric of his practice jersey, the pine-and-snow of his scent rising off the warm skin underneath, and the steady slow drum of his pulse a thumb’s width from my ear.
He presses a small unhurried kiss against the crown of my head.
Stand down, knees. Stand down. We are upright. We are professional.
“Okay,” Rémi murmurs, into my hair. “You need to stop fighting for perfection, Iris. You can have off days. Everyone else on this team has off days. The men on the other side of that gate just had an entire off day on national fucking practice ice and they have not, to their credit, stopped breathing. Your health, your sleep, your mechanical hip, the chemistry inside your body — those things are not optional. The performance is downstream. You are not, in this house, going to keep grinding yourself into glass shards for the comfort of men who are not, at the end of the day, the reason you came here.”
I do not, in any visible way, react.
But the small private chamber in my chest that has spent fourteen days carefully not crying in front of any of these men is doing, on the inside, the small honest collapse it does when somebody locates the wound the day after the wound has been bleeding.
“And, for the record,” he adds, quieter, into the crown of my hair, “nobody is going to bully you again on this ice. Not in front of me. Not in front of Matteo. Not in front of Jude. We will shutthat down, today, tomorrow, the day after. As many times as it needs to be shut down. Yes?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Good girl. Go shower. I will leave you my hoodie.”
He pulls back. He doesn’t go far. His hand stays at the back of my neck for one more grounding beat. The corner of his mouth does the millimeter Rémi smile.
My face, traitor that it is, lights up.
“Oh, another one to add to the collection. Excellent. I am building an inventory.”
Rémi sighs through his nose. The sigh of a man calculating cubic feet.
“At this rate,” he says, mildly, “I am going to have to build you an actual dedicated closet. And a damn nest space.”
I frown up at him.
“What is a nest space.”
Rémi pauses.
It is, by Rémi standards, the longest pause I have seen him take. The careful pause of a man who has just registered that the question he received was not the question he was expecting to receive, and who is now adjusting his entire next sentence in real time.
What. What did I just say.
“Iris.”
“Yes.”
“Have you,” he asks, very carefully, “ever had a nest.”
I look up at him. My face, in the small soft yellow of the safety bulb, does the small honest thing it always does when I have just been asked a question that has, structurally, hit a gap in my education.
“I mean.” My voice is small. “I have read about them. In, um, books. Mostly the books we have been not discussing in this house. The romance novels reference them constantly.The female lead always has a nest, and the Alphas always say the wordnestin a tone that suggests the nest is doing some emotional or scent-related work I am missing the deeper context of. I have, ah. Honestly. I have never had one. I do not really know what one actually is. My family did not exactly walk me through the Omega curriculum at presentation. There was no chapter discussion. The book stayed on the shelf.”
“Okay,” Rémi says, softly.
He has gone quieter. Why has he gone quieter.
Because something has just told him that the family that withdrew at thirteen never explained the Omega-specific architecture you have been living without for a decade. And Rémi Bellerose, who has been building things with his hands since he was six years old, has just identified a missing structure in his house.
“I will explain after you shower,” Rémi says. “We will get you some food on the way to the clinic as well. They may want bloodwork. Bloodwork on an empty stomach is, in my opinion, a crime against decency.”
