I do not, immediately, answer.
Telling Jude is, structurally, the part of this conversation I have been steering around in my own head since the doctor pronounced the wordwithdrawal.Our captain has, on the issue of pharmaceutical dependency in a person he loves, exactly one calibration setting, and the setting isvigilance.It has been four winters since Connor and Jude’s vigilance has not, in any visible way, relaxed. The man has not, to my knowledge, taken a recreational drink in three years. He sleeps with his phone face-up on the bedside table. He still, on every birthday Connor missed, drives the four hours to the cemetery alone.
And the captain is, on the specific subject of Iris O’Shea, starting to slip.
I have read it on his face all week. I read it on his face in the kitchen yesterday when he taught her to stir his grandfather’s stew and let her wear his last functional T-shirt. I read it in theway he has, in the past two days, been the first one downstairs in the morning, every morning, with the coffee pot already on when she comes into the kitchen.
Dumping the phrasewithdrawal cascadeinto that captain at this stage of the season, with the outbound game four days away, is, on the math, a controlled detonation we should be choosing the timing of.
“Silence for now,” I tell Matteo. “If Iris brings it up to him on her own, fine, we ease it in alongside her. We do not, in any case, dump it on him without her in the room. He is already tense about the game. The tension between the two halves of the house is at a level I am not enjoying.”
“You are telling me. That douche is still recovering from his black eye, by the way. I regret nothing.”
“You are going to be a bench-warmer if you keep acting that cocky.”
“Anything for Pinky.”
“… Yes.”
“See you back at the house, Bellerose. I will start prepping dinner.”
“Good.”
Click.
I drop the phone back into my pocket. I press my thumb against the bridge of my nose for one careful beat, and then I push back into the exam room.
The doctor is at the small side counter, writing up the new prescription with the precise unhurried penmanship of a woman who has not, in twenty years, sent a single illegible script to a pharmacist. Iris is on the exam table, still in the hoodie, the covers pulled up to her chest now, sulking, in the small unmistakable physical posture of an Omega who has decided that sulking is the only protest currently within her budget.
The doctor lifts the slip and turns. “If you have any questions, my personal line is on the back of the prescription. Text or call. Twenty-four-seven. Do not hesitate.”
“Thank you.”
“Of course.”
She nods to Iris, gives me a small careful look in passing, and pulls the door quietly closed behind her.
Iris and I are alone in the small examination room.
She huffs. The huff is muffled by the hood she is still mostly inside. “You better,” she announces, “not scold me, Bellerose.”
I cross to the table.
I lift both my hands. I cup her cheeks. The skin under my palms is warmer than it should be, in a small steady way that the doctor has now given me a name for, and the grey of her eyes lifts up to mine over the curl of her hood with the cautious wary watch of a woman waiting to be told off.
“Iris,” I tell her, very quietly. “I was not, in fact, planning to scold you.”
She blinks.
“Oh.”
“Mm.”
She does not say anything for a beat. Her eyes are drooping. I can read it on the small soft muscles around her temples, in the way her shoulders have stopped holding their captain-Omega posture and have started, in the small honest collapse of a person who is, for the first time in three nights, in a room she does not have to perform in, just allowed to sag.
“You do not feel good,” I observe, soft. “At all. Huh.”
She sighs.
