She leans, the small five-degree lean of a woman conceding gravity.
I pull her in.
She comes, against my chest, the way she did in the locker room ninety minutes ago, except this time without any of the earlier-afternoon armor still on the outside of her. Her cheek presses into the cold-damp fabric over my collarbone. One small fist finds the front of my henley and stays there. The pine-and-snow of my scent layers itself over the frosted strawberry of hers, and I can, against my own better professional judgment, feel her actively allow the contact — not the wary tolerance of a polite Omega permitting a hug, but the small full unguarded permission of a woman handing her weight to a man she has decided to trust.
Oh, Iris.
“I hate,” she whispers, into the fabric of my chest, “feeling like I am always on a fucking upscale battle.”
“Okay.”
Beat. Her fist tightens in the front of my henley.
“Rémi.”
“Mm.”
“Can we not tell Jude. About the blockers. About the withdrawal thing. Please.”
Oh.
Matteo told her about Connor.
Or Jude did, in the kitchen yesterday. The man cooked her a stew and gave her the name. We are all in the same conversation now.
“For now,” I tell her, into the crown of her hair. “For now we are not telling Jude. But you, Iris, will tell him eventually. You will not run from that conversation. He will need to hear it from you and not from us.”
“Mm-hm,” she breathes.
Her breath against the front of my shirt has gotten slower. The small fist of hers, in my henley, has gone slack.
I pull back, half an inch. Just enough to see her face.
Her eyes are closed.
Pinky.
I shift my arms. Slow. Careful. The lift is mostly economic — she weighs, against my shoulders, the precise nothing I clocked the night I carried her up from the movie-night couch, all muscle and defiance and small bony sleep-warm bird-weight — and I lay her back onto the paper-sheeted exam table the way you lay anything you do not want to wake into a thing that has been built to hold sleep.
There is a small folded note on the side counter.
I cross. I open it.
Mr. Bellerose — I gave her a mild relaxant in the IV port before we started bloodwork. She will be drowsy for an hour. Please feel free to use this room as long as you need it. The door locks from the inside.
— Dr. Halpern.
Oh, you saint.
I do not, generally, develop opinions about strangers in twenty-five minutes. I have just developed one about Dr. Halpern. I will be sending her, at season’s end, a quietly expensive bottle of something.
I cross back to the table. I dig in my pockets for my keys, my phone, my wallet. I set them on the side counter beside the note. I unlace my boots. I leave them under the table. I lock the door. The bolt clicks.
Then I climb, very carefully, onto the exam table behind her.
The table is, technically, single-Omega width. The math is, in the small dry accounting of a man my size, generous. I slide one arm under her neck. I curl my other around the small bowed bracket of her ribcage. I pull her, gentle, against the line of my chest, and her sleeping body, against every adult instinct I have, settles into me with the same unguarded total surrender she gave me ninety seconds ago in the hug.
Her hair smells of frosted strawberry and the chemical-lavender of the clinic’s soap and, very faintly underneath, the pine-and-snow that has been on her for two weeks because she has been quietly stealing my laundry.
