“Okay,” she whispers.
“Okay,” I agree.
“Genuinely. Wow. We will return to that.”
“We will return to that.”
I move us inside. I drop our bags at the foot of the back-bedroom hallway. The cabin smells exactly the way the cabin always smells — cedar walls that have, for fifty-four winters, slowly released their resin into every fabric in the building; the cold sweet woodsmoke of a fireplace that has not been lit since I was last here in August; beeswax, because my grandmother, while she was alive, made the candles for every room and the wax of them is, somehow, still in the architecture; the faint warm yeasty trace of bread that has not been baked in this kitchen in nine months and that I can, all the same, smell when I close my eyes; and, very faintly, the cold mineral breath of the lake coming in through the window screens on the east wall.
“Shower,” I tell her, jerking my chin down the back-bedroom hallway. “Guest bathroom is the second door on the right. Towels are stocked, soap is in the niche. I will get a fire going in the meantime. When you are out and in comfortable clothes, we will start the actual weekend.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Pinky. Do not say it like that in this cabin.
She has no idea what she just did. Reset. Reset, captain.
She vanishes down the hallway with her overnight bag. The shower starts a minute later. I crouch at the fireplace, build the small steady tipi of kindling and birch bark I have built in this fireplace four hundred times in my adult life, strike the long match, and watch the flame catch.
Then I go to the small fridge under the cabin’s island counter, dig out one of the local pale ales my grandfather keeps stocked, crack it, and lean against the counter with the cold bottle against my palm to wait for her.
The shower turns off. A pause. The small soft sounds of a woman drying her hair on a towel and pulling on something soft.
Then the bathroom door opens. Bare feet on the cedar floor. The pad-pad-pad of her coming down the hallway.
She turns into the kitchen.
I, for the record, nearly choke on my beer.
Kavanagh.
Kavanagh, that is your old varsity jersey. From the wall of the upstairs guest room. The one I hung as a piece of decor when I was twenty-one and forgot about. Three sizes too big on her. Hitting her at mid-thigh.
Kavanagh. Breathe. You are a grown professional captain. Breathe.
She grins.
The slow guilty mastermind grin of an Omega who has located a hidden item by professional process of elimination and is, at this exact moment, prepared to defend her acquisition in court.
“O’Shea.” Carefully. “I know I hid that.”
“Oh, I know you hid it.” Hand on hip. “You hid it under a frame on the wall of the guest bedroom in your grandfather’s cabin, which is the most quintessentially Captain-Kavanagh hiding place a man has ever produced, and I want you to know that I located it within two minutes of entering the shower. And it has now been in active contact with my respiratory system for the duration of getting dressed. So it has my boogers on it. So I have to keep it. To prevent the transmission of disease. To you. Specifically. As a public-health measure.”
I laugh.
Properly. The full-chest laugh I have not done at a roommate joke in considerably longer than my pack would believe if you polled them, and Iris’s grin breaks open at the corners with the delighted reception of a woman who has, for the first time, gotten me there.
“You think,” I tell her, setting the beer down on the counter, “I am, in any way, scared of your boogers, Pinky.”
“I think a clever Omega should not have to be afraid of being challenged on a sound public-health argument.”
“Fair.”
She giggles. Properly giggles. The small bright giggle of a woman who is, against my own best professional judgement, the most beautiful living object in this cabin in his grandfather’s jersey at four-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon, and she pads over to me on her bare feet and stops in my space with the easy comfort of a woman who has, in the past two weeks, decided that my space is a place she is in fact allowed.
She takes the beer out of my hand.
She tips her head back. She takes a long, deliberate, throat-bobbing pull of it, holds it on her tongue for the brief amused beat of a woman tasting craft beer for the first time in a while, swallows, and hands the bottle back to me with the small triumphant smirk of a woman who has just won a bet she had not, until thirty seconds ago, formally entered.
