“No,” she says, easily, “but I like to test such a theory.”
Oh.
Oh, Captain. The captain accepts.
I keep my eyes on hers. I lift the bottle. I tip it back and swig the rest of it in one slow steady pull, the way the man who taught me how to drink a beer taught me how to drink a beer, without breaking eye contact with her once.
“I,” I tell her, lowering the empty bottle, “love a good challenge.”
“So do I,” she purrs. “But, fair warning, sir. I am, frankly, very good at beer pong. And I have, against every assumption a man might make based on my body weight, an extremely high tolerance. Do not, on a wet Wednesday at your grandfather’s cabin, tempt me into something you are going to regret.”
“O’Shea.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“You have, with that one sentence, tempted me into approximately four things I am professionally going to ignore for the moment, and one I am going to act on.”
“Oh?”
“Come.”
I reach into the fridge, pull out two more bottles, and walk her through the kitchen toward the back of the cabin.
I open the slider to the back deck and step aside.
And I watch her see it for the first time.
The deck wraps around the back of the cabin in a long cedar arc, twelve feet deep, with three Adirondack chairs my grandfather built in 1976 lined up along the rail. The cabin sits on a small private inlet of the lake, ringed by mature pine and the soft red-gold of October birch, the water glass-still at this time of day, the small clear ripples around the dock the precise lazy ripples a lake makes when the only thing in it is the lake. The sun, already low, throws a long warm strip of copper across the surface and catches in the tops of the trees on the far shore in a way that I have, in the eleven years I have been coming here, never gotten over.
Iris stops at the rail.
Her bare feet on the cedar planking. The borrowed jersey moving against the backs of her thighs in the small evening breeze. Her hair, still damp from the shower, lifting at the temples. Her grey eyes the round wide grey of an Omega who has just been handed a thing the man handing it to her has been quietly carrying for himself.
“Oh,” she whispers.
Pinky.
I cross to her. I crack both bottles against the rail with the small expert flick of a man who has been opening beers withoutan opener since he was sixteen. I hand her hers. She takes it, eyes still on the water.
We clink.
“To the cabin.”
“To the cabin.”
She sips. I sip. The cold malt of the local pale ale lays itself over the warm honest air of the deck, the soft pine-and-water of the inlet, the burnt-amber of my own scent in the rim of the bottle.
“Okay.” She tips her chin at me. “KPLO. Tell me everything. Why is it underground? What does it actually do? Why is your grandfather paying for plane tickets for small Yorkshire goalies?”
“Operationally,” I begin, leaning my forearms on the deck rail, “the Knot-Pucking League Organization was founded in 1987 by a group of older Alphas, my grandfather included, who had been quietly horrified by the fact that the country’s most lucrative organized sport had, structurally, no infrastructure for Omegas. Not at the youth level, not at the collegiate level, certainly not at the professional. They put up the founding capital, built a private merit-scholarship program, and have, for thirty-eight years, been quietly identifying Omega athletes with the talent ceiling to break through, and funding the airfare and tuition required to put them inside the buildings that did not, on paper, want them.”
“Which is why,” Iris says, slowly, “it does not advertise.”
“Which is why it does not advertise. Loud advertising would draw the kind of administrative pushback that would shut down the funding channels. Quiet operations let the scholarships go where they need to go without the institutional friction of a press release.”
She is quiet for a beat. The sun has dropped another notch. The strip of copper on the lake has lengthened.
“Not a lot of Alphas,” she says, finally, “want to actually help Omegas.”
