I hug Rémi from the front. Properly. Both arms around his waist, my cheek against his chest, the pine-and-snow of him layering itself over the small warm baked-bread of the kitchen.
“Welcome home, Iris.”
“Thank you, defenseman.”
He tips his head down. I tip mine up. The kiss is, on his part, soft — a careful unhurried defensive lay of his mouth against mine in the small low-key Rémi register he does everything else in. I rise onto my tiptoes. I kiss him longer. I let the small initiative of the angle press the next beat of the kiss into him, and Rémi, against the line of his entire established character,groans.
Quiet. Half-suppressed. The kind of small unguarded sound a defenseman produces when an Omega has, in his own kitchenat noon on a Sunday, chosen to deepen a kiss without his explicit prompting, and his hand comes up to the curve of my hip and rests there with the precise control of a man who has decided, against the rest of the data, to keep this respectable.
Oh.
Filing. The folder is, frankly, in crisis.
“You two cannot do that in this kitchen unless I am invited to participate,” Matteo announces from behind me, in the cheerful pitch of a winger choosing to escalate, “and I would like to formally put my name on the list of available participants for future iterations.”
I snicker into Rémi’s mouth.
Rémi breaks the kiss with the visible reluctance of a man overriding a strong personal preference, and presses his forehead, briefly, against the crown of my head. “Go upstairs, Iris. Get comfortable. We will tell you the rest after.”
“After what?”
“After you go upstairs.”
I climb the back stairs.
And I stop, three steps in, because the upstairs hallway is not, in any structural way, the upstairs hallway I left on Saturday morning.
The whole layout has been opened. The narrow run-down corridor with the wood-panelled wallpaper from 1986 has been stripped, refinished, and repainted a soft creamed-white. The hardwood floor has been refinished. Two new wall sconces in brushed brass have been installed. The smell on the air is fresh paint, sawdust, beeswax, and the very clean pine I now know is Rémi’s personal weather system, baked into the lumber of the construction.
And at the far end of the corridor, where the door of my converted utility-closet bedroom used to be, there is, instead, a wide new door painted a soft pale rose-pink with a hand-carvedteal-and-pink wreath at its center, woven from cursive wooden letters that spell the name IRIS.
No.
No, no, no.
I walk down the hallway with my hand against the wall the way a person walks down a hallway in a dream.
I close my fingers around the brass knob.
I push the door open.
Inside.
The room is enormous. Twice the size of the storage closet that lived here on Saturday. They have, somehow, knocked through a wall. There is a four-poster bed in the centre of the room, painted soft cream, with a canopy of sheer pale-pink curtains drawn back at the corners and looped with twine. Fairy lights have been threaded along the entire architecture of the canopy in the precise way I sketched on the Pinterest board I showed Jude yesterday. The bedding is white linen with a soft pink throw at the foot.
On the wall opposite, a bookshelf has been built into the studs from floor to ceiling. Six shelves of new books — my Goodreads TBR. Every cozy romance I have ever screenshotted and not been able to afford. Some arranged by spine color in a gradient. Some face-out, covers presented. Small ceramic pots between them holding tiny succulents.
On the right wall, a built-in writing desk with a small brass lamp and a stack of notebooks.
And in the corner, framed by two tall windows catching the snow-light off the lawn in a long soft-white wash, a small low platform built into the floor, padded with approximately six layers of cream and pink knitted throws and weighted blankets and the softest fabric a defenseman with a wallet has been able to source. Pillows. Two small lamps with amber bulbs. Built-in shelves holding tea kettles, candles, lavender bundles, and a stack of journals.
There is a small wooden sign on a brass hook hanging at the top.
Iris’s Cozy Nest.
Oh.
Oh, you motherfuckers.
