“Fine. I am moving in only because Pinky is, structurally, too good to not hug through the night. Not for you.”
“Not,” Matteo says, smug, “for me.”
Rémi slides up against my right side. The pine-and-snow of him drifts down and layers itself over the blood-orange of Matteo and the small frosted strawberry of my own, and the small private chamber of my chest, against every reasonable assumption I would have made about it ninety minutes ago in a hotel corridor, drops a notch.
Jude, on the far edge of the bed, rises in the slow unhurried captain way of a man closing his own night down. He carries Rémi’s laptop to the small writing desk in the corner. He closes it. He dims the overhead lamp by half. He crosses back. He slips, quiet, onto the small available stretch of duvet on my left.
He does not, in fact, say anything.
His hand simply finds the front of my sleep T-shirt, slow and unhurried, and his palm presses, warm, to the small soft bracket of my stomach in the precise possessive captain palm of a man laying claim to the small piece of ribcage between him and the rest of the night.
Oh.
This.
This is what safe sounds like.
The amber-bourbon-and-vanilla of Jude’s scent layers itself over the pine-and-snow of Rémi and the blood-orange of Matteo and the small frosted-strawberry of my own, and the four of us, on the one king-size bed in a hotel city I have never been in, do the small unhurried thing the four of us, in our pack-house in Minnesota, have, in the past nine days, started doing without explicit comment.
I close my eyes.
The conversation in my head, on the small dark precise sentence I earned in the corridor this afternoon, does not, in fact, go quiet immediately. The small bright photograph of Saoirse Boyne in her goalie pads, of a Coach Declan O’Rourke whose face has not, in five years, worn that small unguarded grin in front of me, is going to be in the small private archive of my own brain for the rest of my career. The small dark sentence about the woman who came before me — the woman who would, on the precise probability curve of the universe, have been me, had she lived long enough to teach the small senior administrative tier what to do with a small bright wheat-haired goalie standing in net — is, in fact, going to be the small ghostly companion of my next four weeks. But the small darker conversation is, on the steady press of three Alpha bodies around me, beginning the small slow process of moving from the foreground to the small private back room where I can, in fact, leave it for one night.
I drift.
And, at the small soft edge of the drift, I feel the precise small soft press of lips against my temple, and Jude’s voice, low and unhurried, against the side of my ear.
“Goodnight, O’Shea.”
CHAPTER 29
Black Belt
~IRIS~
Seven to five in overtime.
That is, on the small dry scoreboard of the small private archive of my entire goalie career to date, the number I am going to be sitting with for an indeterminate stretch of nights, possibly the rest of the calendar year, possibly forever.
Two.
Two shots in the last ninety seconds of regulation. The first one a wrist-shot from the high slot that the post-side glove should, on every available metric, have been there for. The second one a wrap-around from the back of the net by their senior-tier captain, who is, on the small private accounting of the small senior-leagues commentariat, the kind of forward who manufactures wrap-around goals out of structural inevitability. I read the wrap. I read the shoulder. I committed. The puck still hit the back of the net.
Goalie. Pipes. Glove. Five-hole. The wall.
The wall, on the seventh of those seven, was not the wall.
The locker room is, around me at the small folding bench against the back wall, very, very quiet. The kind of quiet that the small public-facing internet callsthe room after,the smallthick silence of fifteen Alphas in damp gear and unfastened pads sitting with the precise interior recalibration of a roster that has, in the past nine minutes, lost a game it had no business being inside of in the first place.
Sweat. Cold-wet pad foam. The chemical-citrus of the linoleum cleaner from this morning. The small coppery undertone of the dressing tape on every wrist in the room. The dark malted release of a single popped energy drink someone has cracked at the far bench.
I have, in the past sixteen minutes, pulled off my gear in the precise unhurried automatic order of a goalie who can do the small undress in her sleep, swapped into my joggers and the soft pink-grey heather T-shirt I packed for the post-game flight home, and laced up my running shoes with the precise small ritual of a woman planning to slip out the locker-room door, walk the long carpeted corridor back to the visitor-team hotel, and sit, in the small private dark of the bathtub of the suite, for the small forty-five-minute private appointment with my own brain that the small dry inner accounting of a 7-5 OT loss requires.
Iris O’Shea, exit strategy in motion. Bag in hand. Three steps. The door is right there. Three steps. Two steps.
Coach Declan O’Rourke is in the doorway.
Cedarwood, black coffee, winter whiskey, the small leather-and-snow-on-wool layered under it all. The precise scent of safety that my body, against every conscious decision I have made about the man in the past forty-five days, files involuntarily on contact.
