The corridor parts in front of us as if I am skating it. People know the jerseys. People know the names on the back of them. The traffic moves for me even when I am not asking it to, and today, specifically, I am happy to weaponize that for the pink-haired Omega trailing in my wake.
We come out the other side of the choke point near the admin wing and I drift to a stop, but I do not let go of her hand.
Because I secretly do not want to.
She does not let go of mine, either.
Notes it. Smirks.
“You know,” she murmurs, eyes drifting down to our joined hands, “you are going to give the entire student body the very strong impression that you are dating the new goalie.”
“Mm.” I cock my head. “What if that is, in fact, the precise impression I would like to give them.”
Her smirk twitches into something more dangerous.
“Tempting,” she says. “Your team will hate it, though. Men, as a rule, do not particularly care for a dominant woman.”
“Most men,” I correct, low, stepping into her space deliberately so she has to tip her chin up to hold the look, “do not, no. I am extremely particular about the women I bother with. And, Iris,” her name, deliberate, just the way she gave me mine in the shower, “I meant every word I said back there.”
Her breath catches. The smirk softens.
Strawberry warms a degree against my throat, sweet enough to ruin a man.
“Santori.”
The voice does not come from far away, and it does not climb to be heard. It lands in the middle of my chest like a check from behind. Low. Irish. Unhurried.
The voice of a man who has never once in his life needed volume to be obeyed.
“Unless you have decided your career path is to love-bomb our new goalie in a public hallway, I suggest you join your pack. There are drills we agreed you would attend, before you went disappearing on me when I sent you to confirm the showers were running.”
I lift my head. Slow. Not letting go of Iris’ hand.
Coach Declan stands in the mouth of the corridor with Rémi at his left shoulder and Jude at his right, the three of them arranged in the tactical formation that means a seniorstaff member is being escorted somewhere by his most reliable upperclassmen, and is using the trip to clean up a problem along the way.
Coach’s face is the locked-down neutral I have known since the day I met him, jaw set, mouth flat, the small muscle at the corner of his eye doing the only work his expression is willing to do.
Iris turns to look with me.
And the temperature of her hand in mine changes in roughly a quarter of a second.
Cold. Not the embarrassed cold of a woman caught flirting in a hallway. The other cold. The deliberate, practiced cold of someone who has had walls and is now hauling them back up from the basement and bolting them into the studs. Her shoulders square. Her chin lifts.
The storm-grey goes flat and unreadable, and the wicked little tilt at the corner of her mouth I have been carefully harvesting all afternoon vanishes as though switched off at the breaker.
I scan the three of them in a breath.
Rémi, first, because Rémi is always the easiest read for a person who knows where to look. Quiet, planted, hands loose at his sides, but the eyes are doing the thing they do when something has caught his attention sideways. He is intrigued. Deeply. A deeply intrigued Rémi is a man already running scenarios in his head.
Jude, next. Captain face. Set jaw.
The very small narrowing of those amber-warm eyes that, on Jude Kavanagh, is the equivalent of a lesser man throwing his stick across the rink. He is not pleased that my hand is wrapped around hers, or that I have by every available read claimed something in a hallway before I have had so much asa five-minute meeting with him about it. That is going to be a conversation later.
Coach. Last.
And here is where the readings stop being straightforward.
Coach Declan is irritated, which I expected. He is irritated because I vanished off a chore he assigned me. That would irritate any coach. It is the surface reading, and a perfectly clean explanation for the muscle ticking in his jaw and the small flat line of his mouth.
