“Fine,” she murmurs back. “Go.”
I wave at her, lazy, two fingers off my temple, and I turn and walk.
Jude’s eyebrow climbs the second I reach them. Rémi falls into stride at my left and waits exactly long enough to be polite.
“Did you give her your phone,” Rémi murmurs.
“Mine does not work in this building anyway. Hers does not work in this country. She has admin to wrestle, dorms to find, an entire side hustle to invent. I do not want her stranded without a way to reach a human.”
I cut my eyes to Jude.
“I told her to text you when she has the room number. Keep your notifications on. Phone on loud.”
Jude says nothing.
The set of his jaw does not soften. He pulls his phone out of his pocket without looking at it, thumbs the side switch up off silent in a single practiced motion, and slides it back into his joggers.
The faintest twitch at the corner of Rémi’s mouth is the closest he comes to a smile.
“Talk later,” Jude says. Two words.
The captain version, not the friend version, but I have known him long enough to hear the difference between a closed door and one left on the latch, and this one is on the latch.
“Yep.”
I glance one last time over my shoulder.
Iris is already moving, my phone tucked into her back pocket, the pink head bobbing toward the heavy oak doors of the administration wing.
Coach Declan is still standing where he stood, hands behind his back, watching her go, and his face has not changed by a single millimeter.
The pink crown bobs once. The heavy oak swings shut behind her.
And Coach’s eyes do not leave the place she was standing in for a full beat after she is gone.
Yeah. They have history.
The damaging kind, with old fingerprints all over it.
I do not yet know the shape of the wreck, or what it means for the three of us, for Jude and Rémi and the careful, patient pack-ship we have been building since we were boys. I do not yet know what it means for the strange, fast, undeniable thing that has wired itself into my chest in the space of a single day.
But I am, simply, curious to see what happens next.
CHAPTER 8
Twenty-Four Hours
~IRIS~
The administrator’s office smells of stale Keurig coffee, paper that has lived three lives in three filing cabinets, and the faint, defeated lavender of an air freshener someone gave up plugging in two weeks ago.
Her name plate says PATRICIA HENDERSON — HOUSING & RESIDENT LIFE, in the kind of brass-effect plastic that fools nobody. She is a Beta in her mid-fifties with a salt-blonde bob, reading glasses perched at the very tip of her nose, and the precise weary posture of a woman who has spent thirty years explaining bad news to people who outrank her.
There is a half-eaten granola bar on her desk. Three highlighters lined up like little plastic soldiers. A photo of a golden retriever I am quietly choosing to like her for.
“Miss O’Shea.” She does not look up from her monitor. “Take a seat.”
I take the seat. My duffel slumps against my shin like a co-conspirator.
