CHAPTER 9
Paperwork
~JUDE~
I have never met an Omega who could be both dominant and disarmingly soft inside the same breath.
It is the first thing that knocks me off course about Iris O’Shea, and I keep being knocked.
One moment she is squared up at a problem, chin lifted, ready to skate it down and bury it in the corner. The next, something shifts behind those storm-grey eyes and a flicker of vulnerability surfaces, gone again before most people would clock it, and the captain in me has logged it. Filed it. Lifted his head from his clipboard at the soft, quick blink-and-it-is-gone of a girl who is more tired than she has agreed to let herself know.
So when she said the worddilemma, crooked at the corner of her mouth and small in a way her mouth has not been small all afternoon, everything in me went looking for the solution like it was a case to crack.
Which is, frankly, a problem.
Captains do not solve dilemmas. Captains build conditions where the team solves its own. It held this morning. It held through lunch. It has, somewhere between a quad bench and anice cream truck, quietly stepped out for a smoke and not come back.
She is two steps behind me now, finishing the cone she gave herself away over.
It is strawberry. Of course it is strawberry, because the universe has decided to commit to a bit. Pink scoop, sugar cone, a small precise rosette of whipped cream that the man in the truck assembled with a deftness that suggested decades of practice. She is eating it in a way that has been an open exhibit since we left the curb — small bites along the side first, then a careful rotation of the cone, then a tongue-flick to catch the drip on the rim before it reaches her fingers, the choreography of a person who has clearly negotiated cones in cold weather before and has the system down.
Her duffel hangs off my left shoulder. The hard-sided case is in my right hand. Both items weigh more than she does and I will not be discussing it.
She had said she could manage. She had said it lightly, with the back-of-the-throat dismissiveness of a person who has been told her whole life that asking for help is a transaction with consequences, and I had taken the duffel out of her hand anyway and shouldered it before the sentence had finished landing. Then the suitcase, lifted clean before she could put up a second polite resistance. The argument died in her mouth, and I watched her decide, very small and very fast, to let me have the win.
Three blocks later, the ice cream truck.
She had not asked. She had not even looked at me. She had simply turned her face toward the brightly painted side-window of a beat-up Chevrolet step van the way a compass needle turns north, and her eyes had gone glassy and intent at the same time, and the corner of her mouth had pulled into something so undisguisedly wanting that I had stopped on the sidewalk andsaid,seriously, and she had said — with a wave of one hand toward her dead phone and a flat little frown of pure indignation — that the ice cream truck only accepted cash.
“That is highway robbery in this economy, Kavanagh. Who carries cash? Do you understand the international banking situation? I cannot, in good conscience, fund a small criminal enterprise.”
Then she had pouted at me. Open. Undignified. Eyes the size of dinner plates. The exact face the truck windows of America have been engineered for since 1957.
I had paid for the cone.
I am still slightly annoyed with myself about it.
Apparently the goalie has a sweet tooth. Noted.
And before I let myself enjoy any of this more than I already have, I owe myself an honest accounting, because honesty is the captain’s tax and I pay it on time.
I have been watching Iris O’Shea since well before this morning.
Not stalking. Coaching. The distinction matters, and I will be repeating it to myself for the foreseeable future. Coach Declan dropped her file on my kitchen counter six weeks ago without preamble, the way he does everything important. A manila folder, dog-eared. A stat sheet that I read through twice and then made myself read again because the second read did not seem possible. Save percentage in a small Yorkshire league that did not have the decency to deserve her. Game footage on a thumb drive that I queued up on my laptop on a Tuesday and did not pause for ninety minutes.
So I know what she is. I know what she could be. I know what the league — the actual league, not the chirping kids in the next house over — will do to an unbonded Omega goalie in her first professional year, unprotected, undefended, walking throughtheir corridors without a single Alpha behind her who knows the difference between charming and a problem.
And then she showed up at the rink this morning and was, in person, somehow more than the footage had promised.
The captain in me went very still about that. The captain in me is still very still about it.
The sector-two house sits at the eastern edge of campus, set back from the road behind a lazy hedge that has not been trimmed since I have lived here, which is two seasons and counting and a deliberate choice. The other house — sector one’s — is a brick-and-glass new build with a basketball hoop bolted to the garage. Ours is older. A clapboard farmhouse the college purchased forty years ago, repainted whenever the maintenance budget remembered, with a wraparound porch and an honest-to-God screen door that slaps when you let it go.
I prefer it. No apology offered.
I shift the duffel on my shoulder, climb the three porch steps, and toe the screen door open with my boot. Behind me, Iris finishes the cone with a small last crunch of the tip, and I do not need to turn around to know she has just licked a finger and decided the gesture is socially acceptable because no one is looking.
Sweet tooth. Pride. The intersection of those two is going to be a recurring problem and I do not particularly mind.
