She does not look up. She reads.
“The undersigned Omega athlete, where unpacked, shall not be permitted to participate in official league competition or sanctioned matches. Housing may not be confirmed in the absence of registered packship.”
The room goes underwater.
That is the only way I can describe it. The kitchen sounds of the house behind us fade out. The cinnamon-and-butter in the air goes thin. Matteo’s grin does not so much fall as forget how to be a grin. Rémi has not moved at all, which on Rémi reads as a small contained scream.
Of course.Of course.It is the missing piece of a puzzle I have stared at for two years without ever clocking the shape of thehole. There has never been an Omega on this team, never been an Omega on any team in this league, and the answer is not policy and it is not prejudice and it is not even the chirps in the next house over. The answer is on the bottom line of a piece of college bureaucracy in a pink-haired girl’s lap.
An unpacked Omega cannot play. An unpacked Omega cannot be housed. Which means an Omega athlete cannot exist on this circuit at all unless the men around her decide, before the season starts, to formally bond themselves to her.
The sport is designed to fail her. By page. By line. By small print.
Iris sets the pen down on top of the paper. She exhales. Her chin stays level by a discipline that costs her, visibly, and the small private flicker I clocked on the bench under the maple is back, and for one suspended second I am not standing in my own living room. I am standing in a different doorway four years ago looking at the only other person I have ever seen wear that exact shade of tired.
Not now.
I do not let myself look at the past more than the half-glance, because the past is a room I have spent four years not unlocking and I am not opening it at this hour, in this light, in front of a girl I have known for nine hours and a winger who will read the shift on my face before I have finished arranging it.
But the dread that lands in my sternum is the same dread. The same metallic weight. The same powerlessness of watching someone I have decided to stand for run into a wall I cannot punch a hole through with the small private supply of force I am currently authorized to use.
It is the dread of a fourth name. The chair at our table that has been empty for four seasons. The pack of three that should have been a pack of four. The young man I lost to a habit that atehim in inches and that I could not, for all the captain’s tax I paid, save.
I close the door on it. I close the door on it. I close the door on it.
And when I open my mouth to say something — anything — Rémi gets there first.
Rémi, who does not speak. Rémi, who has not said more than four words since we walked through the front door. Rémi, who stands at the edge of the small kneeling shape of Iris O’Shea with his flour-smeared forearms and his quiet pine-and-snow scent and a face that gives away absolutely nothing and yet, somehow, gives away everything at the same time.
“So,” Rémi says, low and even and entirely without question.
“Let us be your temporary pack.”
CHAPTER 10
Temporary
~IRIS~
“W — w — what?”
It is the first time in my adult life I have heard myself genuinely stutter. The kind of stutter that lives in cartoons. The kind a woman with my mileage on her does not produce, because by twenty-four the vocal cords have been beaten into a sort of professional cynicism that does not let unrehearsed sounds slip out in public.
Apparently, the cords were not briefed for this.
I am still kneeling on the rug beside my hard-sided case, the pen Rémi offered me three minutes ago held suspended an inch above a line on a piece of college bureaucracy I now know was designed to ensure no one like me ever signs it. The form has not moved. Neither have I. The kettle of blood that has been quietly simmering in my chest since I read the small print has just been ladled, in a single sentence, somewhere considerably warmer and more dangerous than my sternum.
Did he just —
He just —
Matteo and Jude are staring at Rémi as if their brother has just walked into the living room and announced he is buyinga tugboat. Or perhaps a small, exotic carnivore. Their twin expressions of arrested disbelief, on two faces I have already started cataloguing for tell, are some of the best evidence yet that this is, in fact, a real thing that is happening on a real rug in a real common room.
Rémi himself is the calmest object in the room. Hip propped against the edge of his woodworking bench, flour still smeared on one forearm, towel slung over his shoulder. He shrugs at his housemates as though he has just suggested they pick up takeout.
“Look at the form,” he says, low and even. “Read the clause. Tell me what part of that is not designed to make any Omega in this league fail.”
Matteo opens his mouth. Closes it. Tilts his head.
