“You are done for the day,” he says. Not a question. “Go rest. Logistics tomorrow. Jude will run the form back over to admin on his way to the coaches’ debrief.”
“Sign the dotted line,” Jude adds. “We handle the rest.”
I look up at the three of them. Three large men, arranged with no apparent coordination around the small kneeling shape of me on a rug in a farmhouse common room, and the absurd, dangerous warmth gathering behind my sternum is something I will be examining at length later, somewhere I am not also being looked at.
“Are you really, really sure.”
Three heads nod, perfectly in unison, like they rehearsed it at recess.
I sigh.
“Fine. Okay.” I lower the pen, find the line, and sign in the looping scrawl I have used since I was sixteen. “Iris O’Shea, of sound mind and questionable judgment, accepts the temporary packship of three idiots she has known for nine collective hours. Y’all better not cower out on me.”
“Cowards do not get assigned to my house,” Jude says, very dry.
“Cowards do not get assigned to my
Rémi simply tips his chin at me. Which, on the Rémi scale, I am beginning to suspect translates to a small standing ovation.
I cap the pen and pass it back to him, fingers brushing his palm in the exchange, and the cool pine-and-snow of him slides up my wrist like air at the top of a mountain, settling something at the base of my throat I had not realized was unsettled.
Then I remember.
I dig in my coat pocket and pull out Matteo’s phone, holding it out to him on a flat palm.
“Here. You can have it back. You actually need it.”
He does not take it.
He looks at it. Then at me. Then crosses his arms.
“Keep it.”
“Matteo.”
“Keep it, Pinky. I’m clearly fine. Anyone I need to talk to is either in this room or my mother. You, on the other hand, may yet require a means to text people. Or, you know. Doom-scroll. Recreationally.”
“I do enjoy a strong doom-scroll,” I admit, in the smallest voice I have used all afternoon. “Though, candidly, I haven’t got anyone to text either. Nobody has actually checked in on me since I landed, so. Phone or no phone, the inbox is going to look the same.”
It comes out lighter than I mean it. The way these things have to come out, when you are saying them on someone else’s rug. The way you have to say a true thing when you have not finished sorting out how angry you are about it being true.
There is a small, telling silence.
Rémi’s pale eyes have gone fractionally tighter. Jude’s shoulders have come down a degree they were not high to begin with. Matteo, for once, has nothing immediate to say, which is its own answer.
“Your old team,” Jude says, after a beat, careful, “knows you got out, right? They know you’re here?”
“Oh, sure. They know.” I tip a shoulder. “I think I was, in retrospect, more of a placeholder than I’d allowed myself to notice. Useful while I was there. Out of sight, out of inbox.”
The look that passes between Jude and Rémi over the top of my head is not subtle, and yet neither of them comments. I appreciate it more than I should.
“Keep the phone,” Matteo repeats, gentler this time. “If you need any of us, that’s how. We’ll sort the phone situation properly on the weekend. Bookstore. Plan an outing. I’ll let you pick the case.”
My eyes prickle, which is unacceptable, so I yawn again to give myself something else to do with my face.
“Okay,” I mumble, and slide the phone back into my pocket. “Weekend. Case.”
I push myself to my feet. The duffel and the case have already been ferried somewhere, presumably the storage room I am about to start calling home, which means I am free to do the only remaining piece of administrative business I have left in me for the day, which is fall over.
