“All right.”
“All right,” I agree.
“Great.” Matteo claps once, brightly, the small percussive sound a man makes when he wants to skate the conversation onto a different rink. “Glad we’re aligned. Important meeting. Productive use of everyone’s afternoon. While you both have me, however, I would like to formally lodge, for the record —”
“Santori.”
“— that I still get first dibs.”
Jude pinches the bridge of his nose.
I lean on the counter and let my eyebrow climb. Slowly, because it is the only piece of my face that has ever cooperated with the goal of looking unimpressed.
“Dibs,” I repeat, because I have to. “On a person.”
“On an attention budget,” Matteo corrects. “An affection allocation. A first-pick of pursuit. I am being entirely civilized about this.”
“You,” Jude says, without lifting his head from his pinched nose, “are a menace and have always been a menace, and I do not know why I let you live under this roof.”
“Because I bring the only working sense of joy in this house, Jude, and you would be a small, sad man without me. Tell him, Rémi.”
“He brings noise,” I tell Jude, neutrally. “We can debate what flavor.”
“I bring
“It is the third one I worry about,” Jude mutters.
“Correctly. You always have.” Matteo pushes off the island, ambling toward the doorway in that loose long-legged way of his that means he has decided the conversation is over and intends to leave you with the bill. “Anyway. Lovely meeting. Glad we got the temporary-pack docket settled. I am off to be a productive member of this team and run drills like a good little winger, which, as Coach reminded me earlier, I did not do enough of today.”
He gets two steps from the kitchen doorway.
Stops.
Turns his head halfway over his shoulder, with the careful theatrical lightness of a man delivering a line he has been waiting twenty minutes to drop, and adds:
“Oh. By the way. We fucked.”
Silence.
Pure. Total. The kitchen clock pickles three full seconds out of the air. Somewhere down the hall a door clicks shut, and somewhere in the oven a loaf finishes proving, and somewhere in the back of my own skull a tally sheet I did not know I waskeeping flips a card from one column to another and the math, abruptly, reads different.
My eyebrow, the one that has cooperated my whole life with the goal of looking unimpressed, abandons its position and climbs into territory it has not visited since junior year of high school. Jude does not pinch the bridge of his nose this time. He covers his entire face with one large palm, the way a man does when he has decided the only honest response to news is to physically prevent his expression from contributing.
“Matteo,” Jude says, into his hand.
“Hm?”
“When.”
“Oh, the showers. Before lunch.” Bright, unbothered, as though reporting weather. “Anyway. I would have led with it, but the temporary-pack thing came up and I am, contrary to popular accusation, capable of reading a room.”
“Well,” Jude says, very slowly, lowering the hand from his face only enough to glare at the doorway, “fuck. We are actually doomed now.”
“Doomed?” Matteo, all wounded innocence.
“Doomed.” Jude does not break the glare. “Because you, Santori, have many talents, but commitment issues have never been one of them. You fall hard, you fall fast, and you fall in writing.”
Matteo laughs. Genuinely. The laugh of a man who has heard this assessment many times before and has, on every occasion, declined to refute it.
