“That’s right.”
Jude’s voice carries across the ice in the easy unhurried way it carries everywhere, and a heartbeat later the captain himself is skating into the open space between the two team halves, the captain’s letter on the chest of his white pinnie picking up the overhead light. He comes to a clean stop a stride off Coach Declan’s shoulder, planted square, posture unbothered. “Submitted yesterday. Confirmed this morning. Iris is part of our pack. She’s ours.”
Matteo glides in behind him, on his other shoulder, white pinnie pulled crooked over his shoulder pads in the deliberate slouch he wears like a personality. He has not bothered to hide the grin. Rémi follows last, quiet and enormous, taking up the third point of the triangle, and the three of them stand at center ice flanking my head coach in a configuration that does, for the first time in twenty-four hours, look like a unit.
I am, ostensibly, still examining my pad strap. The strap has not changed.
A long, low whistle goes up from one of my sector’s defensemen, the sort of impressed under-the-breath whistle aman makes when his teammate has just done something he secretly admires and will roast him for later. From the far half of the rink, a chorus of low scoffs and grunts comes back, the small mean wind of a group of men who have just learned the door they tried to close has been pried open over their heads.
“Hold the fuck on.”
That is Brennan. Sector one’s captain. The voice I have only heard described to me and now get to learn for myself, deep and braying and laced with the particular masculine outrage of a man who has been told, in public, that something he assumed was his decision was, in fact, not. He skates a half-circle out in front of his crew, the dark sweep of his pinnie cutting the air like a flag a person planted on a hill they cannot defend. The body is impressive. Six four, broad through the chest, blond hair cropped close. Were this a different morning and I were a different woman, I might describe him as good-looking. I am, blessedly, not.
“An unpacked Omega cannot be on this team. That is league regulation. That is not a gray area. So someone explain to me right now how the pink-haired walk-in is suddenly skating in a white pinnie when, last I checked, she did not arrive with a pack on her back.”
Voss, from his usual orbit at Brennan’s elbow, snorts. “Oh, come on. She probably batted those big sad eyes at the captain over a piece of paper and the captain bent the rules. We’ve all watched it happen before. Omegas have one job and they’re very good at it.”
A few low laughs spill out of the sector-one half. Some uglier than others.
Breathe, O’Shea. Strap. Stick. Don’t look at them yet.
I do not look at them yet. I do, however, lift my head out of my pad just enough to track the back of Jude’s neck, because I know he is going to do something and I do not want to miss it.
Jude does not do anything.
It is Rémi who skates forward.
Half a stride. No more than that. Just enough that he is now standing inside the gap between the two sectors instead of beside it, and the entire rink registers the movement the way the rink always registers Rémi Bellerose moving, which is to say with the small reflexive flinch of an audience watching a piece of furniture decide to walk across the stage.
“She is part of our pack.”
Low. Even. Five words, the way Rémi tends to issue words at all, like he has only been allotted so many for the calendar year and intends to use them where they will land.
The rink, which had not entirely settled from the announcement, freezes again. Differently. The first freeze was shock at policy. This one is the shock of a roster suddenly remembering that the quietest man on it has a voice, and that the voice is currently, on the ice, in full view, speaking on a stranger’s behalf.
Even Brennan’s jaw stalls.
Across my own half of the ice, three or four of the sector-two boys exchange a look I will be replaying for hours. The look of men registering, in real time, that the giant quiet pillar of the house has just declared a thing in public, and that whatever they had privately suspected might be going on in the back wing of the farmhouse has, with that one even sentence, become the official position of their captain’s inner circle. Hargrove’s eyebrows have climbed up under the front of his helmet. Petrov’s mouth is open. Linder, ever the analyst, is already nodding the small slow nod of a man arranging his future opinions to align with whichever way the room is now committed.
“Cap approved the forms yesterday,” Rémi continues, conversational, as though the listening rink is a quiet party he has been politely asked to give a brief update at. “Headmasterstamped them. We confirmed pack status this morning. She is our Omega. She is in our pack. She will be living in our sector at the house.”
Voss opens his mouth. Rémi continues over him without raising the volume one click.
“And you do all know,” he adds, with the precise, unbothered flatness of a man delivering a piece of information for the formal record, “that our sector’s wing is scent-proofed. Has been since the renovation two summers ago. So none of you needs to lose sleep about a thing.”
It is the second part of the sentence he wants them to hear. The first is the cover.
Matteo, two seconds behind on the cue but never one to leave a beat without a punchline, ambles forward and folds his arms across the front of his pinnie.
“So don’t get all jealous about how active we might be behind closed doors, gentlemen.” He pauses, lifts a hand in apologetic generosity. “And I would like to apologize, with my entire heart, in advance, because the house is not technically soundproof. So if things get loud and creaky on our wing some night, fellas, do yourselves a kindness, take your earbuds and your wounded male egos to a friend’s couch. Free advice from a concerned roommate.”
The whole rink, sector loyalties briefly forgotten, comes apart at the seams.
A chorus of whistles, groans, theatrical fake-retching from the sector-one half, the sound of two sector-two defensemen skating across to playfully slug Matteo in the upper arm and tell him in unequivocal language that they did not need that image with their morning coffee. Hargrove, my breakfast-toast-bandit from the kitchen yesterday, lets out a delighted, unhinged hoot. Petrov drops his stick. Linder, from somewhere in the back,simply says, very quietly, “gross,” and a fresh wave of laughter goes up.
Men. Sex. The whole gender, the whole subject, all at once.
I keep my face under my mask and roll my eyes so hard the inside of my own skull objects. I am, however, biting the inside of my cheek hard enough to leave a mark, because the corner of my mouth is doing the traitor thing and there is, professionally speaking, no time for the corner of my mouth.
