“I am not short. You are simply absurdly tall. There is a difference. The difference is significant.”
“Mm-hm.” Matteo tilts his head. “Sure. Although, for the record, I know you like the height differential. I distinctly remember the height differential being a feature in the show —”
“SHUT UP.”
She comes at him.
Pure animal velocity. A small pink-haired Omega launching herself at a winger twice her size, the popcorn bowl wobbling on the coffee table, Rémi’s neat circle of stones nearly catching a knee, and Matteo himself simply laughing as she lands on him with the full force of approximately one buck-twenty soaking wet and approximately five percent of her body weight in actual indignation, and barely shifts him an inch.
“Come on, Miss Black Belt,” he taunts, holding her at arm’s length by the back of his enormous hoodie she is wearing, “take me down. Show us.”
“YOU SON OF A BITCH.”
“Love that for me.”
Rémi stands. Brushes invisible lint off his joggers. “I will get the s’mores kit before the integrity of this firepit is compromised.”
It takes us a full ten minutes to corral the chaos into a watchable configuration.
Rémi resumes his floor position on the rug, one long leg folded beneath him, the marshmallow skewers laid out beside him with the precision of a man laying surgical tools. Matteo settles on the couch with the popcorn bowl in his lap and one arm extended along the back of the cushions, which I am, professionally, ignoring. I claim the leather wingback that has been my chair since the day we moved in, the one Rémi has been quietly threatening to replace with something less aggressively medieval for two years. And Iris — having lost her tackle, won her dignity, eaten three handfuls of cursed popcorn, and demanded a personal s’more on standby — folds herself into the corner of the couch nearest Rémi, drawing her knees up under the enormous hoodie she is wearing until only her face and one foot are visible above the fabric.
She looks, in the soft amber light of the candles on the mantel, smaller than her personality has any business being.
I arch an eyebrow at her.
“And whose hoodie,” I say, gently, “did you steal this evening, Pinky.”
“Have absolutely no idea,” she says, with the angelic serenity of a thief in mid-getaway. “Found it on a chair upstairs after my shower. Movie nights demand hoodies. It is a known law of physics. The trajectory cannot be altered.”
“Right,” Rémi notes, threading a marshmallow with infinite calm. “That one is Matteo’s.”
“ABOUT TIME,” Matteo announces, with the satisfaction of a man who has just received a delayed shipment. He drops himself onto the couch on Rémi’s other side and aims his next sentence at Iris like a quarterback locating his tight end. “Now steal Jude’s jersey and we are square, Pinky. Even on the wardrobe ledger.”
She smirks, slow.
Her eyes slide across the room to mine. The challenge in them is delighted and shameless.
“Do not,” I tell her, leveling the gaze of a captain who has run actual prison-yard discipline sessions in his time. “Do not steal my jersey. I am, at present, in possession of exactly one functional jersey, because somebody on this couch decided to spill orange juice down my last one yesterday morning.”
Matteo lifts the popcorn bowl in a small, unrepentant toast.
“Regret nothing,” he says, serenely.
“Santori, I swear on my mother’s biscuit recipe —”
“Play the movie, Cap. Play the movie. The night is young, my opinions are unfiltered, and we have miles of plot to get through before Toy McTeenage Skater learns to skate with a man who is, statistically speaking, a known liability.”
I let it go. I press play.
The Cutting Edge unfolds on the screen in the colour-graded warmth of a film made before half the people in this room were born, and the living room of the sector-two house settles into a quiet I have not heard inside these walls in months.
It should be louder than this. We are four very loud people. Matteo alone is normally a small noise tax on any room he occupies. And yet the cumulative atmosphere we have produced — Rémi cross-legged at the coffee table toasting marshmallows on a slow rotation, Matteo stretched along the couch with onehand absentmindedly working the popcorn bowl, Iris quietly tucked between them with her eyes locked on the screen and her mouth doing the small subconscious flickers of a woman who is, somewhere in there, falling for both leads simultaneously — reads, on the inside, like a room with a heartbeat.
I sit in my wingback and watch it.
Peaceful.
This is what peaceful looks like. The thing you have been quietly engineering for two seasons. It looks like this.
