“I can build shit.”
Beat.
“I can build you one.”
My jaw, traitorously, drops.
Properly drops. The hinge of it, the actual muscular complex, gives up. I stare at him from my stool at the island, and the entire kitchen tilts a half degree to the left, and I have, suddenly, no idea what to do with my hands or the cup in them or the corner of my mouth that has started to do a small, embarrassingly grateful wobble.
Matteo unfurls off the couch.
He ambles across the rug to where I am sitting, slides one warm hand under my jaw with the casual deftness of a man who has been physically managing me as a hobby for two weeks, and gently pushes my mouth closed.
“And,” he adds, conversationally, “we can buy you the books you actually want to put on it.”
Oh. Oh, no.
Eye-water threatened. Threat retracted. Pride still partially intact.
Jude, behind me, sets his smoothie glass down on the counter. “And, while we are gathering hobbies into the curriculum.” He tips his head, considering. “We could do some kind of hockey-house book club. Once we are off the road and there is breathing room. It would, frankly, be good for some of the guys. All any of them do off the ice is doom-scroll. Readingwould be a net improvement. And it would be a way to do something as a unit that did not involve sticks or pucks. Get the team out of one register and into another.”
“OH MY GOD.”
Matteo wheels on Jude. His grin is delighted. “Oh, look at our captain, gentlemen. Quietly trying to entwine our Omega’s hobbies into the curriculum of an entire NCAA Division One hockey program. It is so subtle. So strategic. He is a master of his craft.”
“Go,” Jude says, mildly, “suck a lemon, Santori.”
“Will do. After the book club.”
“Wait.” I am still staring at all three of them. “Wait, wait. Genuinely. You guys are —”
“Yes,” Rémi says, before I have finished.
“Okay but —”
“Yes,” Matteo agrees.
“It would,” Jude says, quietly, “be good for the team. Doing a relatable activity as a unit that breaks the ice further. Especially with you on the roster. What do you think.”
“I — I would love that.” My voice has gone embarrassingly small. “I would. Genuinely. I have been wanting an excuse to talk about books out loud with people for, ah, my entire life. What — what would we start with? Is it going to be themed? Are we going to pick by vote, or rotate picks, or —”
“We will offer it,” Jude says, calmly, with the particular captain finality that means he has just put a date on a project, “after our first official game. Open invitation to the whole sector. See who bites.”
“DEAL.”
I am beaming. I am embarrassingly, transparently beaming. My face is doing whatever it is doing without my consent and the three of them are watching me do it with the relaxed indulgenceof men who have, frankly, been waiting two weeks for this particular face and were going to keep working until they got it.
I look at them. All three of them. The three different scents stacking around me at the island like a small invisible architecture I have, in fourteen days, grown helplessly accustomed to.
“Thank you,” I whisper, before my brain has authorized the words. “Seriously. Thank you for, ah. Accepting my little hobbies. Letting me have them. They are dumb but they keep me — functional, I think.”
Matteo’s smirk softens. He lifts his hand. Runs it, slow, through my pink hair, smoothing it back from my temple with the casual ownership of a man who has been doing the gesture for considerably longer than the calendar would suggest he has been allowed to.
“We have got to keep your hobbies alive, sweetheart. So the whole of life is not just centered on the perfection of winning on a sheet of ice. That is a small lonely religion to be raised inside.”
He winks. He leans down. He presses a kiss against my temple, warm and small and absolutely without theater, and the part of my chest that has been quietly accumulating evidence over fourteen days files the kiss in a folder labelledItems to Examine Later, Privately, In a Locked Room With No Witnesses.
“Happy?” he murmurs against my hair.
