Page 67 of Omega’s Forward

It’s a stupid thing to do and I do it anyway. Cushions. The stack of files on the dining table. I put the pregnancy test in the bathroom bin, wrapped in tissue, and then I take it out again and put it in the kitchen bin under the tea bags, because the bathroom bin is the first place anyone would look.

Then I stand in the middle of the living room and hear myself and stop.

He’s not going to look in the bins. He’s going to look at me.

I have lived here nine years. I bought this flat with the first real money I ever made, and I bought it for the terrace and the light and the fact that there is nothing in it, not one single thing, that has anything to do with ice or sticks or my father. No photographs. No jerseys. When the sports package went on the television, I put it under a profile called Guest, as if that made a difference. This flat is the one place on earth that hockey never got into.

In three hours the biggest hockey player I have ever seen is going to walk up my stairs.

I keep thinking of him wheeling a case along the platform at Green Park with a hundred commuters flowing round him. He’ll be too big for the carriage door. He’ll have to duck. No one is going to recognize him. Probably. Professional hockey isn’t a thing here like it is back home. He’s nobody here. In this city he’s just a big American with a beat-up face and no idea where he’s going.

He is walking into my city, my flat, my hockey-free life.

And I should be at work. It’s a damned Tuesday. I’ve never taken a Tuesday off in my life, not unless it was heat-related and only then because no omega on this planet would ever go to work when they’re in heat.

Home on a Tuesday. That’s my life gone mad already.

I stop with a cushion in my hands.

Tuesday.

Tuesday isn’t just a thing for me. This Tuesday is an important one. Today is an important one.

Barons at home to the Marauders. Cade Dorn’s first game back in that building since he put the Swedish boy on a stretcher.

The face-off is tonight. And he is on the Piccadilly line.

He’s missing it.

I put the cushion down very carefully.

Instead he has taken a plane to come visit me.

I don’t know what to do with that. He came because I sent him an email. He came for the baby.

I say it to the empty flat, out loud. “It’s not about me.”

The flat doesn’t answer so I go and find my coat.

*

There is no coffee in this flat.

I threw it out three weeks ago, a full bag of good beans, because I couldn’t stand to open the cupboard it lived in. I don’t miss it. My stomach doesn’t miss it.

But he drinks it. Black, no sugar, one large. I am not going to have him sit at my table with a glass of water while I drink peppermint tea like an invalid.

So I go down the six flights and out into the street.

It’s cold. Proper London cold, damp and gray and getting into the collar. I keep my coat done up and my head down and walk to the little grocer on the corner where I buy a bag of ground coffee and a carton of milk in case he’s changed his mind about black.

I walk back with the bag against my chest and my breath going up in front of me.

I take the stairs slower than I used to. That’s new too.

Back in the flat I put the coffee in the cupboard and shut it. Then I open it and take the bag out and put it next to the kettle, where a person could see it, and then I stand there hating myself, and leave it.

Half past ten.