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I try—and fail—to bite back a grin. “So salty.” And I didn’t even relay Aiden’s taunt about kissing me.
“Should’ve stabbed the fucker in the jaw so he couldn’t run his mouth so much.”
“So violent.” I shake my head, scooping up the last of my chili and toppings on the last of my chips. “I’m so sad this is gone. We do have leftover veggie chili. Would it be crazy to have the same dinner two nights in a row?”
Killian shakes his head, standing up with his bowl and leaning over to grab mine, too. “Living dangerously. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up with you.” He rinses the dishes out in the sink, glancing over his shoulder at me as he does. “By the way, a maid will be here tomorrow while we’re at school. She’ll do the laundry and clean up. I don’t usually have a cat here, though, so if you need her to do anything extra for Toast, just leave a note.” He turns off the faucet and walks over to tap a piece of paper hanging on the front of the fridge. “Grocery list is right here. Add anything you need her to pick up for the week. If you want a specific brand, make sure you write it down so she gets the right thing.”
My eyes widen. “You have a maid who also does your grocery shopping?”
“I grab stuff between visits if I have to, but she does the bulk of the shopping and cleaning so I don’t have to waste time on it,” he states. “She comes once a week.”
“Wow.” I figured he had a maid, but I’ve certainly never had a maid, so it feels bizarre that a stranger will come clean up after me and buy me groceries. “It’s nice of your parents to do that for you so you can focus on school.”
“They don’t. I pay for the maid myself. It’s worth it to me. I figure my time is better spent on other things. There’s always a fuckload of reading and other shit to do, so…”
“That’s smart, if you can afford it. A once weekly maid would probably cost at least as much as I make working both jobs on Sunday, so I couldn’t, but I can certainly see the logic of freeing up your time like that. Sadly, I don’t know of any college jobs that pay that well.”
“It’s not technically a college job. I went in on an investment with my friend Silvan sophomore year. There were startup costs I couldn’t afford back then, but he took care of it and assumed all the risk. He let me pay him back out of my share of the profits over the next year and now we’re equal partners with equal stakes, but while I could pay back the money, I couldn’t pay back the gesture. It’s no big deal to him and he didn’t frame it that way, but realistically, he did me an enormous favor. When you have money, it’s easy to make more. He knew I didn’t, and he also knew I didn’t want to ask my stepdad to borrow any, even for a brief time, so he made sure I didn’t have to.”
“Wow. Silvan sounds like a good friend.”
“He’s a great friend. Very loyal to his own.”
“When Aiden was trying to get a meeting with the leader earlier, he mentioned Silvan. He had put his money on Hex as the leader, but he said Silvan was the most logical choice because of his dad, he just wasn’t sure he’d want the responsibility.”
The mention of Aiden annoys him, but he nods. “He’s not far off the mark. Silvan is the most connected, but he has plenty of his own shit going on. He’s not really interested in being the king of the Blue Bloods on top of it. He’s a great brother, though. I’m glad we got to be Blue Bloods at the same time.”
“He’s a senior too, right? Were you tapped the same year?”
He shakes his head. “Nah, they scooped him up as soon as he stepped foot on campus. Most of us are given the opportunity to join the Blue Bloods, but they would have courted him if they had to. With the family he comes from, the guy was a shoo-in. Took ’em a little longer to decide on me. I was tapped sophomore year, which is why things turned around for me that year.”
“Can I be a Blue Blood?” I ask lightly. “It sounds like a sweet gig.”
He smirks faintly. “Sorry, no girls allowed.”
“Ugh,” I say, rolling my eyes. “Typical.”
“Even if they were, you don’t have the stomach for it. It’s not all perks and power consolidation; there are responsibilities, too. You have to get your hands dirty sometimes, and since you have a moral opposition to eating meat because it means an animal had to die…”
“I probably don’t qualify.”
He shakes his head. “Definitely not.”
“Well, I could at least be a Blue Blood’s maid. I can clean and grocery shop. Maybe you should fire the one you have now and hire me instead,” I joke.
He smirks. “I’m game, but you have to wear a maid costume of my choosing while you work.”
“Hey, I deal with sexual harassment at work already. May as well at least be harassed by a guy I like.”
It was a joke, but his eyebrows rise and I see he doesn’t take it as one. “There better not be anyone harassing you at work.”
He has clearly never been a woman working in a restaurant.
I don’t want him to worry about it, though, so I assure him, “Nothing I can’t handle myself.” Looking for a swift subject change, I add, “Speaking of a fuckload of reading, I should probably get started on mine.”
“Yeah, me too.”
I grab my half-empty bottle of water and my phone and start to move, but then I realize this long-ass marble counter is actually a perfect study spot. “Should we do it here?”
