Chapter Eighteen
Brynn
“He played you.”
I look up, eyes wide, as Killian scoops veggie chili up on a Frito and pops it into his mouth. “No.”
He nods. “Yes,” he says when he finishes chewing. “He’s clearly not an idiot. He’s observant enough to gauge your reactions during the conversation and manipulative enough to pivot when he needed to. When the first tack he took didn’t get him the results he wanted, he switched courses. He probably figured you for a softie, so he appealed to that side of you instead. And it worked,” he says, gesturing to me.
“Look, I’m not vouching for the guy, I’m just telling you what he said.”
“He shouldn’t be saying anything to you because I don’t want you talking to him.”
“So I should cancel our lunch date this weekend?” I ask innocently.
The flat look he gives me tells me he is not amused, and it makes me smile.
“It’s not like I wanted to talk to him. Ryan wasn’t there yet, and he just showed up. We were in public, so I figured he couldn’t do anything.”
“He could piss me off,” Killian mutters.
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?”
A smirk tugs at his mouth. “I’d say it’s as good a spot as any.”
His tone is more suggestive than mine, so I shoot him a teasing look as I slide off the seat to go grab my books. “Maybe after our study date.”
___
I love and hate Tuesdays in near equal measures.
I start the day off with Calhoun’s iconic, all-encompassing introductory humanities course. You’d think introductory would mean they ease you in, but not at Calhoun.
On the very first Tuesday of the semester, they assigned us The Odyssey and said we needed to be finished reading it by Thursday. After crying at the sheer impossibility of juggling all four of my classes when I knew I needed to work as well, I loaded up on coffee and gave up most of my sleep to finish the book. I was stressed and exhausted and certainly didn’t enjoy the experience, but I got it done. Then, on Thursday, instead of our regular seminar on campus, they hosted it on the yacht of some wealthy alumnus. We enjoyed free Greek food and Odyssey-themed mocktails while we took a sunset cruise along the Charles River.
I haven’t had to finish a tome in two days since, but it is known as a book-a-week class from the first day of the semester until right up to finals, and while the load is brutal, the class is fascinating, so I consider it worthwhile.
Staying with Killian has seriously cut down on my time spent studying, though, so I make sure to get to school a little early today. Tuesday is my busiest school day. I have back-to-back class until 2:45, then there’s just enough time to hustle over to the Cutler lounge and eat something before the seminar begins.
In honor of Halloween, last week’s assigned book was Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The writing assignment was to explore the theme of hubris and its consequences in the characters, how their actions reflect the dangers of unchecked ambition and the implications of playing god.
Reading about the lonely, rejected monster got me all up in my phantom feels, so I blazed right through the writing assignment. At the time, I was grateful for an easy week since everyone had Halloween parties they wanted to attend and a denser book would have made it difficult to find the time. But after the party I went to, maybe my time would have been better spent trying to wade through Ulysses.
I already submitted my writing assignment to the digital dropbox, but I spend a few minutes leafing through the book rereading passages so everything is nice and fresh for today’s lecture.
My phone vibrates, so I dig it out of my bag. I gave Killian back Hex’s burner to give him and transferred their numbers to my phone, so I’m expecting it to be Killian.
My stomach drops when I see it’s my mother instead.
“Hey sweetie, just checking in! Are you coming home for thanksgiving this year? I’m already planning the menu and trying to get an idea of how many people will be here. Let me know if you’re bringing anybody.”
Speaking of inexcusable assholes who play the victim in their own minds and never consider the consequences of their actions…
I start to delete the message without responding as I always do when she texts me, but on second thought, I tap her name at the top of the screen—Rita Wagner, I don’t have her saved as “mom” anymore—and tap the screen to edit her info. I delete her name entirely and type “Victor” in its place.
I smile faintly at my own private joke, then I back out of the screen and go back to messages so I can delete it.
There. Much better.
I open my book and try to focus, but it’s no use. My concentration is shot.
This is not how I wanted to go into class today, but apparently that’s what we’re doing. Awesome.
I spend a few more minutes on useless attempts to repair my fractured focus, but the book I’ve already read isn’t doing it. Instead, I grab my phone and text Killian.
“Made it to the Cutler lounge. Was not kidnapped or blackmailed along the way.”
“Glad to hear it,” he answers a moment later.
Unfortunately, because he was probably walking across campus and didn’t have his phone in his hand, that moment took too long. Searching for a different way to distract myself quickly before class, I opened social media. The algorithm knows me pretty well at this point, so the very first video it shows me is a sad song playing over a shot of a dog in a cage. It shows him there eagerly watching through the bars for a potential adopter to come meet him. His tail starts to wag and he dances with excitement when a man crouches down in front of his cage and hooks a couple of fingers through the bars to say hi. The dog licks his fingers, wagging his tail so hard his little butt wiggles, then it shows him dreaming about his forever home with the guy—playing fetch outside on a sunny day and tackling his imaginary owner to give him an abundance of face kisses and ear nibbles. But then the guy walks away from the cage, and the dog watches him go, his tail wags slowing until his tail stills altogether. Then the screen cuts to his sad reality of life in a little box all alone and shows him curled up on his bed with his head down like he’s sad. “He’s losing hope,” the mean screen text tells me, making my heart contract painfully. Then the text on the video tells me this sweet baby has spent 174 days in the shelter and he just wants someone to love him. “Could it be you?” it asks on the final screen.
And yes. Yes, it could.
His sad little face squeezes my heart until it physically hurts and I screenshot the video so I can send it to Killian.
“What do you think about getting a dog?” I ask with an emotional, watery-eyed emoji.
“No,” he sends back immediately.
“But he needs a home!”
“That video has 144k views. I’m sure he found one.”
“Bystander effect. Everyone else probably thinks the same thing,” I insist.
Plus, since the guy in the video was quite hot, half of the comments are things like, “Does the guy need adopting because I’ll take him” but I don’t mention that.
“He’s also located in California. Maybe your geography skills are a little lax, but that’s on the other side of the country.”
“Road trip!”
I can see him shaking his head in my mind’s eye, and the visual makes me smile. “Close that app before it gets you in trouble,” he commands.
“So bossy.” On impulse, I pull up my maps app and type in the route from Calhoun University to Baymont, California. The app processes my request for a second, then the map pulls back to show an entire portion of a globe with a blue map indicating our projected route across the entire width of North America. I’m only teasing him at this point, but I screenshot that and send it, too. “You mean to tell me you wouldn’t travel 3,000 miles for that squishy little face?”
“Correct,” he texts back promptly.
“How dare you. What if I got kidnapped and hauled to the other side of the country? I guess you’d just say, ‘well, it was nice knowing her.’”
“You are not a random dog in a random animal shelter on the other side of the country. I’d make the trip for you.”
This is a ridiculous thing to make my heart flutter, but it does.
Smiling, I text back, “Aww, my hero.” But then I add, “In that case, Aiden just showed up. He’s kidnapping me, but he said to make your life easier, he’ll tell you where he’s taking me. It’s here,” I state, attaching a cropped screenshot of the shelter’s address in California.
“Nice try.”
“I’ll see you in two days!”
“It won’t take two days. If I’m going to California, I’m flying,” he assures me.
“Ok, but don’t forget to bring a cage. It’s totally not for a dog. Aiden is making me get in a cage right now, and I have a feeling my mind will splinter and I will adapt quickly to this new environment, so we’ll need it to transport me back.”
“If you keep texting me about that asshole, I’M gonna put you in a cage to make sure you never talk to him again.”
I grin at the screen. “Sorry!” I type back, but I’m not sorry at all. It’s probably weird, but I get a little kick out of him getting jealous every time I mention that jerk.