Chapter 7 #2
“If you’re serious about helping out around the house,” he said while he carried dishes from the table to the dishwasher, “I can show you how I like the kitchen cleaned.”
I’ve cleaned kitchens before, but decided maybe I shouldn’t point that out. “Sure. Of course.”
He proceeded to show me exactly how his dishwasher was to be loaded. Bowls and saucers on the middle shelf with the glasses, while the pots, pans, and plates went on the bottom. Short things in the center, tall things on the edge, and that part was smart because of the sprayer, but I just nodded.
He slid the top rack out. “Lids, spatulas, serving spoons — all of it up here.” He closed the top and pointed to the silverware holder. “Spoons and knives together so the spoons don’t nest, forks in their own slots. Everything has a place.”
It was almost exactly how I load mine at home, and he was the first person I’d met who understood the problem with putting all the spoons together, but again, I decided to keep that to myself.
Still, I liked the fact his dishwasher was organized much like mine way more than I was comfortable admitting to myself.
It was unfair, him being both sexy and smart — and possibly the perfect uber-organized Dom, but I didn’t have enough data on that to be certain just yet.
He closed the dishwasher and opened a cabinet to the left of the refrigerator. Inside, on the back of the door was a whiteboard with handwriting so perfect, it could’ve been a fancy font. Garlic, mayo, milk, spinach.
“Please note anything we’re running low on, even if there’s a spare in the pantry.”
Then he walked me to the pantry, which was twice the size of his huge kitchen, with rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves, everything labeled. Bulk rice, beans, oats, canned tomatoes, enough pasta to feed a small army.
“Are you expecting an apocalypse?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I buy staples in bulk. During the…” He paused a microsecond before finishing, “…riots a few years back, I kept a lot of people fed and alive.”
I’d gone to Sam’s right when the shit hit the fan, before most people saw it coming, and had bought tons of toilet paper, rice, pasta, jars of sauce for the pasta, and tons of frozen food and canned food. I’d spent nearly a thousand dollars on food in one trip.
So I understood why the pantry was a good thing, and yet, it seemed a little off.
However, what really bugged me was the tiny little hesitation before he’d said riots.
There was more to the unrest than simple riots, but I had no idea what had truly set them off — or what’d stopped them.
Did he know? It didn’t seem likely, but maybe he’d hacked into something that’d given him the info?
He walked to the left, and I followed him.
“I make my own kimchi, and I buy garlic in bulk and pickle it. I’m down to a half gallon left of my pickled garlic, so the note to buy garlic means another bulk buy. Bring clean tongs with you from the kitchen to get anything you see here. I’m careful about contamination with these big containers.”
He turned to face large bins behind us. “There’s a one-cup scoop in the rice that stays there. You’re welcome to use anything in here or the kitchen to cook with, but check with me before you open a new container of something, please.”
And then we went back to the kitchen, where he demonstrated how he wipes everything down. And I mean fucking everything — the counters, the stove, the backsplash, the fronts of the cabinets, the sink, the faucet, the microwave door handle, the fridge handle.
Then he pulled out a bottle with a homemade label that said Glass Cleaner and sprayed it on the stainless fridge. It didn’t smell like anything at all, and it left the surface gleaming without streaks. He wiped it down with a microfiber cloth — and repeated the process with the dishwasher and oven.
Complete overkill, but I only nodded.
He shooed me out of the kitchen before he activated the robot mop, and then led me to the living room, where he retrieved a tablet from a drawer, woke it and punched in a code that he let me see, touched it a few times to open an app, and handed it to me.
“I like schedules,” he said, and based on what I was seeing, this seemed like an understatement.
The calendar was color-coded, and it seemed outside work was green while inside work was pale blue.
On the outdoor schedule for the coming week was cleaning the gutters, mowing, mulching the beds, watering on specific days, and washing the windows from the outside.
I ignored everything green and decided on what I could handle of the inside tasks.
“I can cook, clean the kitchen after, change the sheets, do the laundry, clean the bathrooms, and dust.” There were apparently seven bathrooms in this monstrosity of a house, and he had two bathrooms one day, another two the next, and then three the next.
Dusting was by itself the next day. He had a load of laundry on three of the days — sheets one day, towels the next, his clothes the next.
Four days of housework inside, Monday through Thursday.
He also cleaned the roller on the robot vac on each floor every day, and hand-cleaned the stairs once per week, but I figured I’d let him keep doing those things.
He merely nodded, and then clicked on the bathroom entry, which opened another list, and I tried very hard to keep my face neutral while I read the list of what seemed like a hundred detailed items to clean.
“I’ll walk you through it the first time,” he said. “But you’ll have a list to check off.”
He glanced at his watch. “We may as well do it now.”
The first thing to do was pour vinegar into a bag that was hung on the showerhead, to keep minerals from accumulating.
Then he walked me through cleaning the toilet from the bottom up, making sure to clean the floor really well behind it while he pointed out the robot mop doesn’t get back there.
I prefer to clean from the top down, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to do it his way while he was watching me, and then swap out to my way when he wasn’t around.
Next came cleaning every corner of the floor — more areas the robot mop doesn’t get to his satisfaction, apparently. Then the sink, and it quickly became obvious this man thinks watermarks are evil. He spent so much time making sure it was completely dry.