Page 78 of Knottingley Ever After
“OH MY GOD.” I throw both hands up. “Stop underestimating meeeee. I have a black belt. Sankukai karate. Earned it when I was eighteen and very angry. Can we move on. Please. With your collective lives.”
I huff. I uncross my legs.
And I realize, in the same beat, that I have been on the kitchen island for the better part of forty minutes, my joints are stiff, and I am significantly higher off the floor than I have any business being for a graceful exit.
I rise onto my knees. I shift to a crouch. I look down at Matteo, who is now, conveniently, exactly the right height to be a problem.
“Down,” I tell him.
His grin breaks open like the sun.
“Oh, princess.” He stands up off the stool and steps in close. “Are we asking nicely.”
“Asking,” I say, calmly. “As an order.”
Something behind his eyes goes warm and entertained and a little dangerous, but to his credit he does not tease me about a single thing. He simply offers up one bare arm, the inked one, and ducks his other behind my knees, and lifts me clean off the marble as though I weigh, by his calculation, exactly nothing, and lowers me to the kitchen floor in a single unhurried motion.
“Black belt my ass,” he mutters as my socks touch tile.
Then he leans down and presses a kiss against my temple, casual, almost absent-minded, the kind of kiss you give a person you have been in close quarters with for considerably longer than thirty-six hours, and the small honest part of my chest that I do not run by the rest of the committee files the kiss before my pride has even finished objecting.
I side-eye him. He smirks. I let him have it.
“Right.” I scoop the flyers into a stack and tap them on the marble to square the edges. “If I cannot get something on campus that does not involve being a casserole ingredient, I am taking the bus into town this morning and seeing what the local economy has on offer. Let me go change —”
Matteo’s arm winds around my waist.
He spins me, easy as anything, until my back is to his chest and my whole field of vision is the upside-down underside of his jaw, because he has dropped his chin to look down at me, and I have had to crane my neck up to find his face, and the angle, frankly, is doing my equilibrium no favors.
“You are not getting a job, Pinky.”
“Excuse me?”
“Our hockey schedule is not going to allow it. I am sorry. I will need you to receive that information.”
I plant a finger at the dead center of his chest. “Matteo Santori. I need a job. I cannot just exist on this campus on someone else’s phone for the rest of the term.”
“Why.”
“Why?” I sputter. “Essentials. Toothpaste. Soap. Laundry detergent. The blockers I am going to need to re-up with the Omega doctor at the clinic, which, by the way, are extremely expensive, especially the stronger formulary I am about to be put on, which I will need because clearly my old blockers were not equipped for whatever atmosphere this campus is generating. My scholarship covers tuition and a modest meal stipend. The meal stipend covers, at Minnesota grocery prices, approximately three weeks of food. Did you know a bar of Irish Spring at the gas station up the road costs five-ninety-nine? Five. Ninety-nine. At home, that bar of soap was a pound. I am still emotionally processing it.”
Matteo does not let me go.
“You,” he says, calmly, “are not working.”
“Matteo.”
“You need to go shopping? We are going shopping. Go change. We are taking Jude’s car.”
I crane harder. My neck reports a complaint.
“Wait.” I look at him upside down. I look across the kitchen at Jude. I look at Rémi. Both of them are standing in their respective spots wearing the precise faces of men who have already had this entire conversation between them at some point in the last twelve hours and arrived at the same answer. “… We are going shopping?”
“Yup.” Jude takes another long pull off the water bottle. “You said you need essentials. Let us go get them.”
“But I do not have money.”
Rémi fishes his wallet out of his joggers without breaking eye contact and flips it open with one thumb. Three cards in a neat fan. He turns them toward me with the matter-of-factness of a man presenting receipts.
