Page 3 of Demon Dating Service
“What sorry? There’s nothing to be sorry about. I enjoy eating with you, and I figured I’d find you here after Matteo left his last Wednesday class and crossed to the library.”
“Please, you’re making me sound like a stalker. I simply like this bench. It’s the only time of the day the quad is quiet, andthere’s a bobolink that’s been spending a lot of time in that tree over there. Did you know that an old name for its species is ‘rice bird’ because of its diet of rice and seeds? It currently gets its name from the unique song it sings?—”
“Luke, eat your wrap before it gets cold,” Harper cut him off.
With a smirk, Luke leaned close to her and took a big bite of the wrap, making ridiculous hungry noises as he chewed that made Harper laugh. Yeah, she could be annoying, but he knew he was just as annoying with his random bird facts. That was to be expected of an ornithology student who looked forward to spending his entire life studying birds.
He tried to tame his need to spout useless facts with Harper. She’d been his friend since their sophomore year in college and had picked the same graduate school—Ravenwood University—even though they had different majors.
Luke was studying ornithology and environmental sciences and engineering (as a fallback so he could find a job one day), while Harper was getting her master’s degree in finance. To him, that didn’t seem like a fit at all, but apparently it was a family tradition, and he was pretty sure Harper was only going because her parents were paying for it. She’d mentioned something about moving to California or Mexico when she got her degree and opening a surf shop near a beach, which sounded more like her.
“Do you think it’s weird that I have a crush on an undergraduate?”
“Hell, no!” she shouted, drawing the eyes of a couple of people as they passed by. “He’s fucking adorable. Plus, he’s not a freshman, right? He’s at least a sophomore.”
“Junior, I think. I overheard some young women whispering about him. One of them was pretty confident that he’s a transfer and that this is technically his junior year.”
“There.” Harper waved the remains of her wrap at Luke as if it were a wand and she were his fairy godmother granting him a wish. “That means he’s like twenty or twenty-one. And you’re…”
“Twenty-two. I’ll be twenty-three next March.”
“See. Not weird.”
Luke stifled a sigh with another bite of the chicken wrap, his eyes straying to the liberal arts building directly in his line of sight. No sign of Matteo yet. It wasn’t an age thing, so that mostly left him with the sexual orientation thing. Was there any chance Matteo could be gay? Or at least bi? He’d heard whispers, but not so much that he was willing to hang all his hopes on it.
Not that he had much hope. Luke was well aware of his shortcomings, beginning with his perennially empty wallet. He was of average height and build, though he trended toward the skinny side. His arms were muscular from doing so much manual labor, but his stomach wasn’t as flat as it could be. It was hard to eat healthilyandcheaply. Usually it was one or the other. Other than that, his hair was a boring shade of brown, and he was pasty white from too little sun. Add in black-rimmed glasses, and he felt that he was a pretty unnoticeable package. Definitely not worthy of someone as sexy as Matteo Zito.
“So, as for your list, I refuse to believe you’re having any trouble with your classes. You ace everything, and the semester started two weeks ago,” Harper stated before shoving the last of her wrap into her mouth. “Research?”
“Fine. Nothing much to report yet. I’m still refining my thesis.”
“Job?”
Luke slumped on the bench and frowned at the remains of his wrap. What he’d eaten was already turning in his stomach. “I’ve got Burger Hut four nights a week, and I’m working four nights a week at Sinful Soaps stocking shelves, sweeping, and doing general cleanup and prep for the next day.”
“First off, you know I’m pretty good at math.” She leaned close enough to bump Luke’s shoulder. “Finance major and all.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But that adds up to eight nights a week, and last I checked, there are still only seven days in a week.”
Luke rolled his eyes. “I don’t have any classes on Friday, so I work a double starting in the early afternoon into the evening at Burger Hut, then head to Sinful Soaps.” And even with that, he wasn’t making enough to get by. His scholarship didn’t cover all his class and book costs, which were outrageous. Plus the cost of living in the quaint town of Rookborough was through the fucking roof. He needed to find a third job during the day on the weekends, but his plan had been to catch up on his schoolwork and sleep those two days.
A person didn’t need that much sleep, right?
“I’m afraid to ask how the housing situation is going…” Harper balled up her empty wrapper and dropped it into the paper bag before grabbing the fries.
Luke forced himself to eat the last two bites of his wrap and added the paper to Harper’s bag. “Still surfing Jacob’s couch, but I think tonight’s the last night for that. I overheard his roommate bitching about me while I was brushing my teeth this morning, and I don’t want to put Jacob in the awkward position of having to kick me out.”
“No apartments with roommates?”
He groaned. “You mean like the mixed-media artist I shared an apartment with, who I caught cutting off little pieces of my hair in the middle of the night to use for his next project? Or the health nut who thought because I was gay, I must spend all my time at the gym working on my perfect ass and abs? Or maybe the asshole who thought I would be his live-in maid since the apartment was in his name, only to find out that we weren’tsplitting the rent fifty-fifty, but more like seventy-thirty because he was doing me a favor by sharing with me?”
“Yeah,” Harper drawled. “You have the worst luck in finding roommates. And school just started. I wish I could help…”
He waved off her comment. There was no way she could help. Yes, her parents were paying for her education, but they were making her pay for her own room and board, which meant she was sharing an apartment with three other women. Nothing could convince him to surf on that couch. If he was desperate, there were park benches, homeless shelters, and he thought he’d worked out a hidden spot in the library where no one ventured that he could sleep in for a few undisturbed hours.
“I’ll figure something out,” he said, his mind already distracted by the trio of crows that had settled on the back of the wooden bench across from them. They’d been watching him and Harper for several minutes now, their heads cocking this way and that, as if they could understand their conversation.