Steelhands - Jaida Jones [42]
Around the end of the winter semester, I’d decided I was either gonna wring his neck with my bare hands or we were gonna end up friends for life. He was too smart for his own good—too much of a smart mouth for his own good, I mean—and I’d taken to sitting in back of class with him just because he made me laugh with his comments. No one else seemed to appreciate that about him, so I guess I ended up unconsciously resigning myself to sticking around for the long haul. Just ’cause he needed someone with the patience to put up with him for that long, and it sure as shit wasn’t gonna be the other fly-by-nights he associated with.
Some days, I still wasn’t sure I’d made the right decision. Especially when, in senior year, the bastard locked me out of our room all night so he could make time with our linguistics professor.
I was willing to bet there’d been some lingual action going on, but if it had anything to do with tutoring, I’d have eaten my boots. He was my best friend, but I wouldn’t live with him again for all the gold in th’Esar’s vaults and a night with th’Esarina, beautiful as she was. There were limits to a man’s patience, after all, and living with Roy was my limit.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Roy said, appearing at the top of the stairs. Finicky bastard always did like to make an entrance, especially if there was an audience, though it didn’t seem to matter much either way because we were both used to him. “We’re ordering in. I hope you don’t mind.”
“My stomach’s had enough of your good old-fashioned home cooking to last a lifetime,” I told him. Having food brought in was like reprieve from battle at the last moment, as far as I was concerned, and I wouldn’t be paying for it in the trenches afterward, either.
“You told me you never cooked,” Hal said, with a smile like he already had some idea where this was going. He hadn’t taken his eyes off of Royston since he’d appeared on the stairs, which was sweet in its own way, if also a little nauseating by my own personal standards. No carriage could run on three wheels.
“There is a very good reason for that,” Royston said, shooting me a dark look. “Though one wouldn’t expect a man of war to be so squeamish. I ate it, anyway.”
“Man can be more than one thing at the same time,” I said, which was true enough.
The caterer arrived before we’d even made it into the dining room. Despite the Crescents’ completely off-the-rocker design and how easy it was to get lost just trying to pass through it, somehow the deliveries always made it there, probably because it gave them most of their business. Roy intimated that it had to do with some magic spell or other, but I had a feeling it was more to do with the fact that most magicians didn’t have time for making dinner, and coin was the real magic at work.
The dining room itself was a cozy enough place, or at least I’d always liked it: dark mahogany furniture and a small chandelier set over the table to give off light. I didn’t know my ass from my top end when it came to decorating a room, but I had to hand it to Roy. He had a knack for putting things together so that they just felt right. It wasn’t a skill I could’ve used in any way—put down a chair and a table and a bed and you had yourself a house you could live in just fine—so I didn’t envy him so much as I enjoyed reaping the benefits from time to time. There was a stack of books in the corner, no doubt related to whatever rubbish Roy was working on at the minute and couldn’t bear to be parted from, and I saw something on the china cabinet shelf that looked distinctly like an essay or some lecture notes. That made me shudder, bringing to mind my own lecture notes, which were currently just a list of pupils I didn’t like, as well as the ones I knew I wouldn’t like by the time the week was out.
I supposed