Chapter 589 | Bag Tea and Other Insults

Chapter 589: 589 | Bag Tea and Other Insults

I got up to fetch the tea, because the alternative involved a small woman from Osaka beating me with an umbrella in front of the entire Sapphire first-year class.

The drink station sat thirty meters away, which gave me about forty seconds to panic in private. I had punched a hole through a dimensional guardian with my bare hand. I had climbed a Silver alpha by the face and stabbed its heart while hanging from an eyeball. None of that had prepared me for a housekeeper asking about my intentions over a tray of cold hash browns.

My Snake Eyes twitched at the edge of my vision out of pure habit, and I shut it down so hard my left eye watered. Scanning my captain’s mother for cup size would qualify as a war crime, and I already had enough of those pending in front of Belle’s tribunal.

I filled a paper cup from the hot water tap and dropped in a green tea bag that cost the academy maybe four cents. The steam smelled like grass clippings left out in the sun. Behind me, our end of the dining hall had gone dead silent, so I knew every single one of them was watching me make tea like I was defusing a bomb.

When I set the cup in front of her, Keiko lifted the paper tag between two fingers and frowned at it for three full seconds.

"This is bag tea."

"It’s what they stock here, Ayame-san."

"I know what they stock. I clean the Summit kitchens on Thursdays when the regular girl gets sick." She dunked the bag twice and drank it anyway, which told me everything I needed to know about where Misato learned to complain and comply at once. "Now you will sit down, boy."

I sat down across from her. Naomi’s hand found my thigh under the table immediately, warm through my uniform pants, and her thumb pressed once in a small circle that meant she was laughing at me on the inside. On my other side, Blair held the housekeeping shoes against her chest and stared straight ahead with her ears still glowing.

Keiko set her cup down and folded her hands on top of the umbrella. "My daughter does not bring people to meet me. In nine years she brought one friend, and that friend was Blair, and only because Mr. Davenport paid for the car."

Blair flinched hard enough that the shoes creaked in her grip.

"So tell me what you are going to do," Keiko went on, as if she hadn’t just gutted the heiress to a hunter dynasty with one sentence.

The old version of me would have run a script here, the one I used to run on girlfriends’ parents back home. Firm handshake, clean compliments, a joke about the weather, and a promise about the future that sounded expensive and cost me nothing. That guy closed deals. That guy also ended up alone, which says something about the long-term returns on charm.

"Honestly, ma’am, I don’t have a five-year plan," I told her. "I have a training schedule, and your daughter runs it with a stopwatch and no mercy. What I can promise is that I show up. When she calls me, I come, even when it’s uphill at five in the morning."

"Especially then," Misato muttered from behind her mother, still staring at the ceiling.

Keiko didn’t even glance back at her. She kept her dark eyes on my face for a long time, the same patient look she probably gave a stain on marble before she decided how much scrubbing it would take. "And the other girls?"

Belle answered before I could open my mouth. "Six, ma’am, depending on how you count Davenport."

"Do not count me, Fox."

"I already did, and it’s in a tab." Belle turned the laptop a few degrees so Keiko could see a color-coded grid with far too many columns. "Love, Fox, Fitzgerald, Baxter, your daughter, and a pending variable."

I watched Keiko read the spreadsheet in its entirety while I quietly calculated how far I could get on Wave Motion before an umbrella reached me. Nobody at the table breathed. Jordan lifted his face off the wood just enough to watch, a strip of syrup stuck to his cheek.

Keiko pointed one finger at Naomi. "You are the pink one."

Naomi waved at her with her fork, a tiny wave, her cheeks going dark. "Hi, Ayame-san, I’m Naomi."

"Misato says you carried him out of the gate on television, bleeding."

"He was really heavy," Naomi admitted, and the shell necklace bounced against her collarbone when she nodded. "I don’t recommend it to anyone."

The corner of Keiko’s mouth twitched, and before I was ready for it, the twitch turned into a laugh, a short bark that made the two Sapphire girls at the next table drop their spoons. She covered her mouth with one hand, and for a second she looked like her daughter in the tree line, caught off guard by her own happiness.

"Misato’s father had only one woman, and that was me," she said when she recovered. "He still left when she was four years old. So I learned something cleaning other people’s houses for thirty years. A man with one woman can still walk out the door. Six is too many girls, and I think you are an idiot."

"Most people agree with you, ma’am."

"But I am old, and I do not make rules for young people anymore." She tapped the table twice with one short, chapped fingernail. "I only care if you stay."

The lime ring in the back of my skull flared so hot I had to blink a few times, and I blamed it on the steam coming off Blair’s shoulders. Misato had gone completely still behind her mother. Her arms were crossed so tight across her hoodie that her knuckles had turned white, and she was blinking at the ceiling tiles like they owed her money.

"I’m staying," I told Keiko, because there was nothing else worth saying.

She studied me for another five seconds and then nodded once, the same short nod Misato gave when a formation finally held. Then she turned her head toward Jordan, who had been slowly lowering his face back toward the table.

"Who is this one?"

"That’s Jordan, ma’am," Belle explained. "He’s mostly decorative."

"I have a concussion and opinions," Jordan protested into the wood.

Keiko reached into her canvas tote and pulled out a rice ball wrapped in cling film, the seaweed still crisp, and set it next to his elbow without a word. Jordan stared at it, then at her, then at the rice ball again. He peeled the plastic with shaking fingers and took one bite, and his entire face went soft and stupid.

"I’d die for you," he mumbled with his mouth full.