Page 21 of The Badger in His Burrow

Do you like kimchee?

Elliot Crane

Do I like what?

Korean fermented cabbage.

No idea. I like sauerkraut. Is it like that?

Not exactly. I’m making Korean for dinner.

Okay. Why?

Why not?

I wasn’ta chef or anything, but I could buy gochujang and sweet chili sauce and kimchee and sesame seeds, and I could cook rice, sauté veggies and chicken, and crack an egg over all of it. It wasn’t exactly authentic, but it was tasty and vaguely Korean-themed. Noah had always seemed to like it, anyway. Of course, Noah was basically a garbage disposal, so his approval wasn’t the best metric of quality food. He hadsaidhe liked my version ofKorean, anyway, and he usually didn’t comment on most of my cooking unless I specifically asked. Since I wanted to impress—or at the very least not disappoint—Elliot, I was going to go with something that Noah had freely expressed his liking for.

I didn’t have a lot of money, but I felt incredibly guilty about the fact that I’d been essentially exploiting Elliot’s generosity—and not even in exchange for sex—that I was going to at least buy some groceries and cook the man dinner.

Also, I had an interview lined up, which had put me in an optimistic—especially about my bank account—mood. Not that I was super thrilled about the job itself, but money was money, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’d been a waiter in my life. Assuming they hired me, of course.

It wasn’t the job I wanted, but I hadn’t heard back from the Shawano County Sheriff’s Crime Scene Investigation office. Hart had said they were desperately short-handed a few months back, but short-handed didn’t mean they had the budget to hire more people. Or maybe they’d hired people. Or maybe they’d looked me up and found out I was now a shifter, and they didn’t want fur and fangs on the job. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. Nor the last, most likely.

I sighed, then picked up a different jar of kimchee that was a little cheaper, even though it wasn’t quite as good as the one I’d been holding.

Don’t count your chickens and all that.

Speaking of chickens… I grabbed a package of legs. They were cheaper than breasts or thighs.

And frozen edamame was cheaper than fresh.

And so on.

At least rice was cheap.

I was feeling a good deal more depressed by the time I and my way-too-expensive-for-the-number-in-my-bank-account groceries got back to the house. Elliot’s house. Itwouldn’t be any good for me to start thinking of it as one we shared because, well, even though I was kinda living here, it wasn’t my house, and I really shouldn’t be staying here much longer.

I’d also been doing some very cursory apartment hunting, but the aforementioned small size of my finances meant that I couldn’t actually afford to put down a deposit and first month’s rent—to say nothing about last month’s rent—because I couldn’t even affordonemonth, much less three. And rental companies tend to frown on renting to people who don’t actually have jobs.

So that was kinda on hold until I had a job—not just an interview—and managed to save enough to do big boy things like get my own place.

Which I hadn’t had for the last four years between living with Devin and crashing with Noah. And now Elliot.

I was a serial moocher. And I hated that. I felt like the deadbeat boyfriend that everybody always complained about and warned you against dating. And yeah, I should be careful about dating a serial moocher, because I had literally no capacity to support someone who was as much of a pathetic mess as I was. But it didn’t feel good tobethat guy, either.

I didn’t think I was lazy or overly needy, but if you looked at my track record, it certainlylookedthat way. So that was also causing some minor existential crises, because I thought of myself as a hard worker, but my lack of independence and constant reliance on other people to support me seemed to suggest otherwise. So if I was lazy or made really bad choices, if I was a mess because there was something wrong with me… How did I fix that?

I wasbusy sautéing the vegetables and chicken when Elliot came inside—he’d been working out in the garage, the door up so that air could get in. He’d explained that he did a lot of the smaller projects in the basement shop, but larger things—like the banquet table he was working on for one of the event rooms at the Menominee Resort and Casino—couldn’t fit up the stairs and so had to be made out in the garage.

He was sweaty and covered in sawdust and sexy as hell.

“So how come you don’t just make everything in the garage?” I asked him.

“No climate control,” he replied, raising his eyebrows as though to ask me if the massive sweat stains on his t-shirt hadn’t made my question vaguely ridiculous. “It’s hot as fuck in the summer and colder than Val’s balls in winter.”

I snorted with a grimace at that particular image. “I, ah, wouldn’t know anything about the temperature of Hart’s balls,” I replied, my neck heating. I focused my attention back on the chicken and vegetables.

Elliot sniffed appreciatively. “Smells good. Let me get cleaned up, then dinner?”

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