“Temper,” Sila smiled and shook his head.
“You wouldn’t be saying that if it’d been you who took that call from Crate earlier today,” Rin stated, and like it always did, mention of their father wiped any semblance of a good mood from the both of them. “It was a complete ambush.”
“Do you think he’s serious?” Sila asked. “The Imperial?”
“I don’t know.” He ran a hand through his hair. “He certainly believes he is.”
He hummed. “We could wait it out. If he’s as sporadic as you’ve heard, he might lose interest eventually.”
“Fantastic plan. Gold star.”
“That was sarcasm.”
“Yes.”
Sila nodded like he was taking mental notes.
Rin rolled his eyes. “Seriously. What do you think we should do?”
“Didn’t you just say you’d handle it?”
“Not about Kel.” He would handle it…somehow. “About Crate.”
“I dismissed his call earlier, so I haven’t spoken to him yet.”
“You’ve got to stop doing that,” Rin said. “Eventually he’s going to catch on.”
“He’d have to pay attention to us first.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but that was a fair assessment.
“If he orders me home,” Sila told him, “I’ll say no.”
“Yeah, that’ll work.”
“Why not?”
“He pays for our tuition,” Rin reminded. “We can’t stay on planet unless we’re attending school, and even if we pooled our savings, we wouldn’t even have enough to cover a semester.”
“Then I’ll quit. I’m fine with that.”
“I’mnot.”
Sila ran the pad of his middle finger beneath his bottom lip in thought. “What about your Imperial?”
“One, he isn’t my anything—except maybe the bane of my existence—and two, what about him?”
“He wants to marry you. That’ll make us family. Tell him to pay for me.”
Rin blinked at him. “You can’t be serious.”
“Why not?” Sila tipped his head.
“I’m not selling myself for money.”
“Just taking it up the ass for free then.”
Rin leaped to his feet, but Sila remained calm and stoic as ever. He inhaled slowly, letting the air pool into his lungs, and then exhaled even slower.
