Page 69 of Puck Shots
“Sure. Do you want help?”
“It’s mac and cheese, how hard can it be?” he replies, turning the box over in his hands and reading the instructions with a frown on his face.
“I’ll grab the milk.”
“It doesn’t say it… oh, wait, yes it does. I’ll need butter, too. Do we have real butter?”
“Yeah, Jeeper went shopping yesterday, so we’ve got about fifteen sticks of it.” I reply, popping the ingredients on the counter and sitting on one of the bar stools to watch.
Jeeper is totally obsessed with extreme couponing. He even had the pledges scouring nearby streets for inserts on more than one occasion during rush. It’s how we ended up with fifty-three boxes of mac and cheese, too. The pantry, off the large open kitchen, is huge, but it’s not big enough to hold all his stockpile,so we have the basement filled like a grocery store of all the extras. We don’t keep it all. A lot of frats and sororities coupon, maybe not to the extent that Jeeper does—I swear this guy treats it like an Olympic sport—but his score of forty-seven bottles of fake tan were a good trade to the Zeta Omega Gamma sorority for a couple of kegs. Now those are something you will never see a coupon for.
He puts the pot on the burner and adds the water, then measures out the rest of what he needs. Tipping in the packet of pasta when it does with a satisfied smile.
“So what do you want to do after we eat?” I ask, and he pumps his brows once, then leans forward over the bench and kisses me.
“I was kind of thinking the same thing,” I say into his mouth, cupping his face and deepening the kiss. I don’t know how anyone could get tired of this. And that’s how we almost burned down the kitchen. Not really, but the next time my eyes open it’s because I smell something burning.
“Shit, the pasta,” I say, and Eli turns and grabs the smoking pot from the stove top, tossing it into the sink and turning the tap on. It sizzles and hisses as the smoke clears.
The alarm above us starts to sound, and I grab a dish towel and start waving it frantically in front of it as a few of the guys come running in. Sam is one of them, and he’s holding a fire extinguisher.
“Where’s the fire?” he asks, and Eli switches off the tap.
“No fire, just smoke. It’s all under control.”
“Looks like it,” Sam replies over the blaring sound of the alarm. He climbs onto a stool and presses a button on the base of the alarm, silencing its siren.
“You have ten minutes to clear the room or it will go off again,” he says, jumping down. “And don’t forget to clean that pot.”
“Sorry,” Eli says, his cheeks bright red.
“It was my fault,” I say, and Sam turns with a raised brow.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I walked in looking this hot and it just went off.”
A few of the guys laugh, but Sam just shakes his head in disappointment and leaves the room.
“You’re hot enough to set off my alarm,” Eli begins as he tips the pot upside down, spilling out the partially charred chunks of macaroni. “So, I’m kind of not into cooking now. Takeout?”
“Pizza?”
“Perfect. You order; I’ll finish cleaning this.”
Thankfully, the local pizza place has twenty minutes or less guarantee, so the pizza is at the door by the time Eli is done scrubbing the black from the bottom of the pot, and we cuddle up on the couch to eat.
Without me even having to ask, he flicks the channel to hockey.
“Hey, ref, you dropped your whistle!” I yell at the screen. “Right in the ribs, call it!”
Eli chuckles beside me.
“What?”
“Nothing, I just love…your passion for the game.”
I wrap my arm over his shoulder.
