“I’ll ride with you,” he said the instant the trunk had been slammed shut.
I shot him a look as I went to the driver side. “My place or yours?”
Kulti looked at me from the other side of the car. “Yours. Mine is too quiet.”
Considering we both lived alone, I didn’t understand how one place could have a different noise level than the other. The only difference was that his house was at least about six times bigger than my garage apartment.
“Why don’t you get a pet?” I asked.
“I have fish.”
That made me laugh. He had fish? “You do not.”
He tipped his shaved brown head in my direction. “I have three, a beta and two tetras. My agent gave them to me when I moved here. I have an aquarium at my flat in London.”
I tried not to make it seem like his admission was a big deal. “That’s neat. Who takes care of them?”
“A housekeeper.”
A housekeeper. No surprise there. “How many houses do you have?”
“Only three,” he answered nonchalantly.
Only three. I’d grown up the kid of paycheck-to-paycheck parents. While I knew that someone who had as much money as he did could realistically afford way more than three houses, it still amazed me. At the same time, it made me like Kulti a little more. I could respect someone who didn’t blow his money on stupid crap.
Instead, he spent it on buying shoes for kids.
Damn it, I needed to quit this mooning crap, but today had been a real whirlwind.
“Where’s your other house?” I found myself asking so that I wouldn’t think about other things.
“Meissen. It’s a small town in Germany.”
I made an impressed face.
“The house is tiny, Sal, but I think you’d like it,” he noted.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Germany,” I told him. “It’s on my list of places to go on my bucket list.”
He slanted a look at me. “What’s a bucket list?”
He didn’t know what a bucket list was? I shouldn’t have found that as cute as I did. “It’s a list of things you want to do before you die. Have you heard the term ‘kicking the bucket’?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the German shake his head. “Well that’s what it’s referring to. Stuff you want to do before you die.”
Kulti made a thoughtful noise. “You have more things on your list?”
“Yeah. I’d like to see the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, I want to bike the Continental Divide, do an Ironman, see the Northern Lights, hike a glacier, hold a baby panda and win an Altus Cup…” I sensed myself babbling and cut it off. “Things like that. I almost have enough money saved to go to Alaska after the season is over. Hopefully I can knock out some glaciers and the Northern Lights in one trip.”
There was a pause. “Alone?”
“I was going to see if my brother would go with me. He’s the only person I know besides you with the time and money, but we’ll see. Last year we went to Peru to see Machu Picchu.” I shot him a smile over my shoulder. His fortieth birthday was coming up in October, but I didn’t want to mention that I knew that he should be the one thinking of making a bucket list. “What about you? What are you doing after the season is over?”
“I haven’t decided,” he answered in a low voice. “It all depends on a few things.”
A single thought entered my head. “Is your contract only for this season?”
I couldn’t remember hearing anything about the length of his employment, and the idea that he’d be leaving in a little over a month made my stomach churn.
“I only agreed to this season with the Pipers.”