Room Mated: Standalone Reverse Harem Romance

Kylie giggled. “No shoes, no shirt, no service.”

“You love watching me walk around without a shirt on, sweet cheeks.”

Her lovely face flushed. “No comment.”

“And we’ll talk to people about calling it a conversation club and keeping it on the down low,” Jude continued. “Oh, and we should put a sign on the balcony as to its capacity. We don’t want thirty people out there.”

“Yeah, that could get dangerous fast,” Mason said.

“Plus it might make people ask questions,” Kylie added.

“All right, we’ll leave you to two that,” I said to Mason and Jude. Mason liked telling people what to do, so he’d be good at it.

“So, I guess we’ve all got our assignments,” Jude said. “Is there anything else we should talk about?”

“I think we’d make more money if Kylie wore a French maid costume behind the bar,” Mason said, earning an elbow from the woman in question. Mason could be crass at times, but I couldn’t help visualizing what he’d just proposed. Maybe we’d work that into a bedtime story at some point.

Kylie turned to Jude. “Nope, I definitely didn’t hear anything else we need to discuss.”

“Meeting adjourned,” he said.

A day or two after, I couldn’t stop thinking about the speakeasy, or the conversation club, if that’s what we were supposed to call it. It had been something of a teaching moment for Kylie, and it occurred to me, perhaps it could for the first-year students in my cohort.

Consequently, I did something I should’ve done a month ago—I set a meeting for our group. I called in a few favors and got us a good conference room with a nice view. I did it because when people are comfortable, they relax, allowing their minds to come up with more ideas than— Oh hell, who was I kidding? I got the good conference room because I loved the way Kylie’s face lit up when she saw mountains.

The first to arrive at the meeting was a tall redheaded dude. I welcomed him, taking a peek at the cheat sheet Kylie had made me. Male, red-haired, w/freckles = Darren. Kylie was the next to arrive, and sure enough, she took a seat on the side of the room allowing her to look out the window. Go figure.

The last to arrive was, according to Kylie’s notes, female, frizzy brown hair = Paige. I recognized her as the young woman who’d talked shit about me to Kylie by the dolphin statue the other day. I decided not to hold it against her since she’d been mean, but not actually wrong—and also because of the very enjoyable way that day had ended. Hmm, maybe after the meeting was over, I’d take Kylie up to that little room in the tower and do it all again.

But right now, it was time for business. Literally.

“As first-year students, you’re learning a lot. You’re gathering all the pieces you need. Information about finances. Managing employees. Organizational systems. The ethics of capitalism, etcetera. But one thing you don’t usually get to do in your first year is putting all those pieces together. So, our cohort will engage in a thought exercise. We’ll go over every kind aspect of building a business from the ground up. It’ll involve everything you’ve learned so far, and probably a few things you haven’t.”

“What kind of business is it?” Paige asked.

“A bar,” I said. My gaze fell on Kylie as her cute lower lip dropped. When she looked up, I gave her a quick wink, and she smiled back.

An hour later, we were still debating. The six students in my cohort asked the right questions and took a hell of a lot of notes. A young woman named Hannah frowned and raised her hand.

“You don’t have to do that,” I reminded her for at least the fifth time.

“Okay,” she said. “From what you’ve told us, it looks like this bar only serves beer and mixed drinks. Maybe they should add wine?”

“Good point, but what information do we need first?”

“How much the wine costs versus how much you could charge,” Hannah replied.

“Exactly. Anything else?”

“What kind of glassware you’d need,” Kylie said. “And we’d probably need to estimate how many will break each month and what it will cost to replace them.”

“Excellent.” As a bartender, it figured she’d think of that. “Why don’t you work on that estimate.”

“Okay.” She smiled to herself, no doubt amused that for everyone else, it was theoretical, but for us, it was real. But it was still a damn good exercise for these students who didn’t seem to have much real-world business experience.

“What about overhead?”

“What about it, Scott?”

“Well, we’d need to calculate the cost of buying or renting a building plus cleaning and maintenance, right?”

“Right. Why don’t you work on that?”

“For what size place?”

I hesitated. I couldn’t exactly say it was for a dormitory suite. “For a bar the size of the Dancing Horse downtown.”