10. Aspen
ASPEN
As soon as I heard the jangling of the bell, I groaned.
People had been coming in and out all day, which was great for business, but shit when it came to taking a long enough break to enjoy a hot cup of tea.
Every single one I’d brewed today I’d wound up drinking cold, which was starting to put me in a bit of a snit.
I will not snarl at the customers. I will not snarl at the…
I turned with a forced smile on my face, which morphed into a real one when I saw that they weren’t customers at all.
Parker held up a bulging plastic sack, and Phoenix held up a second one, both men beaming from ear to ear with such enthusiasm that my bitterness over cold tea faded, replaced with the urge to hug them.”
“We brought lunch,” Phoenix declared,
“If you two weren’t already my favorite people in the world, you would be now,” I said and raced past them to flip the sign to closed and turn the hands on the clock to show we’d be open again in an hour.
As soon as the door was secured, I hurried into Phoenix’s arms and found myself lifted off the ground for my troubles, one armed, as he spun me around.
Instead of feeling the need to caution him against knocking over one of the displays, I clung, giggling, as he set me back on my feet before he kissed me.
I felt the bag of food bump against the back of my leg, then a sharp edge dug in, spoiling the mood even as he deepened the kiss.
Squirming didn’t free me, but Parker saved me from a bruise when he took the bag from Phoenix, allowing me to melt instead of trying to get away.
“Missed you,” Phoenix murmured as he stepped back, green eyes holding a hint of the shy vulnerability he allowed us to see more of with every passing day.
I could tell it wasn’t an easy thing for him to admit, and even more difficult for him to let himself form that kind of attachment to anyone outside of his family circle, but he pinned my hand to his cheek with one of his when I caressed it, nuzzling, gaze never leaving mine.
For a moment, he sighed and let his pup side shine through, even letting out a soft whine.
“Has it been a long day?” he finally asked.
“The longest. Dorian is still tweaking those commission pieces for Iron Paws and Leather Pups, so neither Murry nor Raleigh were free to come down and lend a hand today. I’ve been going non-stop since we opened.
Not only has there been a steady stream of folks in and out all day, but there is always a flood of emails to answer at the start of the workweek. ”
“I’m sorry you haven’t been able to catch a break today,” Parker said as we headed to the backroom.
“And it’s not even half over yet,” I groaned. “I’m still going to be answering emails right up until the game starts at this rate. Oh, goddess, that smells delicious. Did you go to Peking Palace?”
His answer was to start removing cartons from bags, while I grabbed drinks from the mini fridge, and Phoenix passed out paper plates and utensils.
“You did!” I squealed as soon as I caught sight of the first carton.
“We did,” Parker said as Phoenix plopped a roll of paper towels on the table.
“Someone wrote a scene where his characters were dining at a Chinese restaurant while sorting through the information they’d gathered, and from that point on, he would not stop talking about Chinese food,” Phoenix declared, scowling across the table at Parker.
“First it was, ‘Mmm, I can practically smell the lobster sauce.’ Then it was him smacking his lips before muttering about barbecue pork ribs in a bright red sauce. Then, after I’d finally gotten into the graphic novel I was reading, he groaned and started talking about General Tso’s chicken! ”
“See, he conveniently left out the part about throwing a pillow at my head,” Parker pointed out.
“Did it connect?” I asked, already snickering, because I could tell it had just from the indignant look on his face.
“Caught me square on the nose and scared the hell out of me,” Parker grumbled. “My pen went flying, I dropped my notebook, and I nearly fell out of the chair.”
“Now you’re exaggerating,” I declared.
“By a metric fuckton,” Phoenix grumbled as he started removing lids. “It was that tiny-ass cross-stitch pillow, and it bounced off his nose and landed on the table in front of him with hardly any acknowledgment from Captain Dramatic over there.”
“I thought that was my title,” I said as I took in everything that he unveiled. “Wait a minute. Did you two actually bring every dish he wrote about?”
“Yup,” Phoenix declared. “Shrimp with lobster sauce, Mongolian beef, General Tso’s chicken, barbecue pork ribs, crab Rangoon, tempura shrimp, edamame, and egg rolls.”
“Don’t forget the fortune cookies,” Parker pointed out.
“He tormented me with verbal food porn and distracted me so much from my graphic novel that I’m going to have to go back to the beginning and start over because I have no idea what the hell I read, since the only thing I could focus on was food.”
“Hey, in all fairness, I made myself hungry too,” Parker pointed out as we started passing around cartons.
“Good! They were your characters. You should have kept that shit to yourself, but no…you had to share.”
“Sharing is caring?” Parker said with an impish smirk.
“This kind of sharing,” Phoenix said, motioning to the food on the table, “is caring. Being so damned obscene in your descriptions and sound effects that it was hard to tell if you were writing porn or a conversation was completely uncool.”
“Would it have been cooler if I were writing porn?” Parker asked.
Phoenix slapped a hand to his face, groaned, and shook his head.
“Okay, changing gears before you break his brain,” I said before biting into one of the crab Rangoon. “Ohh...hh...hoo...mmmm...hot, but so, so good!”
“See!” Phoenix growled. “Right there! That is exactly what I was talking about.”
“Oops,” I said before taking another bite.
My eyes watered it was so hot, but the melty, crabby, delicious center more than made up for searing my tongue with the way it tasted.
“Bullshit,” Phoenix replied. “You can’t claim oops while sitting there looking like you’re having an orgasm! We need a penalty corner in here and at home since neither one of you knows how to act.”
“Us,” Parker said, clasping his hands to his chest. “Can you believe that, Aspen? He says we don’t know how to act.
But wasn’t he the one who sprawled naked on the bed just the other day and fell asleep for us to find after that brunch to unveil the upcoming events the Lactin Brotherhood will be hosting? ”
“I’m just sitting here giddy over the fact that he called my house ‘home.’”
“He did, didn’t he?” Parker said, focusing on Phoenix, who attempted to brush it off by changing the subject.
“To be fair,” Phoenix said, “I didn’t intend to fall asleep when I sprawled out on the bed. I’d just gotten out of the shower, and there was a giant sunbeam streaming in. Hell yeah, I laid in it and got fuckin’ comfy too.”
“We could tell by the way you were snoring,” I said, pointing an egg roll at him.
They were so good. Seriously, the whole meal was food porn at its finest.
“Meh.”
Parker snickered and shook his head at Phoenix, who dipped a sliver of rib into the sweet and sour sauce, speared a piece of chicken, and popped them both in his mouth.
“So,” I began, once I’d killed off another egg roll, “after the last session, I think we can all agree that diplomacy is not this party’s strong suit.”
“What do you expect when out of all of us, Phoenix is the most willing to negotiate?” Parker pointed out.
“If by negotiate you mean hold some valuable and oftentimes fragile object hostage until his demands are met, then yeah, okay, I suppose you can call it that. I still can’t believe Phoenix had his character stand there, paw outstretched, ready to knock that elven vase off the mantle if the guild master wasn’t willing to barter. ”
“Hey, that grumpy bastard let us buy the map we needed, didn’t he?” Phoenix replied with a shrug.
“Yes, which was why there was no need for you to knock the vase over afterwards.”
“My inner kitty needed to be appeased,” Phoenix muttered.
“That and he failed his saving throw,” Parker reminded me.
“The dice failed the saving throw, all I did was sit back and helplessly watch the calamity unfold,” Phoenix complained.
“Which is why we need an exit strategy,” I announced. “Something that will allow us to dip the moment it looks like we’re about to kick off another interspecies incident.”
“That’s going to be my character’s slogan from now on,” Phoenix declared. “Meow Minion, kicking off interspecies incidents since 2026. If you’ve got the dime, I’ll arrange the crime.”
“Now you just sound like a poorly thought-out supervillain,” I snickered.
“Or a five AM infomercial,” Parker hooted. “We are truly going to find ourselves in the shit if he unrolls a whole line of products and services.”
“That’s not a bad idea at all,” Phoenix mused. “Do you have any paper back here?”
Sighing, I grabbed a spare notebook from the supply drawer and passed it over, along with a couple of pens. Our food was dwindling, though there was still enough left in the cartons to add a few more morsels to my plate.
“Why are you encouraging him to engage in chaos?” Parker grumbled.
“Because we are about wandering through woods that are filled with marauders, tricksters, and thieves,” I pointed out. “We are going to need our Meow Minion to balance the scales.”
I couldn’t recall the name Phoenix had actually given to his half-feline, half-human character, because once Parker had started calling him the party’s Meow Minion, the name had stuck.
Our pup was rather pleased with it, and judging from the list rapidly unfolding beneath his pen, he was planning on having boatloads of fun…
and likely get us chased all over the forest for our troubles.
Yup.
Exit strategy was a must.