Satisfied By the Slime (Monster Mates #6)

Chapter 1

Discreet Packaging

Maisie

The thing about making two hundred pounds of salt scrub by hand is that your body starts negotiating with you around hour two.

First, it’s reasonable. Hey, maybe switch arms? Sure. Great idea. I switch arms.

Then it’s more pointed. That shoulder thing is happening again. I know. I adjust my grip on the spatula and keep stirring.

Then, somewhere around the forty-minute mark of the second batch, my body drops all pretense of diplomacy.

It sends a white-hot cable of pain from my right shoulder to the base of my skull in a pointed remark that I better finish soon.

I suck in a sharp breath and my whole body locks up, teeth clenched against the sudden flare.

“Okay,” I say to the empty studio. “Duly noted.”

I set the spatula across the rim of the mixing bowl and press the tips of my fingers into the spot between my shoulders where a furious little knot of muscle has taken up permanent residence.

The heating pad velcroed around my lower back is doing its best, God bless it, but it’s hardly making a dent.

The desert night presses its familiar silence against the studio walls, the kind of quiet that only exists in a town small enough to hear your own heartbeat.

I want to stop, but I can’t.

The email from Verdance glows on my phone screen, propped against a row of curing rosemary-oat bars like a tiny billboard for my future.

Six hundred units. Thirty days. A number at the bottom that I’ve looked at so many times today it’s lost all meaning and then found it again—that slow vertigo of yes, this is real, this could save me, I just have to not screw it up.

That number would clear my credit card. The bad one. The one I lie awake thinking about with a sick, rolling dread that spikes every time I remember it exists.

I pick up my wine, take a sip—okay, more of a gulp—and do the math again.

Twenty units a day.

Cure time of seventy-two hours for the scrubs, which means I need to start one hundred and forty units within the first week or I’ll bottleneck at packaging.

Ingredient costs I can cover if I order the shea butter in bulk, which means another charge on the card, which means I’m thinking about the card again and that awful dread is hanging over me…

I should call Gram tomorrow. She’d know what to say to give me the courage to push through another day. She always does.

I was eight the first time Gram let me help make her signature soap.

I had stood on a wooden stool in her kitchen on the outskirts of town, stirring the lye mixture with a wooden spoon almost as tall as I was.

She watched from behind me, one hand over mine on the handle, the other resting on my shoulder.

Slow and steady, baby. Let the heat do the work.

For Gram it was a hobby, something to do to pass the long desert afternoons that stretched out like taffy. She had her wool felting, her alpacas, her dog-eared romance novels. Soap-making was just another thing to keep her hands busy.

For me, it became the thing I reached for when I didn’t know what else to reach for.

I moved to Coyote Springs because of those visits. Because some part of me never forgot how quiet the desert could be at night, how Gram’s house felt like the only place where I didn’t have to be anyone in particular.

I take another sip of wine and stare at the half-built shelving unit against the far wall.

Kyle designed it two years ago, back when we were going to open a brick-and-mortar shop together.

Phase One of the expansion, he called it.

The unit was going to hold retail displays.

That was two years ago.

The shelving unit holds overflow stock now. Fourteen boxes of unsold lavender bars from a batch I overproduced in a panic after he left, convinced that if I just worked harder, moved faster, made more, I could outrun the hole he’d carved in my finances.

He had the vision.

I had the credit score.

When the vision evaporated—along with Kyle and roughly nine thousand dollars of my borrowing capacity—the debt stayed.

He was a tech bro who had visited Coyote Springs on a wellness retreat, met me, and thought my little soap-making business was the quaintest thing, that type of artisan business that would totally take off with his social media expertise.

Yeah, that didn’t happen.

I finish the wine and consider pouring another half glass.

Though what I really should be doing is going to bed, because my alarm is set for five-thirty and I need to run labels before the first batch is done curing, and my back is a solid wall of misery from my tailbone to my neck.

Instead, I lower myself to the floor, because the studio stool makes the spasms worse and at least the concrete is flat and cool against my shoulder blades.

I press the heating pad harder into my spine and stare at the ceiling.

This is the part of the night where the quiet gets loud.

Where I notice that I’m alone in a way that has weight and texture and a specific quality of pressure against my chest, like someone resting a hand there.

I can feel my own heartbeat.

I can feel every place where my body is holding tension, which is everywhere, every hinge and joint and fiber clenched against something I can’t outwork.

I haven’t been touched by another person in a way that felt good in two years.

My body has become a piece of equipment I maintain.

Feed it, medicate it, force it through another sixteen-hour work day.

The idea of someone else’s hands on me exists in the same category as beach vacations and retirement accounts: Theoretically real. Functionally imaginary.

I pick up my phone.

Therapeutic deep-tissue massager.

That’s what I type into the search bar.

Legitimate and responsible. The kind of thing a woman with a wrecked back and a massive order deadline buys so she can keep functioning as a productive member of the economy.

The results are expected.

Massage guns shaped like power drills. Heated neck wraps. Foam rollers that look like medieval instruments of war.

I scroll with the glazed efficiency of someone who’s been managing her own pain long enough to know that none of these things are going to touch the knot between my shoulders that’s been there since October and has apparently filed for permanent residency.

And then the algorithm does what algorithms do.

The listings shift.

Slowly, the way a conversation changes direction at a dinner party after the second bottle of wine.

“Massager” starts appearing in quotation marks.

The devices get sleeker, more sculptural, described in language that’s doing a very specific kind of work.

Whisper-quiet.

Multiple intensity settings.

Ergonomic curve designed for hard-to-reach areas.

I know exactly what’s happening.

Yet I keep scrolling.

It’s 1 a.m.

I’m on the floor of my studio with a heating pad and the dregs of a glass of cheap wine, and the algorithm has clocked me with the precision of a sniper.

Every third listing is now shaped like something Georgia O’Keeffe would’ve painted if she’d had a contract with Brookstone.

Powerful. Deep. Pulsating.

Targeted stimulation for total release.

Oh, we’re not even pretending anymore. Wonderful.

I should scroll past.

I should plug in my phone, go to bed, and wake up in four and a half hours to run labels like a serious business owner who doesn’t make purchases based on loneliness and Pinot Grigio.

But I guess I’m just not that kind of person in the middle of the night.

I lean back against the concrete and scroll deeper with the righteous energy of a woman reclaiming her God-given right to enjoy things.

The listings get bolder in their coyness—curves to fit your body’s natural contours, intuitive pressure response, seven modes including—and then one stops me dead.

Somatic Deep-Tissue Relaxation Unit

Advanced responsive technology.

Full-body use.

Learns and adapts to your body over time.

Warming, pulsating relief for every area.

Quiet.

Infinitely patient.

Designed to be exactly what you need.

Satisfaction guaranteed.

I read it again.

A third time.

I mouth the words “Infinitely patient” and feel something thump in my chest.

I have never once in my life encountered patience in a consumer product.

I’ve barely encountered it in a man.

The product images are artfully vague. A sleek, curved shape in iridescent material, lit like a perfume ad. No dimensions or comparison photos of it resting in someone’s hand for scale.

The brand name is something I’ve never heard of.

Zero reviews.

Zero purchases.

$99.99.

I add it to the cart. I stare at the checkout screen. The little orange button.

Complete Purchase.

I put my phone face-down on my stomach and stare at the ceiling some more.

When was the last time I felt good in my own body, good in a way that had nothing to do with productivity or output or earning the right to exist? I come up empty.

The memory is there, somewhere, buried under two years of survival math and the specific exhaustion of being your own pack mule.

I know it’s there the way I know the bottom of the ocean is there.

Accessible in theory.

Would require equipment I don’t currently possess.

I look at my phone again as my thumb hovers over the orange button.

I remember something Gram told me one time, after she bought me a gift card to a local masseuse on a particularly bad back day.

Maisie Hayes, the Lord gave you a body and He expects you to enjoy living in it. That’s just good stewardship.

Gram has a way of making everything sound like scripture, even the stuff that absolutely was not.

I tap Complete Purchase.

The screen loads.

The little spinning wheel does its thing.

A confirmation email slides into my inbox with a cheerful Your order is on its way! and an estimated delivery window of three to five business days.

My heart is pounding. Which is absurd. I’ve just bought a massager—a massager—for less than the cost of my last shea butter order, and my body is reacting like I’ve signed a lease on a new apartment.

My face is warm. I can feel the wine in my cheeks and the adrenaline everywhere else, a fizzy, reckless current running through all that exhaustion like someone plugged a string of Christmas lights into a dead outlet and they flickered on anyway.

I delete my browser history—and the purchase confirmation email along with it.

Sure, I live alone. There’s no one here to see my phone and raise an eyebrow.

But I delete it all anyway, as if that’ll wipe clean the shame.

I haul myself off the floor, and my back registers its formal complaint with every inch of altitude gained.

The mixing bowl is still on the worktable, the scrub starting to set up around the edges.

I should transfer it to the molds.

I should wipe down the station.

I should do the seven other things on the list I keep on a sticky note next to the sink, each item written small and tight because the note is running out of room the way everything in my life is running out of room.

Instead, I rinse my wine glass, put the plastic wrap over the bowl, and turn off the studio lights.

Five-thirty is going to come for me like a freight train, and I’m going to meet it the way I meet everything: upright, caffeinated, and barely held together by an array of heating pads.

Three to five business days.

I can wait.