“So, you’re telling me the dog’s helping you sleep at night, not Marcus and his penis?” Sadie repeated slowly, her face looking like she was trying to calculate the speed of a certain fraction of light through space.
Sinking down in my chair, I made a noise as I took a mouthful of coffee, almost choking when I swallowed at the same time.
“I-I-I…” Sadie’s mouth opened and closed as she looked at Santana. Seeing she wasn’t going to get any help there, she mumbled, “Well, bugger me.”
“Aren’t you feeling frustrated?” Santana whispered, looking around us like spies were watching us.
That, I could answer with zero issues. “Fuck, yes.”
Brightening, Sadie straightened up in her seat. “Then go find him and bang his brains out.”
“I can’t. They’re working on fixing one of the old barns. It’s the one those rescue horses are going in.”
Just last week, seven horses had been rescued from a racecourse where they were being whipped and abused brutally. They were gorgeous but skittish, so Marcus had found some equine specialists who would be coming in to help them.
“They’re in the spare stable, but he wants them to have more space in their stalls so they can move around if they get agitated.”
Rubbing her temples, Sadie stared at the coffee table.
Frowning at her, Santana asked hesitantly, “Honey, are you okay?”
“No, no, I’m not.” Dropping her hands down with a smack on her thighs, she finally glared at me. “How are you still alive?
“Listen, you need some man loving to knock you out at night. Trust me, pets work wonders—I know that from experience—but doing the dirty will have you zonked out and feeling woosah faster than you can say ‘fuck me, Amadeus.’”
Wrinkling my nose, I shared a look with Santana that said I wasn’t alone in questioning the woman’s sanity.
“In my defense, Marcus hasn’t tried or hinted at wanting to do the dirty, either.”
Scanning me from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, Sadie tilted her head to the side. “Have you been taming your goblin garden?”
“My what?”
“You know…” she nodded at my crotch. “Your goblin garden.”
“Ew,” I breathed. “Who calls it that?”
“People do. I also call it a nunney. If it hasn’t been tamed in a while, it’ll either be a meadow, or it’ll be crossing into a thatched roof type of ugliness.”
“I swear, I get so lost when you talk sometimes,” Santana muttered, saying precisely what was going through my mind at that moment.
Sighing, Sadie pulled her phone out and tapped something in before turning it around to show us a peculiar looking roof on top of a quaint house.
“Nan had a romance book written in around the ‘50s, and in it, the woman’s public hairs—”
“Public hairs?” I choked out.
“Yup, public hairs. Anyway, the woman’s pubes are referred to as a thatch, and all I could picture was a thatched roof. It made me feel a bit grossed out.”
Santana and I looked back at the screen, realizing what she was saying and jerking away from it simultaneously.
“That’s disgusting,” I groaned, pressing my palms into my eyes to try and clear the mental image. “Why?”
“Don’t ever refer to a snatch as a thatch in a book,” Sadie said to whom I assumed was Santana, given that I couldn’t write one to save my life.
“Noted.”
Not giving me a chance to clear my brain, Sadie went back to the original topic. “Anyway, have you tamed the garden, or is it overrun?”
I wouldn’t say it was overrun, per se, but I hadn’t been as meticulous with my personal grooming since it’d all happened. I guess I was distracting myself with Maestro, work, and life with Marcus in general, so that’d fallen to the side.
Heck, I hadn’t even painted my toenails or moisturized…
Shit, no wonder he didn’t want to touch me.
“Right,” Sadie snapped, getting up and hitting the screen on her phone.
As she asked Elijah to babysit Bronte, I leaned into Santana’s side. “Do you know what’s going on?”
Shooting me a bug-eyed look, she chewed nervously on her lip. “I have a feeling it involves a thatch.”
“Okay, ladies, we’re going on an adventure. Everybody hold hands and follow the teacher to the car.”
I’m not gonna lie, by this point, I was not only intrigued by what she had planned, but I was also slightly scared not to do as I was told. So hell, yeah, I stayed in line and didn’t let go of Santana’s hand.
It wasn’t until we were driving toward town that I mustered up the courage to ask Sadie what was going on.
“There’s a beauty salon that we pass every time we visit, and when I looked it up online, it had something called ‘vagscaping.’ It’s kind of gross, but I think it’ll cover what we need doing. You can also get your legs done.”
When no one said anything, she added, “We’re shocking you out of your little shell with wax. Trust me when I say you’ll be a reformed woman.” I swear I heard her whisper after it, “Changed for fucking life, too.”