Page 36 of Their Pup to Tame

“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 offhis 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 claimoopswhile 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 sayswedon’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.”