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“I mean, ye-esss?”
“Anyone new in your life?” she asks.
I frown. “Not that I can remember…”
Which is apparently the wrong answer judging by her angry badger face.
“Perhaps someone who needs a handsome prince?” Sarah flutters her eyelashes and I choke back a laugh.
Faye didn’t want to go home after the Matador last night, so I brought her back to my place. Once there, I watered her, fed her, and then tucked her into bed to sleep it off. It was all fine until eight a.m. when Rachel and Ivan barged in to say good morning to Dale. Ivan and I were working on teaching him to sit—for as smart as pigs are, this one can’t seem to take a command much less not make a mess any time he’s out of his crate. I was cleaning up the juice he’d knocked off the table when I heard Rachel and Ivan giggling about princesses and zombies.
“Those rats sold me out,” I say.
“Thoseratsare my children and they wouldn’t stop talking about it the entire car ride to school. I mean, it was a hot debate. Was she really an enchanted princess woken by a handsome prince? Or a princess zombie who hadn’t made the shift quite yet? And then things got really heated over whether or not Dale the pig qualified as handsome.”
“You’ve got to admit, he’s got certain angles that really work for him.”
“Zeke,” she says, holding her mug with both hands as if this will make her words more emphatic. “My kids saw a woman in your bed this morning.”
Oh shit. I didn’t think about it that way.
“Oh shit,” I say out loud when I realize the first time I only thought it.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry, Sarah. But really, it wasn’t anything weird or inappropriate.”
“Look,” she says, taking a long sip of her tea. “You’re young, you’re handsome, and just because you haven’t paraded a slew of eager young women across our front yard—and thank you for that, by the way.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I know you’re not a monk.”
“I’m not.”
“And maybe we need to talk to the kids about not just barging in on you in the morning.”
“No,” I say, quickly. “I love that they say good morning.”
It really is one of the best parts of my day and one of the main reasons I haven’t even considered finding my own place. Sure, the rent situation is better than shelling out the money for a condo in The Pearl—a condo that would only complicate things if I get traded—but more than that, I love being close to those kids. I love that they feel comfortable enough to just barge in any old time. I don’t want to do anything to damage that.
“I’m not saying they can’t come over,” she says, raising a palm. “But they could learn to knock.”
“Of course,” I say, with a quick nod. “And, for what it’s worth, it really wasn’t anything… uncouth.” The word flops out of my mouth like a dead fish. She presses her lips together, fighting a smirk.
“It wasn’t uncouth, was it?”
“What wasn’t uncouth?” Zach comes down the stairs, buttoning the wrists of his green flannel shirt.
“The woman in his bed this morning.”
“He brought a woman home?”
“He brought a woman home.”
“I didn’t bring a woman home,” I say.
“There was a woman in his bed this morning,” Sarah says, pointing at the garage, as if that explains it all.
