“Whoa, whoa, let’s pump the brakes on the accusations, honey. You fell asleep on my dick. Again. As in, you’ve done this to me before and have now done it another time. Do you know how many times a man can experience that and still survive? I’m pretty sure I’ve officially met my quota. You were out cold, and I was distraught. Chinese food was the only solution!”
“I didn’t fall asleep during sex,” I contested. “We were finished.”
“No, Crazy, we weren’t. I stuck my dick inside you, and I may as well have been plugging a sleep machine into the outlet. You were out! No sexy time. No tantric titties. You literally made me a no-pump chump.”
When I thought back on it, I couldn’t exactly say he was wrong.
This pregnancy kept me so damn tired. All the time.
Plus, I had a long track record of being able to fall asleep at the drop of a dime. I’m talking borderline narcoleptic at times. It wouldn’t have been out of the realm of possibility for me to fall asleep during sex, even when I wasn’t pregnant. And well, right now, I definitely was. Come to think of it, I couldn’t exactly remember how I’d gotten from check-in sexiness to the end of my nap, so it wasn’t unheard of.
“Yeah, well, I’m sleepy,” I eventually responded, putting a hand to my hip. “I’m building a human, for Pete’s sake. I am literally a walking, talking, miracle of fluffing life right now. How many organs did you fashion out of nothing today, Thatcher? Exactly none, son.”
“I know, I know,” he pleaded, his hands up in a defensive pose. “I understand. Your body is working overtime, and you fell asleep. No harm, no foul. I just needed food as a consolation prize.”
I narrowed my eyes, and he grabbed a half-empty container of lo mein and presented it to me like Rafiki held Simba in The Lion King.
“Here. Please, honey, have some food. I don’t even want any more.”
“So, you just want me to have your scraps?”
“No, I-I don’t even really like lo mein. I ordered it mostly for you. I just ate half of it to make sure it was safe for your consumption.”
I sighed. Lo mein did sound good. And I was really freaking hungry. The only other option was to wait for something else to arrive, and as my stomach’s protests changed over from silent to uproarious, I didn’t think that was the best of options.
I opened and closed my hand like a crab claw in demand of the container, and Thatcher shuffled forward to hand it to me. He looked handsome, staring up at me from his knees like that, and it almost made me want to try having sex again.
I mean, I was wide awake now. Raring to go. There was no way I’d pass out before completing the action this time.
“Maybe we should—” I started, only to be cut off by the sound of a knock on the door to our room. It was light at first, but with each pound, it seemed to get harder and more persistent.
Maybe they’d been knocking for a while, and we just hadn’t heard them?
Either way, I had too much food to eat to be worrying about some rando at the door. This was a job for the Jolly Green Giant if ever I’d seen one.
“Who could that be?” Thatch pondered, peeking his head outside the bathroom as I grabbed the container of lo mein and his fork from the counter, sank down to the ground, and went to town.
Mmm. That’s good.
He shuffled past me, out the door and into the main space of our room, and I concentrated on my noodles.
Yum.
“Cass, did you order something?” he eventually called from a distance.
I shook my head, concentrating on executing the perfect curl of my noodle around my fork.
A shocked guffaw cracked out in the room, and the sound of Thatcher’s footsteps pounding toward me increased by the second. “Did you order strippers?” he asked, his voice close now.
“What?”
“Cass, stop eating for a second and listen to me.”
Annoyed, I pulled my head out of the container of chicken and looked into his eyes. They were serious and concerned, and in the tiny space between his arm and the side of his body, I could see a man and a woman loitering just inside the door of our room.
Oh! Suddenly, it hit me. The strippers were here!
“Yes!” I shouted. “I totally lost track of what time it was.”
“You actually ordered them?” Thatch asked, his mouth pursed in surprise.
I shook my head at his confusion. I really wasn’t sure why this was all coming as such a shock. I mean, I’d been pretty fucking clear that we’d come to Panama City Beach because it was a spring break town. What did he expect?
“Yeah, of course I did. Neither one of us had a bachelor or a bachelorette party, so we’re going to have one tonight.” I shrugged. “What’s the big deal?”
“I don’t know,” Thatch hedged cautiously. “I just never imagined I’d be watching a stripper dance, when my wife’s perfectly superior tits are right next to me.”
I laughed. “Oh, please. I know you love my body. Why wouldn’t you? It’s bangin’. But this is a tradition we didn’t get to have, so we’re having it now.”
“When did you even arrange this?”
I rolled my eyes. “I put it in my itinerary when I did all the planning. I let them know of the hotel switch while you were busy checking in. And voilà! Here they are.”
“This itinerary…is it the kind of thing I could print out in the hotel business center?”
“No!” I protested. “That takes all the spice out of it, and we are keeping this honeymoon spicy, dammit!”
Thatch raised both his hands and nodded. “Okay, fine. But, uh…what are we doing about the adult industry professionals in the room? Keeping them?”
“Yes!” I insisted. “Tell them to get set up, and I’ll finish up eating in here.”
When he didn’t move fast enough, I narrowed my eyes.
“Okay, okay. Getting the room—” he paused and lifted his fingers into air quotes “—set up. Whatever that means.”
Thatcher might have been confused, but I couldn’t have felt clearer. Setting up for a joint bachelorette/bachelor party in our honeymoon hotel room after we were already expecting a baby meant we were still the us I knew and loved. It meant we were wild and crazy and in love and all the things a million other people could only dream of being.
It meant that life as I knew it was here to stay, and I didn’t have to wonder how everything coming our way would change it.
And fluffing hell, I was going to make sure we enjoyed it.
I looked to my left and took in the vision that was my beautiful wife, sitting in a chair beside mine. Cass grinned over at me, her eyes alight with excitement and anticipation, and I tried my damnedest to force an equally entertained expression to my face.
On the inside, though? I could not shake the sense of impending weirdness.
Most people would’ve thought that their wife hiring strippers for the night would have been something to celebrate, but in that moment, it just felt like…shit was about to get strange.
Once Cass had finished off the lo mein, Magic Mark and Emma Bone—our exotic dance professionals for the evening—had commandeered our bathroom to do whatever it was strippers did before they performed, and I couldn’t deny I was pretty goddamn freaked out by the whole situation.