“What? You didn’t?” Raye asked.
Luna didn’t deny it.
“Bet Knox, even if he’s with someone else, didn’t like that much,” Jessie drawled.
“We were just friends out for drinks,” Luna said.
“Methinks Knox is gonna hear about this,” Raye replied. “Methinks Knox might be with someone else, but he isn’t gonna like it. Methinks?—”
“Oh my God, stop it with the ‘methinks’ shit,” Luna groused.
Jessie was nodding sagely toward Luna. “Well played, my friend. Well played.”
Hang on.
What?
“What’s well played mean?” I asked.
“Nothing makes a man realize he wants something and it’s time for him to make his move more than that man seeing someone else having what he wants,” Shanti explained.
I was still confused.
“But you could have had Knox,” I said to Luna.
“Really?” Luna fired back. “Maybe you all don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe it wasn’t me who was holding back. You ever think of that?”
“Holy shit,” Jessie whispered everyone’s thoughts.
“Dude! They’re called artichoke agave and they’re the shit!” we heard shouted from the coffee cubby area, this interjection ending our chat, something that was probably good because Luna looked like she needed us to back off.
Though, we’d need to circle around to it again, for sure.
But that shout was Annette.
Annette was Rock Chick adjacent. Not a full Rock Chick because she’d already found her man before the others had their romantic adventures, so the “adjacent” part was a technicality.
She’d come down from Denver on a visit a few months ago with some of the RCs, fell in love with Phoenix, and now she was adding to her head shop empire (she had one in Chicago called Head East, one in Denver called Head West, and she was opening one here, and she was calling it Head Southwest).
She’d also assigned herself as the landscape architect for Tex and Nancy’s new home.
Tex just hadn’t accepted that assignment.
Nope, that wasn’t right.
Tex was vehemently opposed to that assignment and all the assignments the RCs and AAs had given themselves to revamp their seventies home that had been designed by an award-winning architect, but it hadn’t been all that well taken care of in, oh, the last forty years.
“We’re gonna have dirt and rocks,” Tex retorted as we all made our way from behind the bar to the coffee cubby so we could watch the show. “Not anything I gotta maintain or water. And my Nancy isn’t gonna be out in the hot sun doin’ that shit either.”
When we got there, we saw Annette standing, holding a big tub filled with a full-grown artichoke agave. And there was a bucket at her feet in which was a healthy agave victoriae-reginae (my favorite, btw, they were gorgeous).
I wasn’t certain why she had to bring the actual plants into SC, considering they were rather large, outside of presentation purposes. But it seemed an unwieldy presentation.
Then again, to get through to a man like Tex when he was being stubborn about something, you used every tool in your arsenal.
“It’s a desert plant, my man,” Annette assured him. She swooped an arm to the bucket on the floor. “They all are. You only gotta water them for a year, two, at most three before they find purchase and thrive on their own. And you don’t have to water ’em much because they’re desert plants.”
“You can set up drip systems, Tex,” Harlow chimed in. “So you and Nancy don’t have to water at all.”
