“Is it?” I asked. “Seems morning is nigh on gone, now.”
“Well, close enough,” he replied easily. “What can I do for you?”
“Lualhati is still asleep,” I said without preamble. “I need to know if that is normal.”
“Hmm,” he rumbled thoughtfully. “Hard to say.”
Hard to say? What the blazes had I even called him for?
“Is your wife awake already?” I snapped.
“Yes,” he conceded. “But that is only because I woke her up myself.”
“Tenn!” came his wife’s strangled-sounding cry from somewhere beyond him.
“Do not worry,” he said to her. “I will not tell him that I woke you up by eagerly bumping you!”
“Jesus Christ,” Tasha said. “Do you mean humping? Because that’s what you were doing when I woke up, you horndog.”
“I am not a corndog. We have been over this. I do not identify as any human snacks. Including nachos, which you called me that first night you met me.”
“Horndog,” she corrected.
“I was not being that either,” he said adamantly. “I was being the large spoon! I know you always like to be the tiny spoon!”
Empire help me. Was this what marriage to a human was like? It sounded like Warden Tenn had entirely lost use of all his faculties. Calling himself a large spoon and comparing himself to human snacks. What the blazes was he on about?
“Warden Tenn,” I said sharply. “I must request that you refocus your attention on this conversation at once.”
He did so, but only after adding to his wife, “Do not worry, Tasha. I also will not let him know that I found my delicious breakfast between your legs this morning!”
“Are you quite well?” I demanded once I sensed that his full focus was with me again.
“Always!” I thought I heard the thud of his boots on a wooden floor, then the click of a door shutting. “Why do you ask?”
“Because you are speaking utter nonsense!” I said. “Being spoons and losing your breakfast between her legs!”
“Not losing,” he said on a conspiratorial growl, “finding.”
“That makes even less sense. What, did a lone sausage waggle its way between your wife’s thighs in the night? Or perhaps some tuhla fruit sprouted there while she slept!”
“I am not speaking of literal food, my fellow warden,” he said. “I am speaking in metaphor.”
By the blazes. First the ridiculous not-heart-shaped heart, now this. Why couldn’t everyone just say precisely what they meant?
“I was speaking,” he went on, smugly rumbling the words, “of cunni-linoleum.”
“Speaking ofwhat?”
“You did not hear me? Well, I shall say it again. I have gone outside the saloon, and Tasha will not berate me for it now. I was talking about cunni-limoncello.”
“I think our connection has gone bad.”
“Has it? I can hear you just fine. Did you not catch my mention of cunni-limerick?”
“Every time you say that word, it is a different word.”
“Nonsense!” he scoffed. “I could never forget a word like cunni-lumberjack! I’m surprised you do not recognize it, Warden, as I know you have read the human book more than once. Surely you have seen the demonstrative images of it, where the man puts his mouth on the human woman’s cunt!”
