Something to Talk About. Dakota Cassidy

such a priss?”

      LaDawn scooped up the gel breast and shook it like a raw chicken breast, making it jiggle. “Because you are?”

      With alcohol came fearlessness. “I am not. I quote the Lord, yes. But that’s only because Jesus analogies are all I have to make comparisons to real life. My mama was a true Southern Baptist, and it just so happens Bible verses are what stuck. So while I might be conservative on the outside, I don’t buy into it all the way you think I do. I like sex. I like it a lot.”

      LaDawn reached out and patted her hand, her tone a little condescending, a little amused. “Good for you, honey. You still shouldn’t be playin’ with the big girls.”

      “Em, talking dirty to some stranger on the phone isn’t like practicing to flirt with a man in real life,” Dixie reminded her. “I’m not sure how you’re connecting the dots here.”

      “She connected them with wine.” LaDawn barked a laugh at her own joke.

      Which only infuriated Em further. She raised a finger and swished it around. “Let me tell you a thing or two, Miss LaDawn, I could do it! I hear you naughty Nancys take calls all day long—I’ve learned some things from you.... I’m not sayin’ I want to talk to the men LaDawn considers herself ‘companionators’ to—that might be rushin’ things, what with the latex and flogging, but maybe something tamer. Who knows, maybe it’ll help me get better at talkin’ up the opposite sex—free me from the chains that bind or something.”

      Or something. Anything to loosen her up and help her forget there were days when she felt like she was nothing but a stale loaf of day-old bread. There were days when Clifton’s words, even after almost a year, still stung. “How was I supposed to know, someone like you, conservative and nigh on prissy, would entertain the idea I liked to wear women’s clothes?”

      Conservative and prissy.

      She wanted to be a new Em. Open to owning her sexuality and leaving the buttoned-up perception of her behind.

      Marybell snickered, swirling her glass of Pinot. “Very dramatic, Em, this freein’ of your sexuality. Next you’ll want to read the Kama Sutra cover to cover and pose nude for Playboy.” Marybell chuckled. “Taking calls isn’t like flirting in real life. We openly have sex using our words—we don’t just suggest it. Don’t confuse the two, pretty lady.”

      “Girl, you are somethin’ else when you an’ libation join hands in holy alcohol, ain’t you?” LaDawn squawked, slapping her hand on her thigh. “Two glasses of Chardonnay and all of a sudden you’re Em the Emasculator.”

      Em felt the office chair she was sitting in wobble. Or was she wobbling? She couldn’t be sure. She giggled on a hiccup, one that jolted her so hard, she fell into Dixie, who stroked her hair with a soothing palm.

      She took a deep breath and waved a finger at LaDawn’s lithe form in a “fooled you, didn’t I?” fashion. “It wasn’t Chardonnay, FYI. I had four drinks at the bar. The ones with the orange swirly stuff and the pretty umbrellas in them. Four.” Take that, conservatism.

      “Four?” LaDawn and Marybell chirped their surprise in unison.

      “Okay, who was on Em duty while I was off two-steppin’, LaDawn?” Marybell asked, casting a glance of aspersion LaDawn’s way.

      LaDawn popped her heavily lined lips, brushing her platinum hair off her shoulder with a scoff. “Oh, no. I told you I was gonna take second shift. That means before 11:00 p.m. you were babysitting.”

      Marybell shook her head, the pointy spikes of her red-and-green Mohawk beginning to sag after a long girls’ night out. “Nope. Dixie was supposed to take eight to ten. I was ten till 12:00 a.m. We let Cat take the night off, seeing as she can’t keep her eyes open for more than twenty minutes at a time.”

      Cat, now sprawled across the chaise, snored to prove their point.

      All eyes went to Dixie, who shot them a sheepish grin, full of dimples and sunshine.

      LaDawn grabbed the bottle of Chardonnay and poured her and Dixie another glass to share while Marybell dug a blanket out to cover Cat, tucking the edges under her chin. “You were textin’ with that confounded dreamboat of yours again, weren’t you? It’s not girls’ night if you’re textin’ with your man, Dixie. Then it’s girls’ night and Caine,” she admonished with a stern tone, but a smile she couldn’t hide crept across her lips.

      Dixie wrinkled her nose. “But he’s so cute when he texts me,” she defended her schoolgirl behavior.

      “If you can’t spend twenty minutes without contact with one Mr. Caine Donovan, you can’t be a girl out on a girls’ night. Then you’re just pathetic and maybe should be textin’ someone about obsession therapy,” LaDawn teased, poking Dixie’s arm with a glittery, purple nail. “So I’m callin’ it now, next time we all give up our cell phones at the beginning of the night so we don’t lose track of Em and her newfound love of spirits. Because look what happens when we do that. Four drinks and she gets to thinkin’ she should be learnin’ the tricks of the trade instead of just running the place.” She leaned forward and ruffled Em’s mussed hair with a chuckle.

      Em stuck her tongue out at LaDawn.

      LaDawn popped her lips at Dixie, ignoring Em. “While you’re off moonin’ over that man, it doesn’t mean Em doesn’t need lookin’ out for. She’s new to the single scene. Especially in a place called Cooters where every horn dog from here to Johnsonville goes to ladies’ night ’cuz the drafts are only a dollar. If someone doesn’t watch her, they’ll eat our innocent Em alive. You dropped the ball, Dixie Davis. Next time, you have to pull your shift and take my shift, too.”

      Em gave her friends a sour face, tucking her hair behind her ears. “I’m plenty of adult sittin’ right here, I’ll have you know. I don’t need a babysitter, and I’m not so innocent. And if I want to have four drinks, I will. Maybe I’ll have five,” she said defiantly.

      She deserved five. It had been a long two months since the finalization of her divorce. Seven total if you counted the time since she’d found out Clifton was an infidel who wanted to wear women’s clothing and live in Atlanta as Trixie LeMieux.

      Most of the pain of that discovery had passed. That Clifton hadn’t even given her the chance to understand that part of him still stung. She’d always prided herself on being open to new things, despite the fact that she was born and raised in a town stuck somewhere in the 1950s.

      Cross-dressing hadn’t ever entered her mind when she’d been thinking about what the word open meant, but who’s to say she wouldn’t have adjusted? Clifton just never gave her the chance to say one way or the other. He’d just left.

      And now, here she was, single at thirty-six with an eight-year-old and a five-year-old to raise with little help from her ex-husband. His embarrassment after an incident in town, where his secret was publicly and cruelly revealed by none other than Louella Palmer, had kept him from coming to see the boys as often as they needed seeing by their daddy.

      Dixie stretched her arms upward with a yawn of her perfectly glossed, pink lips. “Fine. Next girls’ night out, I’ll take two shifts. Now, what do you say we get you home, Em?”

      Em shook her off, reaching for more wine. She could drink as much wine as she liked, her internal rebel coaxed. “Stop appeasin’ me, Dixie. I’m a grown woman, and I don’t want to go home to my lonely, empty house right now. Gareth and Clifton Junior are spendin’ the weekend at Mama’s, so I’m a free bird. Just like Lynyrd Skynyrd says.”

      Dixie gave her a pointed look—one you’d give a willful preschooler. “You know what they say about idle hands and the devil.”

      “As Satan’s closest confidante, I’m sure you’ve heard all the gossip,” Em shot back, squeezing her friend’s arm with a giggle.

      When they’d been forced into the race for the phone-sex contest Landon set forth with Em as mediator, leaving them in