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Usually meticulous about her appearance, Ashley’s long golden hair was falling out of a messy bun and her eyeliner was smudged all the way down to her cheekbones like some kind of rabid raccoon. She walked through a shadowed room and Miri frowned at a poster on the wall behind her.

“What is it?” Ashley hissed quietly.

Ignoring her tone, Nicole took a swig of coffee. “Miri is updating us on her hunt for monster dick.”

“Forget that, whose apartment is are you in?” Miri pressed. They might be semi-feral on the best of days, but not even Ashley would have a poster for a heavy metal festival on her wall.

“Shh!” Sunlight splashed across Ashley’s face and a door closed behind her. “Sorry, I had to get out of there before Tentacles woke up.”

“Who?” Miri and Nicole shared a look. Had they missed a relationship update?

“My date turned hookup.”

Marta choked on a bite of cookie. “You banged a dude with tentacles?”

“Don’t knock it til you try it.” Climbing into her car, a dreamy look crossed her face. “Those little suckers will change your life.”

“Then why are you sneaking out?” Miri laughed.

“Oh, the dude was a total dipshit. I only went home with him because I was horny as hell and he said ‘please’ when he asked. I like rewarding manners.”

An unexpected pang of envy stabbed at Miri’s chest. The gorgeous, leggy blonde couldn’t flip her hair without having a crowd of drooling men shadowing her steps.

Miri was usually pretty confident in her body — she was on the thicker side, but she knew for a fact she had great tits and ass for days — but Ashley’s specific brand of allure just couldn’t be taught.

And she would know, the bombshell had tried and failed to teach all of them at one point.

No, Ashley just oozed seduction from every perfect pore. And it definitely wasn’t annoying. Nope, not at all. Not even when they were out together and the bartender would ignore their orders to take hers first.

Okay, it was a lot annoying, but Miri couldn’t hold it against her. Ashley might look like a siren but she was the group’s biggest hype woman. If someone so much as looked at her girls wrong when they were out, she would tear the prick to pieces and grind them under her pointy heels.

“Anyway, clit-sucking tentacles aside, I’d rather hear about Miri’s quest to get dicked down by the local monster population.”

Marta sighed. “As the Human Resources manager, I’m forced to pretend I don’t hear this conversation happening on office grounds… but, for the record, I also want to hear about Miri’s attempts to end her vaginal drought.”

“As long as I never have to hear the words ‘vaginal drought’ ever again, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

Miri shuddered. What was so wrong with calling it a “dry spell?” Not everything needed a fancy nickname.

“I’ve been on two dates. One with a rude and handsy minotaur that Nico had to rescue me?—“

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Nicole cut in. “Frowny, tattoos for days, looks like he’d bang you over the back of a motorcycle Nico?”

Marta looked back and forth between them. “Who exactly is Nico?”

“Drake’s demon friend. Miri’s been eye-fucking him every time he comes by the house.”

“First off, I don’t think he has a motorcycle. And secondly, I have not been eye?—“

“Girl, I need a shower and cigarette after the two of you have been in the same room for longer than thirty seconds,” Ashley laughed. “Now tell us how he saved you. I want details.”

She had been trying to tell them before all the interruptions.

“I went out for tacos with a minotaur. He got aggressive real quick and Nico happened to be in the restaurant. He swooped in and gave me an excuse to get out to the parking lot so that I could make a run for it. That’s all.” Okay, that wasn’t technically all of it. “Oh, and I got his number.”

“Of course, you did.” Ashley beamed through the phone screen. “My horny little baby is growing up.”

“Ew.” Miri shook her head. Maybe she should have told Nicole and Marta to fend for themselves. She could be at home in her sweatpants instead of enduring this damned conversation. “The second date was a clusterfuck that turned into a group date.”

“Too bad it wasn’t a group date that turned into a clusterfuck,” Nicole muttered.

“How was it a clusterfuck?” Marta was listening with rapt attention. Miri wouldn’t be surprised if she whipped out a notebook and started taking notes.

“I got my days mixed up. The two demons ended up being cool with doing a combined date—it turned out they already knew each other and had been part of a poly-relationship in the past. And then there was the cousin…”

“The cousin?” Ashley leaned closer to her screen. “Babe, you are killing me with this suspense.”

“One of their cousins was a barista at the coffee shop and we had also matched on MONSTR.” Ace’s grinning face flashed through her mind. If she didn’t know any better, she would say the cheeky demon had planned the whole thing. “He decided to join in on the date too.”

Her phone buzzed in her bag. Miri bent down and fished it out of the pocket.

Ace

Hey, doll face. I had fun the other day at the coffee shop.

Want to do dinner next time? I know a good Italian place.

“Speak of the devil.” Miri flipped her phone around to show them the text. “That’s the barista.”

Marta reached over and tapped the unread tab on her messages. “Um, and the rest of these?”

Between the four demons, she had thirteen messages waiting for her. All of them wanted a second date, or a real first date in Nico’s case. Miri hadn’t had that many men in her inbox since she had accidentally posted a cleavage shot to her stories on social media.

And this time she wasn’t scrambling to delete them.

Nicole squinted at the texts. “Damn, girl. Looks like they all want a slice of Miri cake.”

“So, which one do you like best?” Marta asked.

“Forget that. Which one do you want to bang the most?”

“You think I can pick just one?” Miri laughed.

That was like asking her to choose between chocolate and vanilla.

It was never going to happen. “Nico has those dark and twisty vibes that makes me want to lick his eyebrow ring. Ace has a tail and a loud mouth, and I just know he would put them both to very dirty uses. Kaz just straight up looks like he would be a wild ride and I wouldn’t be able to remember my own name by the end.

And Duke? I’m pretty sure Duke could relocate my cervix to a new zip code.

”When I tell you I can’t decide which one I want most in my bed, it’s because they are impossible to choose between and my vagina wants the whole buffet. Except I have to make a choice… because it would be a dick move to string them all along… and I don’t want to be a dick!”

Nicole and Marta gaped at her. Okay, maybe that was too blunt… and a little unhinged. But the waves of flirty messages were starting to get to her.

“Or…” Nicole started and trailed off.

“Or what?”

“You could try to keep all four.”

Ashley clapped her hands on the tiny phone screen. “Oh, my god, yes. Do that.”

“They’d probably be down for it.” Marta frowned, her nose wrinkling as she concentrated.

“I read an article a while back that there are way fewer females than males in the monster population. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it’s like three to one males to females.

Culturally, they had to be more open to polyamory to survive in hiding for generations. ”

“I really love that you just know that off the top of your head,” Nicole laughed.

Miri ignored them. Not that Marta’s facts weren’t fascinating, but she had too much on her mind to follow along.

Keep four demons? That was crazy… right?

Then again, Nicole had somehow managed to wrangle not one, but five monsters who thought the sun rose and set just for her. And the three demons had been cool with a group date… Nico was the only outlier so far.

How would it even work? Her house was tiny, where would Miri even keep them? Would she be responsible for feeding all four, because her grocery budget could not handle that.

“How would I even go about this?” she asked aloud, mind reeling with the logistics. “Just casually put them all in a group chat and pitch an orgy?”

She could just imagine Nico’s frowny eyebrows soaring as the message blinked in his inbox. Miri snorted. That definitely would not work.

“Get them on one big group date,” Nicole said simply.

“It can’t be that easy.”

She shrugged. “It worked for me. I mean the actual date was a disaster, but they were moving themselves into my house, like, two days later. Trust me, the hard part isn’t getting them into your bed, it’s getting them out of your house again.”

It was a risk. Even pitching the idea could easily go sideways, and Miri could lose her shot with all four of the handsome as sin demons. But if it went right… four… handsome as sin… demons.

“I hope they like lasagna.”