Page 22 of The B!tch is Bad

Chapter 7

Creed

How had Patience become so skilled with motorcycles?

She’d hopped right on my bitch seat, weaving her arms to enclose my torso. Her energy surrounding me gave me renewed confidence. Apologizing to her for my horrible behavior at the harvest fest wasn’t really in my bones. I did not regret having kissed her with such a hungry appetite. I’d kiss her, and more, in a heartbeat. That’s why I’d stayed away from her all week, texting about business.

What I did regret was having injured her fragile sense of self. Running from a violent past, Patience needed a gentle touch. Of course the first thing I’d done after purchasing the painting of her was do a reverse image search. When buying it, I’d known it was a gouache done by Alfred DeStory of Chicago. But the search led me to a thousand photos of one Constant Azarin of Edmond, Oklahoma, a brilliant, savvy runway model—yes, a natural blonde.

According to celebrity gossip sites, she was a girl from the province who attracted so much attention she became a favorite model for New York artists. This leggy, winsome teen emanated an innocent aura, at first on the runway, where girls wore a strange array of cavewoman attire, geometric forms not sewn to accentuate body shapes, but instead float on models like butterflies or frying pans.

Constant Azarin morphed to solely working as an artist’s model. She gazed at your soul from a world music album cover, an oil painting in the Museum of Modern Art, an impressionistic acrylic up for bid at Sotheby’s. She stunned the viewer with her knowledge of their destiny.

But she never spoke for herself. On red carpets, she only appeared next to her mother. I saw the cowed, browbeaten girl when she stood next to this controlling succubus. There was a definite difference in Constant’s eyes when standing next to Heather, the burden of unshed tears. Heather Azarin communicated for her daughter, brash and pushy. About age forty, Heather had given her daughter her pre-Raphaelite eyes, round with wonder. Except Heather was hardened, skeptical. A bitch as she reeled off the names of designers and painters Constant had or would work with.

Strangest of all, there were no social media accounts for Constant. She was hashtagged quite a bit in the accounts of others, but evidently Heather didn’t want her responding to anyone without her nonstop awareness of it. Constant had no duckface selfies, no fish gape, no bragging group poses where everyone with open mouths proclaimed that they were having the funnest time of all. Who were her friends? More importantly, who was this man—the one guy she didn’t get rid of? What had happened to split them up? Would this guy come back from her other world to reclaim her?

Patience Bedford, however, had a Facebook burner profile. It was very thin on details and had just been created six months earlier, but she had five hundred friends—mostly patch holders and relatives of the Bare Bones MC. Without a single selfie, she molded a character who worked at Smoky Mountain High organizing fun marijuana-related events for bikers and tourists. Her profile picture was a cartoony AI of her brown-haired self, invisible to image searches. Posted were photos of Pippa Lofting, Elektra Whaley, Ford and Lytton Illuminati with their old ladies, and even Santiago Slayer—for a hitman, he sure had a huge online presence—adorning her pages with the joyous party faces missing from Constant Azarin’s page. She was an “events coordinator” who loved dogs, wine, and skydiving, but had no birthplace or education.

She had not posted anything about working for me. I didn’t know whether to be happy or suspicious about that. I liked to think she was protecting me.

We cruised through the feathery walls of air that swirled down Seeker Valley, her bare legs clamped about my hips. Of course we couldn’t talk, so I just imagined what she thought and felt as we slid by glittering fish farms, willows and umbrellas swaying over wine tasters, campers in camping chairs watching Seeker Creek mosey on by.

I sped up smoothly around corners because Patience would grip me tighter, her little hands over the black leather against my pecs. Yes, I’d bought a cut, but it was only a black leather vest to me, unadorned. If I looked deeper, I supposed I wanted to fit in with the crowd. When we slid by my stainless fermentation tanks looming nuclear under their massive roof, our journey was almost over. Was Patience giggling as I glided up my driveway? Oliver had dismounted his new Harley by now, and Lytton and Sean were yelling forcefully at the clown.

With regret I felt Patience slide from her seat. I watched without shame as she smoothed her flimsy skirt down over her bare legs. Removing her lid, she handed it to me with two stiff arms as though it were a bowl of holy water.

I stuffed my shades in my shirt pocket and grinned. “Thanks for the ride.”

“This Beemer is made in Berlin, right?”

“Right.”

“Torque goes from two thousand to four thousand rpm.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It has three modes.”

I nodded. “Rain, Roll, and Rock.” I couldn’t resist now. “How’d you come to know so much about this particular ride?” I probably already knew the answer.

“Ivan.”

That fucking competitor of mine. To push back, I said with a toss of my head, “Come on in. I have caviar and pumpkin soup, and can take some scallops from the freezer.”

Her eyes widened. “Oo. Scallops.” She was in. She almost clapped her hands with glee. “I’ll be right over. Let me just . . . “

“Sure,” I said, dismounting the scoot. She had conquered the terror I’d struck in her heart with my kiss, and that was good enough for me now.

As she sashayed back to her cottage, Oliver hollered at her. Pointing at my house, he said, “Creed will buy you a house like that one day.”

I joined the bellowing men. Earlier, Lytton had been shouting about Oliver selling him bogus vape pens that sent clients to the hospital. Now the focus had shifted, and Wildstar had taken control.

He bawled about some Screaming Eagle Pinot that had gone missing at Wine on Main. This drew my interest. “And I go there, and there’s like a fucking wall of boxes of Two Buck Chuck hiding the fact that there’s a shit ton of ’08 Pinot missing!”

Oliver spread his arms wide. “I have no idea what you’re talking about! Are you trying to say there’s some thief around Wine on Main?”

“We do need more security cameras,” I inserted.