Page 24 of The B!tch is Bad

How had that slipped through? Did I subconsciously want Patience to feel sorry for me—or at least see me as more human? I never spoke of cancer to anyone. “Yes. Throat cancer three years ago. It forced me to look deeper in myself, realize what was important.”

She had stopped chopping and just stood like Jack Nicholson with the cleaver. “Wait, back up. So you had a tumor in your throat?”

“Yes, surgery, chemo, radiation. All of it.” The salsify was peeled, so I could avoid her eyes by grabbing a colander from above to rinse the scallops in the sink.

“That must have been so stressful.”

My back to Patience, I shrugged. “My then-girlfriend took care of me. I had a feeding tube for a month. But I’ve been cancer-free since then!” I declared this with false cheer, hoping to put the emphasis on the “cancer-free.”

“Is that why you don’t vape?”

“Exactly. Don’t want smoke near my mouth. I couldn’t smell or taste for a whole year.”

I heard her clap her hand over her mouth. I hoped she wasn’t still holding the cleaver. “Land’s sake! You must’ve been panic-stricken you could never cook again.”

She was spot on. “You got it.” I shook the colander free of water. I remained at the sink, maybe looking a bit introspective, because Patience came to lean on the counter next to me.

Her voice was soft as a misted star. “Did this have anything to do with you leaving Silicon Valley?”

At last I turned to her. I’d have to come clean, just as she was coming clean. “Everything to do with it. Made me face my own mortality as they say. And finding two empty wine glasses and my girlfriend naked in my kitchen didn’t help.”

Her mouth became an O. “And I presume there was a naked guy somewhere near as well?”

I had to take a sip of my riesling for this one. I nodded once. “Dude got away before I could shoot him.”

Patience breathed in my direction, open-mouthed, going, “Wow. Wow. Wow. You’ve been through a lot.” Then to my surprise she added, “I shot at my husband once. Missed. He disarmed me and beat me.”

It was my turn to gasp. “What the fuck? You didn’t leave him right then and there?”

She looked at my boot. “No. My mother forbade it. Mr. Fingerhut was extremely wealthy, her cash cow. But that’s when I started formulating the plan to split.” She looked up at me, lower jaw set. “I made a vow to never miss again.”

“I can see. That’s why you want the target practice?”

“Exactly.”

“Then we’ll do it together.” My smile encouraged Patience to smile too. I handed her a wooden spoon. “See if that pumpkin soup needs to be warmer.”

While she slurped from the spoon, I shook the chopped bacon into the cast iron pan, letting it sizzle before I turned down the heat. “So why’d you have to break up with Ivan?”

She froze, her lips pursed above the spoon. Her face tightened, and she balanced the spoon on the pot rim. “My mother, of course. Ivan was only a musician, a biker from Russia. Why would she let me go with him?”

I stirred the bacon without looking at it. “But you were Constant Azarin. Couldn’t you have started a movement with a hashtag like Britney Spears did?”

Twirling to shoot daggers into me, it was obvious her jig was up. Would she run and go underground now it was clear I knew her identity, like she had from Mr. Fingerhut?

I swear my heart stopped working. It just thudded and lay there until she cried, “That’s exactly what Ivan said to do! He said just start blabbing to the media, finally make social media accounts, just do it! Talk to a lawyer, you know?”

Encouraged by her admissions, I became animated. My heart flopped into working order. “Right? Why not? That’s your fucking money, and you’re over eighteen.”

“Yes, well, at the time I was twenty-three.”

This fresh admission encouraged a silence where we both looked at each other wide-eyed.

I knew she was just twenty-five, not the thirty-five that Patience Bedford had been. I’d consorted with younger women before, of course, although not quite twenty-five years younger than myself. It seemed to encourage some domination instinct that I wasn’t sure Patience needed. The power, the control over the young lass, well, it turned me on.

I wanted to reach out and seize her, to kiss her with even more power than I’d shown in the garden shed. Yes, I’d fantasized about fucking her mouth until I spewed a great load. Patience on her knees, her bare, pert butt displayed in the mirror.

But she was used to being controlled. She was finally free.