Page 8 of The B!tch is Bad

I must’ve encouraged him, for he looked back at my face. “—and we’d just shared a life-altering experience together, not sure what.”

“There was a dead guy,” I told him confidentially, as though discussing the plot of a show we’d seen. “I think we had to keep the circumstances of his death quiet.”

“Yes, yes,” Creed said. He took off his horn-rimmed glasses and thoughtfully mouthed the earpiece. “Did one of us kill the guy?”

I wracked my brain now. You know how dreams dissipate the second you gain consciousness? “Did it have something to do with a winery?”

Santiago had obtained the drugs, but he stood off to one side to watch us interact, enrapt. Maybe we were the TV show. He said, “This is too fortuitous, like a dream.”

“Yes,” said Creed, that one word a roomful of smoke. This man was absolutely four-dimensional, too real to be true. “It was quite the dream.”

I couldn’t take my eyes from Creed’s when Santiago handed me the Cymbalta. “Twenty, thirty, or sixty milligrams?”

“These are sixties.”

My voice was breathy when I asked Creed. “You are the vigneron at this winery?”

“Yes, the winemaker. You know something about wine?”

I nodded, telling the truth for once. Santiago slipped an open bottle of water into my other hand. I bit off half a Cymbalta and swished it down. “I, ah, I went to many wineries when I lived in St. Louis.” I tossed my head, whipping off my backstory as though it were on my nightstand. Once the pill worked, I knew all my racing thoughts would be calm, sipping chardonnay and perusing the new Venus catalog.

“Then you should come see me.” He didn’t say, come see the winery. He said, come see me.

For a person trying to run from a nightmarish past, I was sure eager to meet new people. Nothing wrong with that, if I kept the conversation focused on them and not me. Deflection, deflection.

“Hey Patience!” Pippa yelled from just outside the lobby, waving her arm in an arc. “I’ve got some of this medicinal Dabba Doo strain for you. Really calms the nerves!”

Well, Pippa was my boss, after all. I’d scored big from Santiago, I’d taken my break, and now it was back to work. I’d had many dreams as a girl. None had ever come to fruition. I’d never met the odd teen who yearned to be a wife and mother, cleaning the house all day. I’d worked on doing my dreaming at night, as a healthy girl should.

“I look forward to seeing you,” said Creed, that warm, sooty voice caressing me in its arms.

He was so darkly handsome, it was almost magnetic the way he pulled me into his orbit. It required a monstrous effort to wrench myself away.

Walking down the hallway, Pippa whispered to me, “Never ever let anyone, even a Bare Boner, know about you. Oklahoma, whatever your real name is, none of it. You’re Patience Bedford from St. Louis. I know how it feels to have nobody to talk to. I’m telling you, Patience. You make your own story. That’s the one thing you have control over. Inventing your own story.”

I whispered back, “I’m going to need a better story.”