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“Bobby,” she said in her sharpest schoolmarm voice. “Tell me what Katherine said or you’ll be in big trouble.”
Bob blinked twice, his face lost all tension as if she’d slapped him. “She thought she’d broken her ankle,” he said quickly.
“And?”
Bob was stoned and traumatized and a wretched excuse for a man, but he wasn’t stupid. Two more blinks and he dragged himself out of whatever place A
“Why do women ask so many questions?” he asked, his terrifying bonhomie back in place.
“For the sheer joy of hearing men talk,” A
Bob shook his head from side to side as if trying to clear it. His hands slid from his knees up his thighs as he pushed himself upright. He was tiring of the game. A
She unclenched her teeth. The blanket slid a couple of inches down her chest but didn’t fall off of her shoulders. The cold felt clean and good on her neck. “Katherine thought you’d killed the wolf, shot it with a tranquilizer, then cut its throat,” she said, desperate to put off whatever was coming for another minute. “She figured you for the kind of guy who liked other people out cold, didn’t have the balls to deal with the conscious – woman or wolf. At least that’s what she said to me. ‘Everything’s big about Bob but his heart and his cock,’ I think she said. Yeah, that was it, verbatim. Shrinkage: cold heart, shriveled cock. Makes sense, you know. Based in language: cockles of the heart, warm the cockles, cock-” A
“I told her it served her right,” Bob snarled. “She said, ‘Send somebody, you fat fuck,’ and I threw her to the wolves. Literally,” he said and laughed.
A
“Not literally,” A
A
Not him, she told herself. That little boy.
To Bob she said: “Since we’ve been doing business together, I’ve been meaning to tell you what a pompous ass you are, with your pouffed hair and oily smile. Women have to be drugged to keep from laughing in your face. And a hypocrite! Sheesh! It would be scary, if it wasn’t so obvious. Expert. Lord! You’re a whore, Menechi
“Your raping is like your killing: no balls in it. You rape women who are not there, and you’re not there when you kill. You don’t literally kill anybody, do you, Bobby boy? You literally do nothing. If you’re going to kill me, you many-chi
“I. Won’t. Die.”
That was her best shot. She had been as vicious and mean and ugly as it was possible to be without using a thesaurus. Smiling in what she hoped was a damning and disdainful ma
Through the curtain of spruce needles, she watched him, trying to read her future in his stance, the way his eyes seemed to grow larger as his face relaxed and the cheek flab melted in a grim facsimile of the melting of one of Madame Tussauds wax madmen.
She realized she was seeing his eyes for the first time. Her revulsion and his grin-narrowed gaze had kept her out till now. His irises were dark, but the color was indistinct: blue or brown or hazel, or all three mixed together. He wasn’t more than five feet away, yet A
Time wasn’t in its petty-paced persona. It had ceased to be linear, and A
She was growing old waiting and yet scarcely more than fifteen seconds passed before the waiting was over.
Bob Menechi
A better person might have felt sorry for him, but, as far as A
Then he charged, head down, mucus and tears streaming, and he crashed through the ephemeral defenses of her spruce bower and was on her. Though she’d been watching, waiting for it, the onslaught took her by surprise. Not even slowed by the tree branches, he came down in an avalanche of snow and rage, in the reckless flying tackle of a high school football player too young to know how frail the human body is.
A