Page 67 of The Spite Date (Small Town Sisterhood #1)

FUCK THIS SHIT

Simon

It’s likely a good thing my security team is here.

They’ll prevent me from killing my dinner companions so that I may continue to see my children grow up without finding myself in the exact situation that I put Bea in just before I met her.

And now I’m thinking about Bea.

Would be far more pleasant to think about Bea if I knew if she’d been made aware of the special show at the drive-in theater this evening, and if she went, and if she liked it, but I know none of those things.

Because my parents unexpectedly arrived on my doorstep at the exact moment that I should have been leaving for the drive-in theater myself, and the only way to keep them from terrorizing my children was to agree to have dinner with them.

At JC Fig.

Where we’ve been given a private room—over my objections—so that there are no witnesses now to my parents’ horrific nature.

“You owe us, that’s bloody why,” my father is sniping at me as Aileen, the same server that Bea and I had, hovers in the doorway of this upstairs dining room as though she’s afraid to approach the table to refill our water glasses.

Tank takes the metal pitcher from her and does it himself.

I wonder what it would take for my security agent to justify homicide in my defense?

Clearly, I wouldn’t want Tank, or Pinky, or Butch, to end up behind bars on my behalf, but what if it were justified?

“All of those years that we supported you while you were dilly-dallying with that silly career,” my mother adds with a sniff.

“All of those times you made up stories about what your mother was doing when she was at her book club,” my father growls.

“And the stories you would make up about your father while I was away on a commission,” my mother adds.

The both of them.

Pretending that I lied about their affairs.

Because they’re broke.

Flat broke.

That inheritance they claim to have taken away from me to bestow upon my sons instead?

Even their home is mortgaged to the hilt.

They’re penniless.

Paupers.

Maxed the last of their credit cards to fly here to the States to badger me for money.

Probably expecting they’ll be staying in my home too.

Not bloody likely.

They continue to prattle on about my terrible misdeeds as a child, making up their own stories about the things they never did to support me, while I smile as pleasantly as if I were eating?—

Well, I was going to say a Sunday dinner of roast lamb and carrots and potatoes, but I find I’d prefer a very particular barbecue chicken and butternut squash risotto.

God, I should be at the theater.

Not that I expect Bea would fall into my arms in gratitude for showing her favorite old movie, but so that I could watch her watching the show.

So that I could see that I haven’t fucked this up further by plunging her into the depths of grief by reminding her that she’ll never again watch it with her mother.

Would you look at that?

I’ve drained my wine.

Again.

Is that the fourth? Or the fixth?

Fixth?

Is that a number?

“Well?” my father booms. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Well, what do you have to say for yourself?” I mimic back in a high, whiny voice.

My father’s eyes bulge.

That’s it.

I shall act out until he has a stroke.

And then I shall use my magical powers vested in me as a father of two teenage boys who steal animals and eat ridiculous numbers of hamburgers and have very fine women sent to jail, and I shall annoy my mother to death as well.

I burp.

The overwhelming churning in my gut thanks to the butter and cheese in the pasta that I requested plain comes out of my arsehole in a long, deep fart that reverberates throughout the room.

’Tis a good evening to have consumed dairy.

This will aid in my plan to murder both of my parents without laying a hand on them. “How’s your— hic! —blood pressure?” I ask my mother.

Smiling, of course.

Waving my wine at her.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” my father snaps.

“ What the hell is wrong with you? ” I snipe back, falsetto.

This is fun now that I’m getting into it.

“You will cease speaking to me that way right now ?—”

I interrupt his tirade with another long, satisfying release of the gas bubbles tormenting my midsection.

“ Stop that right now ,” my mother snaps.

“ Stop that right now ,” I parrot.

Except that’s not me parroting my mother.

I have not, in fact, opened my mouth at all, other than to sip wine, and it would be impossible for me to be parroting my mother while drinking wine.

Which means that someone else has parroted my mother.

Clearly this is the case, because they’re both gawking at something over my head.

“How dare you,” my father roars as my mother half rises and adds, “Who the bloody hell do you think you are?”

“Fuck off,” comes a very cheerful, very lovely, very painful-to-hear voice.

A voice that makes my drunken heart pitter-patter and my pride have its first self-flagellation at the next long toot to come from my arsehole.

I’m terrified to turn around.

Both to discover that it is, and also that it is not, Bea.

She is Schrodinger’s Bea.

She both exists behind me and simultaneously does not.

My mother looks around and waves viciously at poor Aileen. “Who’s in charge? How dare the staff speak to us this way. Do you know who we are?”

“You’re nobody,” Bea’s lovely voice says above me.

“Absolutely fucking nobody . Because only nobody would speak to another person the way you’re currently speaking to the best man I have ever known in my entire life.

And my father set the bar high when it comes to judging men. Very, very, very high.”

I would like my arsehole to stop answering for me now.

And for me to find my courage to look up at the angel currently hovering over my shoulder.

I can see her.

This room is full of mirrors, and I can see her .

Or her mirage.

Possibly she’s a ghost.

“Are you a ghost?” I ask the woman in the mirror angled perfectly to show her lovely face to me.

Dimples pop out of her cheeks as she dashes her hands over her eyes.

All five of them.

Dimples and cheeks and hands.

Bloody hell, I’ve forgotten how to count.

Gentle hands settle on my shoulders. “Who fed you dairy? Did they do that too?”

I point in my parents’ general direction. “I told you they were?—”

My arsehole interrupts me.

“—dreadful,” I finish, and even the wine can’t give the word enough gusto to recover from the utter wanker my arsehole is making of me.

“Butch?” Bea asks.

“Right here.” My security man shoves two supplements into my hand.

I leap on them as though they are a gazelle and I am a lion.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” a new voice says.

“Jake, meet Simon’s parents,” Bea says. “They’re paying the bill.”

My mother gasps.

My father goes the kind of red that makes my red wine look pink.

“Also, for your information, I just posted about your business on socials too,” Bea continues, her face aimed toward Jake. I think. The mirrors and the wine make it so bloody difficult to keep up.

“I don’t need your help,” Jake sneers.

Bea squeezes my shoulder when I attempt to rise.

“I’m not helping you,” she says. “I posted about how you had no interest in opening a restaurant until we drove past Ada Jane here and I told you what my father always wanted to do with the old house, and about how you stole my dream from me when you dumped me. Griff shared my post. Daphne did too. Six people have already commented with ways that you’ve fucked them over too, and I have a feeling we’re about to hear from many, many, many more. ”

“You can’t do that,” Jake sputters.

“Oh, I think you’ll find I put in enough of the in my opinions and the way I felt ’s that your father can’t sue me for defamation. And even if he did, I know an attorney or two myself, and Daph’s lining up backups as we speak.”

How amusing—Jake’s head has become a tomato.

A very ripe, very mushy tomato.

And the woman of my dreams—she has taken complete control of all of the unpleasant people in this room.

Pride swells my chest.

“Get the fuck out of my restaurant,” Jake growls.

I start to rise to take part in defending the woman of my dreams, but the wine is acting as terribly as bubbly does, and I sway while my arsehole protests Jake’s demands for me.

“I’m leaving, but only because I’m sick of your face, and I don’t want anyone to think I would ever endorse your restaurant as a place to eat good food.

” Bea follows her announcement by waving her hand toward my parents.

“And you two. If I ever, ever hear of you contacting Simon again, I’ll write my own damn movie script about what terrible people you are, and then I’ll have my brothers and their friends make it into a YouTube series, and you’ll never be able to show your faces in public again.

No. Shut your mouth. You’re done talking. ”

She leans into me, her breath on my ear. “Now, can we please get out of here?”

“I’ve drunk six wottles of bine,” I inform her.

“That’s very restrained of you if it’s been like this for the past hour.”

“In— hic! —deed.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner. I had to do a little saving of myself first. Ever After told me so.”

She got the message.

She understood.

“I love your dimples,” he tells me. “They— hic! —horn me makey.”

She smiles, those beautiful pools of moss and trees and grass and every good green thing ever shining down on me as though I deserve to be smiled at. “I adore you, Simon Luckwood.”

My eyes water. “I do not deserve you.”

“You deserve every good thing in the entire world and so much more.” She tugs on my hand. “Come with me.”

I don’t recall my feet working.

I do recall my arsehole making its presence known twice more before we reach the door.

There’s some kind of yelling about a bill.

Butch makes a comment about dishes that makes Bea laugh, and also makes me wish I’d made whatever comment that was.

We step into the crickety night air, all crickety with the crickets cricketing, and warm arms circle me as other bodies move around us, carrying signs I cannot read in the dark.

“Simon,” Bea whispers. “We have to keep walking.”

“But I love you here,” I tell the angel holding me up.

“I love you everywhere,” she replies.

Some distant part of me realizes this is monumentous—monumental?

Momentous? Good god, words are stupid—but the utter relief at no longer being in my parents’ presence, the warmth of her body tucked against mine, the effects of the wine, the fresh air, and the thought of willy dogs has me content to do nothing more than bury my head in her hair and hold on so that I might stay here long enough to sober up and understand what, exactly, is happening.

Why I feel like sunshine in the darkness.

How I am the moon spinning about the earth and an immovable rock rooted through the earth’s crust at the same time.

“Beatrice?”

“Yes, Simon?”

“Please be real when I wake up.”

She squeezes me tighter.

My arsehole responds as it must this evening.

And everything draws darker in the musical sound of her laughter.

If this is a dream, then I never wish to wake up.