Crazy Bitch (Bitches and Queens) (15 page)

Hannah leaned back in her chair
and silently watched Willow. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had
dared to tell her no. It was so strange, so exciting. It was such a huge
turn-on that she was almost able to forget about Willow’s Thursday night, happy
hour with Zachary. Almost. But crazy, jealous Willow was just the incentive she
needed.

Moving with lightning speed,
she had Willow flat on her back across her desk. Clothes were ripped, torn, and
carelessly tossed to the floor, and Hannah was buried deep inside of her. With
Willow’s thighs tightly clenched around her waist, Hannah pounded her into the oak
block.

“Does he fuck you like this?”
Hannah hissed cruelly.

“No,” Willow cried out.

Still furious that Hannah had
been in contact with her ex-stalker, the hardcore fucking did little to soothe her
rage. Although not usually a violent person, something about Hannah brought out
the worst in her, so she scratched, clawed, and when Hannah dared to come close
enough, Willow sank her teeth into her tender skin.

“Fuck!” Hannah spat as she
pulled away sharply. “That fucking hurt!”

“Good!” It was supposed to
hurt. Once upon a time, Willow had been happy and normal before Hannah came
into her life and turned everything upside down. Nowadays, she spent most of
her time miserable and confused. Her only glimmers of happiness came inside
this office, locked away from the world’s prying eyes.

Struck by an epiphany, the kind
that is only realized in the midst of a tumultuous fury, Willow realized that
she hated Hannah nearly as much as she loved her. She loved her for everything
she was, but despised her because Willow knew she would never be enough. It
simply wasn’t possible. There was no way to out-fuck insanity.

Willow reached up and yanked
the tresses of Hannah’s blond hair free from the tight chignon she had sported
today. Pulling her mouth down to meet her lips, she whispered, “No one fucks me
like you do…” Inwardly she added,
No one ever will again either.

Sam stepped to the side to let
Willow through the door, barely able to hide his disgust at the sight of her.
Seriously, she always looked five minutes past her last fuck and five minutes
away from the next—a fucking white-trash disaster. He honestly didn’t
understand how she had captivated Hannah so, or why his very reasonable, very
sensible fiancée was so fond of her either.

He glanced over at Hannah, who
was sitting behind her desk, and didn’t bother to conceal his dismay. “Good
God, you’re a mess! Are you ill?”

“No, I’m fine,” Hannah
dismissed with a wave of her manicured hand, sounding a little out of breath.

“You look all rumpled. Have you
seen a doctor?”

“They don’t give antibiotics
for being messy,” Hannah denied.

“They should,” Sam said. “If I
were a
real
potential buyer, I would take one look at you and
reconsider. Did you forget you were trying to run a high-end label? You look
like you just rolled out of bed.”

“Sam,” Hannah cautioned with
warning.

Sam sat down across the wide
desk. Folding his hands, he rested them across the wood, not knowing that
Willow’s naked ass had been plastered there only a few moments before. His
smoky-green eyes narrowed to slits before he opened them wide and started to
look slightly ill. “Oh,” he gagged in disgust.

“Sam, I have needs too…” Hannah
started.

Sam covered his ears with his
hands and started to sing loudly and off-key, “La, la, la… Are you done yet? I
don’t want to hear about your needs. The fact that you have them revolts me. I
think I may have just puked in my mouth.”

“Grow up,” Hannah retorted.

“I’m not the one chasing after
Little Miss Trailer Park,” Sam snapped back.

“Be nice,” Hannah warned, “or I
won’t let you play. Willow is delicate. Her feelings are easily hurt. You know
how sensitive those artistic types can be.”
He should. God knows how many
bitch fits I had to soothe over
, Hannah thought to herself. She didn’t
understand why Sam didn’t like Willow. The two of them were so alike, she would
have thought they would have gotten along like two peas-in-a-pod. Maybe they
were just too similar for comfort?

“I don’t want to play with your
skanky ho.”

“Sam!” Hannah yelled in outrage.
“What did I just say? Referring to someone as a skanky ho is not playing nice.”

“Whatever,” Sam shrugged
indifferently. “I guess I don’t need to ask about this,” he said as he tossed
the glossy tabloid on the desk.

Hannah glanced uninterested at
the cover shot of her kissing Willow with the bold headline reading—
JUST
FRIENDS???

“You wouldn’t like the answer,
if you did,” Hannah said.

“Probably not,” Sam agreed. “But
I do have one question? How is it that in ten years no paparazzi have ever been
able to track you down in Austin until now?”

“Maybe it was his lucky day,”
Hannah offered.

“Or maybe, someone
intentionally leaked this to the press?”

“Now why would I do that?”

“I don’t know, Hannah. I don’t
know the reasons for most of the fucking shit you do, but it does feel a bit
desperate to me. What’s going to happen if you lose this little game you’re
playing?”

“I never fucking lose.”

That night, the foursome decided
to go out and celebrate. Willow had officially sold her first design, and Kate
had finally found a wedding dress that Sam couldn’t disapprove of because she
decided to reclaim her inner-bridezilla and kicked him out of the
decision-making process.

Before Sam and Kate arrived,
Hannah sat snuggled against Willow’s breasts with her long legs stretched out
on the booth. “I’m sorry,” she pleaded.

“No, you’re not,” Willow
denied. “If you were really sorry, you wouldn’t be sitting like this.”

“Where the hell else am I
supposed to sit? You have the best tits in town,” Hannah declared grumpily as
she held Willow’s fingers against her chest. “I honestly don’t see how it makes
a difference. You have an open-relationship.”

“It just does,” Willow said.

“Why?” Hannah questioned.

Willow fell silent. She wasn’t
about to explain what had transpired after she had come home from work to her.
Zachary had been waiting for her with the tabloid in hand. He might be a
dreamer, but he was also a balls-to-the-wall, brutally honest sort of guy too.
And he was hurt, not that it had happened but that she had been hiding it from
him. An open-relationship can’t work if one partner isn’t completely open and
honest.

Zachary wanted a confrontation,
and Willow fessed up. She even admitted that she was very confused about her
feelings towards Hannah without giving him any unnecessary details. If she had
been utterly honest and told him all that had transpired, he would be the first
person to tell her it was time to get out of Dodge. He would have told her that
their, Hannah and hers, relationship wasn’t healthy, and he would be right. It
wasn’t healthy, but Willow didn’t want it to end.

“Why?” Hannah insisted as she
leaned back and looked into Willow’s eyes. A small smile curled on her lips. “I
know why,” she whispered as she pulled Willow’s lips down to hers.

Sam’s eyes narrowed to slits
when he spotted the lady lovers making out in the shadow-filled booth. “You’ve
got be fucking kidding me,” he groaned.

Kate’s eyes followed his glare
and she stifled her own groan. It was bad enough she had to put up with Hannah,
now it appeared Sam had officially come down to her level. Throughout the
entire evening, Sam did his best to make every conversation as painfully
awkward and tense as possible. Eventually, Kate pleaded a headache because she
could no longer stand being around him while he was around them.

At first, she had thought he
was just pissed about the dress. In her defense, Kate realized that she was
going to eighty before they found the
right one.
Also, she was
superstitious given that the few bumps in their relationships had been more
like insurmountable mountains.

 The problem with their
relationship was that they didn’t have any problems, usually. Most of the time,
they got along fabulously so that when some little issue did arise—it
avalanched out of control. All right, so maybe the last issue wasn’t exactly
little, she did almost die, but in the grand scheme of things, one tiny, little
vein had almost destroyed them. The problem, if it could be called as such, was
that perhaps they were just a little too perfect for each other, a little too
much in love. And their relationship was just a little too smooth-sailing. In
their tiny little corner of paradise, they couldn’t seem to find the coping
skills they needed for the real world. And this was an issue.

For weeks, Kate had tried to
deny it. She believed that if they could just make it to the altar everything
would go back to normal, but after she spent the entire drive home listening to
Sam rant about Willow, Kate realized that he wasn’t just pissed about a dress.
She didn’t want to think it, much less believe it, but Sam was beginning to
sound like a jealous ex-lover.

From the beginning, he had
insisted that Hannah was just a friend, and Kate accepted it because she didn’t
want to believe otherwise. Secretly, she had always suspected that their
relationship was something beyond mere friendship. What exactly it might
be—Kate didn’t know nor did she want to—but she very much needed to know what
it meant for them.

As soon as they stepped into
Sam’s condominium, Kate asked, “Do we have a problem?”

“What are you talking about?”
Sam questioned.

“We are about to get married in
a few weeks and you are obsessing about who another woman is sleeping with,”
Kate answered.

“It’s not another woman. It’s
Hannah.”

“That doesn’t make it right,”
Kate called out.

 “This isn’t about us. It’s
about Willow and the fact that she’s a slut.”

“It takes one to know one,”
Kate muttered.

“Oh my God! I am or was nothing
like that gold-digging whore. For Christ’s sake, she takes her clothes off in
rooms full of strangers,” Sam declared.

“So did you,” Kate retorted. “At
least she got paid for stripping. You just did it for free.”

“Years ago, before I met you,”
Sam gritted through his teeth. “And I wasn’t a stripper, just very promiscuous.”

“Need I remind you that on the
very first night we met, you pulled me on stage and dry-humped me in front of a
room full of strangers,” Kate said.

Sam shrugged impatiently. “Because
I wanted to fuck you and I thought you wanted to fuck me too.”

“Well, I didn’t,” Kate
answered.

Sam smirked. “Yes you did. Just
like you want to fuck me now.”

“No, I don’t,” Kate assured
him. “Not when you’re behaving like this.”

“Like what?” Sam questioned
defensively.

“Like you’re in love with
Hannah and can’t stand to see her happy with someone else,” Kate whispered
softly.

“In love with Hannah,” Sam
mimicked with disgust. “Come on, Kate,” he said as he walked over and put his
hands on face. “You’re the only woman I will ever be in love with. You know
that. The problem is Hannah isn’t a happy soul. Hannah doesn’t do happy.
Whenever Hannah is happy bad things happen.”

Kate’s family was the
huggingest motherfuckers Hannah had ever met. No wonder Kate was such a hot
mess. “What the fuck? I thought this was a wedding rehearsal—not a goddamn
family reunion,” Hannah muttered softly.

“Hannah, don’t start now,”
Willow quietly whispered.

Hannah glared at Willow, who
was sitting beside her in the pew. Willow was just as bad as Sam, both of them
harassing her about how she should behave.
Hannah, don’t say this. Don’t say
that. Don’t touch Willow in front of Kate’s family.
Seriously—did they both
believe she had never been out in public before? And fuck Kate’s family.
Whoever heard of aunts, uncles, and fourth cousins twice removed showing up for
the rehearsal? Once they all began arriving in droves, Hannah half-expected to
see the RVs parked out in back with a game of yard darts set up in the front.
It was fucking ridiculous.

“She’s just a selfish little
bitch. She knows Sam isn’t his best in front of strangers,” Hannah hissed back.

Willow looked across the old
country church and saw Sam yakking it up with one of Kate’s male cousins. “He
seems to be getting along just fine to me.”

“Just give him a few minutes,”
Hannah warned.

Willow suspected that the
impeding storm was caused by more than Kate and her family. The clouds began
gathering as soon as Willow informed her that she had to leave right after the
dinner because a record label was sending over one of their people to watch
Zachary’s band perform. This was important to him, and Willow wanted to be
there to support him, especially considering their relationship had been rocky
at best the last several weeks.