Love Finds Its Pocket

By Mary Scarpelli

What was it, Toni wondered, that had produced in her such a mediocre streak – nature, nurture, birth order, astrological sign? Insufficient familial strife to have created an urgent need to slay the dragon and emerge a victorious warrior who wears her battle scars proudly? She just couldn’t put it all together – at times had fleeting glimpses into her composite personal truth, but was never able to fully connect the dots into a cogent theme. Perhaps the person she had become was all she was meant to be; no greatness, no creative talents or skills, no noteworthy ambitions, no grand love affair.

She felt control slipping away as she toyed with making a simple, clean break from the suffocating stagnation that had become her life. The permanence of that solution felt elegant and effective. She would no longer have to suffer the ramifications of her ill-advised romantic choices and as such would ultimately be freeing herself from the indignity of a bitter, lonely existence.

Gene was absolutely correct in his assertion that Toni sought only to fill her void with activities designed to redirect her attention away from how horribly she was feeling about herself. Why it took the better part of a year for her to make that revelation, to own that realization, remained a mystery but once she did, she was able to think clearly again and knew exactly what she needed to do to put her life back on track. She managed to dodge the onslaught of a massive panic attack long enough to compose a pleading text message and hit enter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary Scarpelli
• Release date: Oct 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310613289

Mary Scarpelli

Mary Scarpelli spent far too many years toiling away in a variety of professional environments ranging from intellectually stimulating to those rife with destructive levels of ambition. As an offset to the madness, there were her creative endeavors, without which she’d have spent more time than was healthy staring vacantly into empty space. Inspiration leads her, alternately, between collaborative musical ventures and the solitary pursuit of writing.Mary has written three novels: The Pursuit of Enlightenment, a coming-of-age tale, its sequel entitled Love Finds Its Pocket, and a satire about a corporate downsizing gone awry entitled Competitive Stupid, all of which are self-published and available through the new paradigm of distribution channels, such as: CreateSpace, through Amazon.com for hardcopy and Smashwords for ebooks, and also available from ebook retailers such as Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Nobel, Sony, Kobo, Diesel, Baker & Taylor and others.Mary’s first love is her membership in the electronic music duo Illusion of Perfection, in which she is one of two.

Book preview

Love Finds Its Pocket

(Continuing Pursuits and Other Anecdotes of Enlightenment)

Mary Scarpelli

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SMASHWORDS EDITION

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Copyright © 2014 Mary Scarpelli

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank DeePer and JuniPer for their support and love. It’s for you that I’ve revived these characters from their stasis. I also thank DeePer (Deep) for creating and so graciously agreeing to provide her art for the front cover and Marlene for supplying the magic to ingeniously transform it into this affecting image.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only; as such, it may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

Discover other titles by Mary Scarpelli

Competitive Stupid

The Pursuit of Enlightenment

This book is also available in hardcopy via Amazon’s print-on-demand

Chapter 1

Here We Go Again

Something about the strength and tenor of her reaction felt regressive – a knee-jerk response not worthy of a person proclaiming the achievement of enlightenment. A perpetual cycle of anger, frustration, despondency, was gaining traction at a frightening pace, leaving its sticky residue to reside squarely in her gut, the weight of it adding to her already aggravated sense of worthlessness, an unrelenting indictment that her petty jealousies had only been in remission. Once again, an insistent idiocy had emerged as victor simply because she had underestimated its grip on her thought process; she was no longer capable of ignoring its momentum.

A relentless barrage of recriminations continued to pour out of her mouth, disrupting a formerly peaceful coexistence. The demanded impunity, an expectation borne from their unconditional love, a weapon against which she was powerless to defend, mocked her every retort. Early adulthood almost precludes any expectation of calm in the face of betrayal. Reacting with a blatantly immature response was almost a guarantee. She could not reasonably insist that her interpretation of the situation’s gravitas be blindly accepted as valid by her lover, not any more – not at her age.

She stood alone, self-satisfied within the depths of her grief, small and emotionally pinched, stewing away just like she did years before experiencing her supposed foray into superior development. With the object of her ire being her lover, her emotional supporter, the shoulder upon which she would typically have shared the ache in her heart, her sense of loss was profoundly felt. They had been though so many upending life-struggles together, effortlessly reconnecting whenever an external force sought to dissolve the stability of their respective centers. They had weathered traumas, both individual and as a couple with an ease reserved for those who share an unconditional level of love, which made the feelings of hostility and the desire to physically pounce come as a sickening disappointment.

Toni had somehow managed to convince herself that her emotionally primitive reactivity of being led by the nostrils of instinctual disparagement: thoughtless, pointless, irrational, had vacated the premises yet there she was, frustrated and angry, powerless to redirect feeling betrayed by someone to whom she had given her implicit bond of trust. A more appropriate reaction would have been tacit acceptance – an ah-ha moment because the more she thought about it, the more she realized that it actually did make perfect sense. Regardless, the battle between her emotional versus intellectual interpretation of the situation had nearly emptied her reserve of rational discourse. How easy it would have been simply to change her mind and lean toward what it really was – a stale dated non-issue. She was too negatively invested to retain clarity of thought for longer than a few fleeting seconds.

Everything is wonderful until it isn’t, Toni mused, and then lamented the sad fact that everything changes and not always in a positive direction. Her mother tried consoling her by saying that life will get easier and that with age will come wisdom but even after having somehow managing to make it, relatively unscathed, to the ripe old age of thirty-six, Toni didn’t feel one bit smarter or wiser although experienced so much happiness since she and Kat had agreed to breathe passionate life back into their relationship – and then just as quickly the thought of Kat blackened her heart. She had perhaps become more adept at spotting bullshit much faster and with far less effort than she ever thought possible but without possessing the gift of prescience, susceptibility to heartache was a constant threat, capable of originating from anyone or anything.

A chill coursed up her spine with the unsettling thought that perhaps that was what her mother had been referring to, which meant there was no holy grail to be found at the end of the journey rather just more plodding pedestrian thinking and anecdotal rather than reflexively correlative, substantive analyses. She sighed as futility threatened to override her desire to continue pursuing pure clarity of mind, not being tied to so many definitive ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ while those pervasively natty impediments refused to relinquish control over her predisposition toward reactive behavior and replace it with the ability to comprehensively, calmly, reason through a quandary.

Inked-Up

To prevent negativity from settling in and taking root, dislodging her contented resolve from its otherwise secure mooring, she decided to exercise a self imposed time-out and recall happier times, once effortlessly shared. Having glanced over at Kat's bare mid-drift reminded her of the day, not long after they had recommenced their love affair, when she and Kat practically fell over each other with raucous laughter on their way out of a tattoo shop in which Kat had winced and complained vociferously during the second five-hour installment of her rib piece in which she had lain prone under the skillful yet persistent hand of her tattooer of choice – an inspired artist who went by the name of Tatter'd. Considering the large scale, intricately complex nature of the tattoo's design, being able to complete the outlining of phase one within such a brief timeframe was quite a gift. She worked fast by most standards, but not quite fast enough for Kat's tolerance not to have been fully expended.

I'm going to rip that fucking machine out of her sadistic little hand and fling it at her fucking spiked head!, Kat whisper-yelled to Toni, albeit not quite quietly enough to be inaudible over the din of Led Zeppelin and the constant whirring of several concurrently employed liner machines.

Toni caught Tatter’d’s eye and grinned apologetically to which Tatter'd simply shrugged with disaffected disinterest. Against Tatter’d’s sage advice to place the tattoo on a less curvaceous, meatier hence less painful segment of her anatomy, Kat insisted on having it imprinted on her rather bony, highly sensitive rib cage, extending the design down across vital organs to her protruding hip bone as future incentive for Toni to luxuriate her tongue in its vicinity. The focal point resided squarely within one of Kat's more intensely pleasurable erogenous zones and she simply could not resist creating a permanent reminder of its existence.

During the first installment, Toni watched, transfixed, as the composition of the tattoo unfolded before her, fascinated with the process as the lines were being drawn, so perfectly smooth and intricately aligned, and then during round two, when the color and shading was added, becoming mesmerized with every dip and dive of the needles into the ink, onto the skin and back again in highly precise, focused movements. So many blotches of color were being applied and then mopped up that it was incomprehensible to her how any sense would ever be made of the end product. Toni worried that the result would be a messy blur of indistinguishable colors, not dissimilar from a child’s art project but with each wipe from Tatter’d’s cloth, the depth, dimension and the intricacies of the form started to take shape.

At one point, Tatter’d stopped tattooing, looked over at Toni, who at that moment had managed to sidle up to Kat’s torso, barely a foot now standing between machine and nose and kindly suggested that perhaps Toni might want to take a seat in the waiting room or go for a walk or anything that would prevent them from sharing the same breathing space. She was already concerned about Kat’s ability to sit still for the remainder of the tattoo so found Toni’s proximity breach highly unnerving. Tatter’d’s thin silver lip ring glistened tightly around her high-gloss purple lipstick to which Toni’s gaze once again became fixated. Kat, although grateful for the reprieve from the constant gnawing against her flesh from those hyper vigilant, relentless needle intrusions, saw that Toni had entered one of her ‘zones of the void’ so sought to snap her out of it before she became an unbearable annoyance; most people didn’t find Toni’s idiosyncrasies as adorable as she did.

Toni’s singularity of focused curiosity had to be tempered lest Tatter’d become so agitated that she screwed up the design so in a moment of inspiration, Kat suggested to Toni that she search out an espresso bar and bring back some baked delectables for them and as Kat held up a questioning hand toward her tolerant tattooer, Tatter’d said that she had a hankering for green tea and a Chai-tea poppy seed cookie and instructed Toni where to find the cafe that carried them – a minimum of twenty-minutes round trip.

After Toni pecked Kat’s cheek and left the shop, Tatter’d looked over at Kat from high-up in her eye sockets, smiled mischievously as she held up the tattoo machine, silently asking if Kat was ready to recommence the torture session. They shared a brief chuckle, then Kat lay back down, breathing slowly and evenly, desperate to find her very quiet place and breathe through the sharp edge of the pain – surprisingly easier to accomplish when she didn’t have to put up a brave front.

Once safely out of the shop and into a cab heading toward home, Kat seemed to have completely forgotten about the agony she had just endured, refusing to acknowledge it or even cop to having felt the ceaseless pain she so obviously suffered through during the process even when direct queries were posed to her. She thought that that level of pain, the effect of which was not dissimilar from having a wire brush being vigorously, repeatedly raked against an open, festering wound, was a necessary rite of passage toward being free from her parents' insistent attempts to invalidate the value of her worldview.

Her brazen attempt to offset the discomfort of that experience while demonstrating her liberation from having suffered through a rather stilted upbringing was to raise her shirt and expose the lovely creation, a seemingly disparate yet beautifully rendered mixture of bright, bold colors adorning an exotic floral arrangement juxtaposed around and within several grayscale, geometric configurations meant to imply a vase, bestowed upon her by that freaky yet supremely talented artist, at every possible opportunity – most often prodding her audience into begging for a viewing, all while dismissing the torture of the endless hours required to achieve the end result, rather focusing on the unique body art she felt fortunate to be sporting and how ones body can so easily be transformed into a museum piece; she ignored her concerns about what it would look like when her skin began to wither away, losing the battle with elasticity to old age.

Kat extolled the virtues of breaking with tradition to formulate ones individualistic expression of art beyond that which is generally accepted by a creatively restrictive and tastefully superior society, while not harboring the emotional angst to support her purportedly contrarian position. Kat's favorite reactions were, invariably, those in which her audience initially recoiled with disgust over how a woman could deface her god-given body in so permanent a manner. To those individuals, she played mercilessly with their emotions feigning catharsis toward a lifestyle even more alternative than the alternative one to which she had already given herself over to living. She would inform the disgusted masses that she planned on covering a majority of her body with inked art; she had no intention of doing so but could not help but shake things up a bit. The older she got, the more playful she became.

First came the proclamation of lesbianism coupled with a domestic partnership in which there would be cohabitation with the woman she loved, then the tattoos – her parents were incensed and demanded to know just how far Kat planned on deviating from the perfectly normal and decidedly privileged upbringing they had beneficently bestowed upon her before she came to her senses and sought out laser removal and a husband, in that order. They were secretly relieved that Kat hadn't announced any plans to marry Toni as that action would have been a sealant to the fate of her relationship with them, propelling them in the direction of contacting their attorney and requesting to have Kat extricated from their lives – and benefitting from their death, for good. They remembered Toni from years back and didn’t think much of her then. They agreed that Katherine must have selected that particular lesbian to be her life-mate specifically to spite them both.

"We could have been convinced to accept your alternate lifestyle, if we didn’t find your choice of life-mate so objectionable. She’s nowhere near our level of refinement, dear – her caliber is so obviously ethnic," Mrs. Warrington explained after Kat demanded to know why she insisted on turning an embarrassingly cold shoulder to Toni during every single one of their fine-dining excursions.

Kat’s failed attempts at eliciting compassion from her parents while subjecting them to Toni in all of her unacceptably low-born wonder failed miserably, which only fueled her decision to shut them completely out of her life. Around their friends, they engaged in rather offensive banter about their daughter’s compassion toward the socio-economically disadvantaged and how her long-term rebellion against them had begun to wear down their patience. They weren’t above stating that they planned on rejecting her if she failed to wake up before hitting a specific age bracket – every few years they would increase that age-related deadline, secretly hoping their daughter would come to her senses so they would not be forced to die as parental failures.

Their merciless snubbing of everyone they saw fit to toss into the objectionable category of other had propelled Kat toward resolving to become the successful and independent woman she was – self-made and unapologetic about her deviation from the mean. They never took responsibility for creating the vacuum that embodied Kat’s emotional emptiness, her need to be loved as unconditionally and frequently as possible, never realizing that nothing and no one could ever make her feel whole unless she reconciled the resentment she harbored so deeply within. It didn’t matter to Kat whether that need was met by men or women; all she knew was that she wouldn’t be happy until she secured it. She remembered the day she met Toni as being the most exhilarating moment of her life. She didn’t know that it would take years to formally secure their bond but ever since she did, nothing was going to stop her from enjoying every moment with her. Life was short and true love was rare so her decision to choose Toni over her parents was made without regret.

Kat had purchased her current apartment not one month after she and Toni got back together, selling her old one at an unheard of profit in such a downturned housing market and purchasing her new place, a foreclosure on lower Fifth, for a song and a dance. Kat wasn’t pleased with the prospect of capitalizing on someone else’s financial misfortune but she had already planned on having Toni move in with her and knew that having a second bedroom and bathroom would make Toni’s acquiescence that much easier.

******

Six months after round two of their romantic relationship recommenced in earnest, Toni once again requested the assistance of her beefy brothers, plus Gene and Marcella to move her carefully packed belongings out of her apartment, into her brothers’ truck and over the 59th Street Bridge where she would take up permanent residence at Kat’s place. Kat was out of town on business, attending yet another writer’s convention, so Toni and crew made due with the human resources they had on hand. Her Eams chair and one dresser were the only pieces of furniture she elected to bring with – all other furnishings were given away either to friends, family or the Goodwill. Her personal effects, clothes, linens, towels, computers, books, important papers, her impressive supply of kitchen gadgets, All Clad pots and pans, pictures, one painting, two sculptures, tchotchkes given to her as gifts over the years and similar miscellany were packed into thirty-two boxes of varying sizes, which included the expanse of two five-foot high wardrobe boxes containing outerwear for each season in addition to items not fitting neatly into any of the smaller boxes, and operating in lieu of padding, her pillows were packed carefully in between the more fragile items.

The brothers Mangiarmi, Giovanni and Massimo Jr., lifted each box as if it had been stuffed with feather pillows. She remembered them as athletic yet accident-prone little boys and seeing them having grown into such strong, handsome, competent men produced in her heart an infusion of love. Marcella elected to stand guard over the double-parked truck, keys in hand, agreeing to move it at first sight of a traffic cop, whereas Massimo loaded and unloaded the elevator while Gene and Toni carted the meticulously labeled boxes to the appropriate rooms. Marcella didn’t have to pick up her daughter from preschool, one specifically geared toward influencing the minds of gifted toddlers, for a few more hours so she sat in the back of the truck, relaxing with a good book as she waited for Giovanni to load up the hand truck with four boxes per trip. He didn’t begin to sweat until he lifted box number sixteen.

Toni paid her brothers a nominal sum – the most they would accept, which amounted, basically, to gas and tolls, and ordered take-out from a neighborhood pizzeria that made the best Italian fast food she had ever eaten. By the time everyone left, tired, well-fed, sweat stained and stinking, save for Marcella of course, Toni felt as if she were finally home. She looked around at the environment, her smile broadening with every turn, allowing an encroaching calm to wash over her; her heart became infused with love and a sense of belonging. Toni moved to the middle of the living room, her body slowly twirling, her arms stretched wide, head back, laughing giddily.

Rather than overwhelm herself with home design, Toni decided to unpack only those items which were deemed to be an immediate necessity: her clothes, toiletries, computers and kitchen supplies; she’d await Kat’s return and together they would decide on placement of the remainder. She didn’t miss or think about her old apartment even for one minute. She was equally ecstatic to finally be settled with the love of her life and also to be living in the same borough as Marcella and Gene, the distance between them equating to a relatively inexpensive cab ride or a short trip on an express train to the upper west side. She never before felt more at peace or at home.

Kat-Nip

Kat sought to make significant strides toward becoming entrepreneurially self-sufficient in her efforts to preclude being downsized by or beholden to a corporate entity to whom her livelihood would be dependent entirely upon their whimsy, greed and/or bad financial decision making borne of hubris, the most common reasons many of her friends and colleagues found themselves being given a package and sent on their way, adrift with few viable options available to them.

Much to her surprise and amusement, the combination of her budding literary agency, incessant blogging, supplemented by her freelance writing and editing projects became immensely profitable in the aggregate, which is why, after nearly twenty years of toiling away in someone else's limited conception of artistic expression, she was able to bid adieu to a restrictive corporate existence and the behemoth of a major publishing house that her father had pulled strings with a golf buddy of his to provide to his daughter that job opportunity, and make her individualistic mark within the world of the written word. Since she had been fortunate enough to have purchased her condo at a fire sale, her otherwise outsized overhead was reduced to a manageable level, which allowed her to pursue her dream career in which building an audience and turning a profit would not necessarily be immediate.

One must acknowledge the changing paradigm shifts and respond accordingly or become subjected to the vagaries of a losing end-game, she admonished to Toni on several occasions.

You know I’m an ardent believer in the concept of forging ones career trajectory toward a pursuit that would be both economically fruitful and creatively satisfying, Kat continued.

Lest one subvert their identity and become a corporate automaton incapable of independent, expansive thought, she added almost as an afterthought.

Toni’s response, whenever Kat began one of her more pedantic life lessons, was to pull out a pen and pad, feigning lecture hall style note-taking. It’s not that she didn’t agree with the concept, rather didn’t think everyone had the ability to be an entrepreneur. She would counter Kat’s line of argumentation by asking who would be following if everyone were to lead.

Conversely, Kat would also present argumentation against every incarnation of newly minted subversive, calling them out as false prophets who were devoid of constructive alternatives on what they had deemed to be society’s ills. Once a group gained momentum, she reasoned, their collective identity would invariably morph into a depressing similarity, sporting the same uniform, speaking with the same ubiquitously annoying verbal ticks, the most recent incarnation of which being the uplift to one’s inflections and employing the same tired lexical catch phrases du jour with such a disturbing repetitiveness that she wondered whether someone had written and widely distributed a series of hipster how-to manuals, designed to provide guidance on blending into the crowd of ones choice which continued to castigate the standard bearer's of society's moral majority as reprehensible slime.

As her distinctive contribution toward aiding in the maturation of the unforgivably uninspired, micro-brewing, artisan-promoting, calculatedly unkempt hipsters that began sprouting from every previously uninhabitable waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn, and furthermore resolute in her belief that she was performing a public service to steer those lost souls toward an experience that can only be described as humbling an otherwise subversive arrogance that was nearly devoid of merit, Kat created opportunities to extol upon them her contrarian views in hopes of luring them into her confidence only to shake up their unjustifiable rage. Although Kat’s parents would have been proud to know that brand of spew had been formulating in her mind, her objectives were not even remotely meant to present a conservative, decidedly more conformist perspective on humanity but rather to shake up what she saw as the formation of a new status quo – the next iteration of despondent youth whose anger against the establishment was justified but whose methods were haphazard and willful as opposed to organized and cogent, hence effective.

The first time that Kat verbalized her contrarian proclamations at a fairly sizable gathering, one in which she was an invited guest, a response to a few tomes regarding herbal remedies that she had been able to sell to a mid-sized publishing house, she became so shocked at the reception her comments received, the furiously nodding heads, the hands clapping and offers of multiple fist pumps in a torrent of impassioned acceptance that she then developed a slight addiction to baiting the perpetually bearded, plaid-shirted, thrift store wearing youth until they bought into her false pretention of making a difference by trampling on and over any and all conventional lifestyles as pedestrian-level cud. She became disturbingly adept at it and although Toni tried, unsuccessfully, to dissuade her from goading those poor, unsuspecting dolts from being subjected to her cajoling, which at its end was a pointed stick aimed squarely between their eyes. Kat was having too much fun in her attempts to incite a riot to stop so carried on with her usual vigor despite the tsk-tsking received from Toni on a regular basis.

One time, when the crowd became dead silent after Kat posed a question regarding how they planned on managing the inevitable fallout from their progeny once they too failed to make the world a better, healthier, greener space in which to inhabit, Toni sought to ease the tension by clapping wildly, muttering comments such as ‘good point!’ and ‘keep us honest!’ but that was the last time in which she accepted an invitation to attend one of Kat’s Brooklyn-based literary events – the level of embarrassment had become unmanageable.

Somewhat cruel and uncomfortable to watch, yet shamelessly funny nonetheless, Toni admitted, only to herself, that she rather enjoyed witnessing those mason jar repurposing, community-gardening, menses-cup using hipsters tripping over themselves with self righteous condescension against a society they had dismissed as having caused the ruination of the world without ever looking at their own extent of culpability; so easy to gripe but rather another thing entirely to construct an alternative solution and effect change on a significant scale. However much she would have enjoyed chewing on that topic with Kat, Toni tucked away all rational, humorous thoughts, to be put on hold for another day because in the present moment, her fury demanded center stage, continuing to gain ground at an alarming rate, supplanting the love she otherwise should have been feeling.

Back to Reality

Trust is a rare commodity, don’t you think? Toni seethed, unable to hold back, veins popping, nostrils flared, breathing having become furiously heated and increasingly rapid.

Kat had chosen to keep quiet for so many years precisely because she sought to avoid an ugly confrontation, the accusations of betrayal, the potentially explosive reaction and even worse, the dissolution of a friendship she worked diligently at cultivating, the return for which she had been so patiently waiting. She was happy to have given up the variety of lovers she would otherwise have been enjoying on a regular basis in exchange for the alluring coupling of constancy and unconditional love that Toni gave to her so the thought of losing everything for something she believed to be an inconsequential, meaningless tryst had made her more avoidant than was her proclivity.

She looked over at Toni, who wore her hurt so openly that it forced the muscles surrounding her heart to squeeze tightly, constricting her diaphragm as it threatened to cut off all circulation. Her reflexive reaction was to fold into her torso and wince. Toni noticed, which prompted her to immediately stop whining, guilt over behaving childishly now overcoming her indignation. They just looked at each other for an eye-drying length of time, until Toni once again found her voice, less demonstrably hurt and considerably more rational than the previous thirty minutes had witnessed, but nonetheless visibly wounded.

"If the affair didn't mean anything, then why did you withhold that information from me? It's not like I've ever asked for a list of your lovers and quite frankly I don't want to know, but her? You withheld information about your affair with her?

If it didn't mean anything to you, then what the fuck! The volume of Toni's voice increased to a level just below a bellow.

Hearing her pathetically pleading tone echoing back through her now aching head, made her feel slightly foolish. She apologized to Kat for yelling, while placing her head in her hands, pushing her eyes as deeply back as she could without squishing them to a mushy pulp. Toni felt powerless, alone and in fear that her world was about to implode.

My love – I knew there'd be a scene, so I sought to avoid it. Whether I came clean the first time that you mentioned her – and if you recall, I did refer to her as 'that elitist bitch', which, if you hadn't been so enamored with her scent or preoccupied with boffing her brains out, would have asked how I could possibly have drawn such a conclusion without ever having met her... Kat stopped speaking without finishing her thought after looking up and seeing Toni's pointed eyes boring a heated hole through her head.

"Oh, Toni, Toni. Please stop looking at me like I just murdered your family. Please. Just stop, okay? Take a step back and get some perspective on this."

Kat didn’t want to fight about a topic that she found wholly irrelevant but would not be allowed