Read Online The Goddess Rules by Clare Naylor - Free Book Online Page B

impatiently.
    “Oh, apart from the cock. They all have the cock. But do they know what to do with it?” This was a rhetorical question. And one look at Kate told Mirri Moncur that her visitor was not qualified to answer it. Kate suspected as much herself, too. Much as she hated to admit it. “No, because women are all fair and good and charming and dying to fix their own drains and take responsibility for their own orgasms so there’s no point in the man even trying to be a man anymore. See?” Mirri lit up a cigarette with her omnipresent lighter. “We have castrated them. It’s too sad.”
    “I love men.” Kate tried to sound liberal and on top of the argument.
    “No, you love the wrong man. You love a slug who isn’t capable of loving you back,” Mirri pronounced.
    “He’s my boyfriend,” Kate lied. “And I really take exception to you commenting on something you know absolutely nothing about.” She knew that was becoming irritatingly bolshy but there was something about Mirri Moncur that brought this side out in her.
    “I’ll tell you everything you need to know about . . . what’s his name?”
    “Jake.”
    “Jake.” Mirri took a long drag on her cigarette. “He is weak. Maybe because he has the small cock. Maybe because he doesn’t like his mother. Really it’s irrelevant. He’s weak and he thinks that because you love him, you are even weaker. So he is mean to you. He won’t call you. He doesn’t care whether you call him. But if you do, he thinks you’re foolish.”
    “You don’t know the first thing about Jake,” Kate said, not able to look Mirri in the eye. “He loved me. He wrote songs for me . . .”
    “He’s not good enough for you.” Mirri stubbed her cigarette out on an ashtray on her bedside table.
    “I see” was all that Kate could manage. She knew it was true. It was so close to the bone that she thought she might be sick. At which point Mirri Moncur abandoned her perfectly executed
tour de Jake
and changed the subject. “So how long will it take you to paint this picture?”
    “About a month,” Kate said blankly. Then, with her blood boiling, she added, “Which should give you just long enough to hang out with Jonah Sinclair.”
    “Ah. Mr. Sinclair.” Mirri smiled and nodded at the memory.
    “You might think that my judgment’s bad. But yours isn’t much better. He’s married, you know?” Kate had decided that an eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth was the best way forward.
    “Oh, yes yes, of course I know,” Mirri said in a blasé way as she flipped through Kate’s sketches.
    “Don’t you think that’s a bit off?” Kate asked.
    “Off?” Mirri didn’t understand the implication.
    “Off color. Wrong. He’s got children, too. A few, I think.”
    “Darling, I’m not the one cheating on my wife.” Mirri shrugged.
    “I know, but isn’t it bad karma or something? I mean, I always think that if I were married and some tart—” Kate checked herself. “—some other woman came along and had an affair with my husband I’d be miserable. I wouldn’t necessarily want to make anyone else that miserable.”
    “And you would blame the single, unattached woman who had never made a vow to be faithful to anyone? Rather than the married man who was cheating on his wife who had made that vow?” Mirri was rearranging a vase of antique lilac roses she’d picked from the garden yesterday afternoon.
    “No, but I’d just be worried that if I ran off with someone else’s husband then someday my karma would come back and bite me on the bum and some woman would run off with my husband.”
    “Oh, I see.” Mirri turned and looked at Kate quite seriously, then in a light way, like a young girl who’s just realized that Santa Claus does exist after all, added, “But I’m not married. And I don’t want a husband. So that’s fine.”
    “Yes, but . . .” Kate was about to expand on her objections when she realized she was wasting her breath. Mirri was as