“God damn it, Janie… you’ve really fucked things up this time,” Webmistress said.
“Me?” Spinnerette said.
“Yes, you… the one who let loose an unbalanced genius inside my home and then lost her.”
“It’s… it’s just a cunning plan,” Spinnerette said. “She slipped away while I distracted you.”
“And she let you in on this plan, did she?”
“Well, no… but that would have given it away to you, too,” Spinnerette said. “But she knew how I’d react… she knows me.”
“Janie, she knows how you’d react because you’re predictable,” Webmistress said. “Able to be predicted. She’s playing you.”
“She loves me!”
“Janie, let me lay this out for you,” Webmistress said. “She doesn’t love you. Nobody loves you. Why? Because you’re clingy… you’re clingy and you need too much from people. Also, you keep falling in love with straight women, which is creepy and wrong. Not because it’s wrong to be a lesbo, but… no. That’s just gross. But even other dykes aren’t going to like you when you cling to them like a barnacle.”
“You’re wrong,” Spinnerette said. “I’m going to find Rhyme and I’m going to prove it, and then for once in your life you’re going to shut up.”
“Janie, I swear to God I should just put a bullet in your head… I don’t know which one of us it’d be a bigger act of mercy for,” Webmistress said. She sighed over the open mic. “But if you wise up before she kills us all, you can come back, at a third of your salary.”
“Come back?”
“Of course you could work a thousand years and it still wouldn’t pay for the damage your ‘lover’ has done,” Webmistress said. “But what the hell… you’re a hopeless case and if I’m honest, I… I feel responsible for you.”
“Oh, don’t patronize me,” Spinnerette said. “You ‘feel responsible’ for me? Please. I’ve been henching for ten years…”
“Yeah, and how many employers did you go through?”
“Enough to know I don’t need you,” Spinnerette said. “You’ll ‘take me back’? I know why… because you’re lonely. Because you shut yourself off from the world, you surround yourself with men who aren’t anything more than meat robots…”
“I love my boys, and they love me.”
“That’s not love!” Spinnerette said. “You don’t know what love is! Love is being able to wait, being willing to suffer… silently, if you have to, forever if you have to, just for the chance to be near…”
“That’s not love!” Webmistress said. “That’s being a creepy emo stalker.”
“You don’t know what love is.”
“You want to know what love is?” Webmistress asked. “It’s a con. ‘Love’ was what men felt about the women they wanted to purchase or carry off and what the women were supposed to feel for the man who picked them. At some point we started writing poems about it to try to paper over how ugly it is, but that’s it. You ever read Romeo And Juliet? All he knows about her is that she’s hotter than the woman he was thinking about when he spotted her, and all she knows about him is he’s a man and he’s interested in her. And that, my dear stupid Spinnerette, is the greatest love story of all time. Is that what you want?”
“No,” Spinnerette said. “I want love, real love.”
Webmistress sighed again.
“I can’t deal with this shit. I’m going to order half my men to bring you in alive,” she said. “And half to kill you and then themselves. Good luck.”
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