Chapter 2 #2
For the next several days, I trail her every move.
She is the very picture of routine. Up at 7.
30 a.m. Works out for forty-five minutes, then goes to work.
Has a fruit salad for morning snack. Wrap for lunch.
Celery, peanut butter, and raisins with carrot sticks for afternoon tea.
Then, six p.m. every day, she’s in one of three fast food restaurants buying dinner.
The girl loves herself a hamburger and fries, and soft serve ice cream.
They’ve been telling us since the eighties that it’s not really ice cream, but I can’t think of what it actually is.
On the third day, she takes a milkshake bigger than her head to a tattoo place. It’s after work and it’s already dark when she goes in there. I look the place up online. It looks okay, not good, but decent. The sort of place where the line work will probably blow out, but you won’t get hepatitis.
I feel my jaw tightening seeing her go in there.
I don’t like the idea of her being marked by someone else, for some reason.
(That reason being I am already becoming both protective and possessive over her.) She probably has tattoos already.
The idea of peeling that perpetual black uniform off her and discovering each and every one of them is appealing.
She leaves the salon fifteen minutes later. She must have been discussing a new piece. I watch her walk down a dark alley in a sort of mindless fashion. She should be more aware of her surroundings. She should be paying attention to what is going on around her.
Instead, she has earbuds in.
Her head is down.
Her phone is out.
And the predator lurking behind the dumpster thinks he has a clear shot at her.
Ella
How many ducky tattoos can you get before it becomes a problem?
I don’t know, but I intend to find out. I need to do something to shake off the feeling I’ve had around me since the funeral that wasn’t really a funeral.
There’s a heaviness I can’t shake. That’s not like me.
Usually, terrible things happen and I move on almost immediately.
I know grief is different and takes longer, but the sadness I feel, and the weirdness I feel is deeper than either of those things.
I take a shortcut on my way home. It saves me like two blocks of walking, and I do it all the time, so I don’t even think about it. Unfortunately, someone else has noticed that too, and they’re lying in wait.
I’m looking at the flash tattoos they offered on my phone, wondering if I should go for a custom one instead, when someone grabs me roughly.
The music in my earbuds is a heavy metal screaming kind of vibe, so my screams blend in perfectly.
I don’t expect them to be useful. In a city like this, people ignore screams. It’s just the way it is.
Then everything happens really fast.
I look up, drop my phone, and see a wild-looking dude coming out from behind the dumpster. He looks like he eats rats and likes it. There’s something feral and predatory about him, but not in a sexy way. In a sort of pestilent way. He wants to hurt me. I feel my soul curdle at his touch.
Before I can do anything to defend myself, I am nudged out of the way, and a tall man in a suit is slamming dumpster guy’s head against the wall hard enough to knock him out.
There’s a sick cracking sound that I think must be the sound a skull makes when it fractures.
I don’t know if that’s accurate, but I don’t want to or get to check.
I can’t see who saved me. I’m not even entirely sure I was saved, because the next thing that happens is that I am pushed up against the wall face first. My hands are behind my back, both wrists clamped in place by one big grip.
Smack!
A hard slap lands across my ass. I gasp in shock as the intense tingling of a hard spank works its way through my body and mind at the same shocking rate. Maybe faster in my body than in my mind, because I can’t fucking believe this is happening.
“Be. Careful,” a deep voice growls in my ear. “Pay attention to your surroundings. There’s danger everywhere.”
Chills run down my spine at those words of warning that seem to have genuine urgency behind them.
I want so badly to turn around, but when I so much as try to move my head to look, a big hand on the back of my neck returns my vision to the wall.
He even presses me forward a little, so the tip of my nose touches the brick.
“Do you understand? When you are out and about, you don’t look at your phone. You don’t listen to music. You keep your head up, and you pay attention to who and what is around you. And no cutting through alleys just because they save you two minutes of walking. The world is a jungle, Ella.”
“How do you know my name? Ow!”
I yelp as he spanks me four more times, harder than before. Each and every one of them leaves my cheeks with that oxymoronic sting that also somehow feels numb.
“Why are you… ow!”
Another four slaps land, and now my self-professed pain tolerance is starting to feel less tolerant. My ass is starting to ache. The curiosity is still there, but there’s no way to indulge it without causing myself more pain.
“Are you listening to me, little girl?”
Oh, I don’t like that at all. Patronizing bullshit. How fucking dare he speak to me that way? The guy he knocked out is starting to stir a little. The man who put him down notices that, and puts him back out with a swift kick.
I have no doubt I am currently being held by someone very dangerous and very adept at fighting. I, being much smaller and not having the benefit of ubiquitous testosterone flowing through me, have to find other ways to assert myself in the world.
Or, in this case, not.
“Yes, I’m listening,” I whimper.
“You are in danger,” he says. “You have to do your best to keep yourself safe, understand?”
“Why am I in danger?”
He pauses. I think, for a second, he’s going to answer me. Then his palm rains down half a dozen slaps on my ass, hard and fast, making me rise up onto my tiptoes and squeal as tears start flowing down my face.
I’m crying.
Fuck, I wish I wasn’t crying. I’ve cried too much lately.
But once the tears start, they don’t stop.
They intensify until my shoulders are shaking.
I didn’t cry when Teddy died. Not really.
Tears flowed down my face from time to time, but I didn’t actually, you know, really cry.
Hard to explain the difference really, but you know it when you see it.
This rough handling has unlocked floodgates inside me. Now I am crying properly. For Teddy, for myself, for all the hardship and awfulness in the world. The rough brute has spanked me into catharsis, and now that I have started, I don’t think I know how to stop.
I hear the man behind me curse softly to himself, then turn me around and press my head against his chest, holding me tight and rubbing my back and my butt in long, slow, soothing strokes.
I haven’t been held lately. I live alone, and Teddy’s gone.
I’ve seen awful things, and I’ve done bad things.
I’ve been trying to keep myself together, but being spanked by a stranger on the street is the final straw.
I come apart completely in the stranger’s arms and he holds me even while refusing to let me see his face.
He rubs his hands up and down my back in a soothing manner until I finally stop sobbing and get my breath back. With my last few gasps of sadness, he pats my bottom. It no longer feels quite as sore, but it is definitely tender to his touch.
“Be a good girl and do as you’re told,” he says. “When I let you go, head home. Draw a bath…” He is about to let me go. He draws back in preparation. Then he presses close again, and this time his tone is even more intensely domineering and stern. “Don’t get a tattoo.”
I immediately want to tell him that I can do what I want and he can fuck off.
But my ass is burning, and I still have all the adrenaline from almost being accosted by a guy who likes to hang around behind dumpsters, and this stranger is the only reason I am safe, so right now he absolutely can tell me what to do.
“Do you understand, Ella?”
“Yes,” I whimper. I want to look at his face so badly, but he’s made it clear I shouldn’t and I don’t want whatever terrible thing would happen to happen if I broke the rule he’s silently imposed.
He releases me, turns me around, and pats my ass one last time. “Go home,” he says. “Now.”
I take a few steps, and then the haze of obedience fades.
I risk more pain to satisfy my curiosity.
I turn to look at him, but he has already turned and is walking away.
All I see are broad shoulders and dark hair.
I think about running after him, but something tells me if I do that, it might be one of the last things I ever do.
He wants to hide his face from me, and I know enough about the world to know that forcing a man to show you his true face when he doesn’t want you to is a bad idea.
I walk the rest of the way home with my ass stinging, my pride bruised, but my heart surprisingly light.
I didn’t think there was anyone left in the world to look after me. I figured that part of my life was done. But it seems there is at least one male creature with some interest in keeping me safe.
I don’t like getting my ass whipped by random men, but I think, deep down, I knew I kind of deserved that.
I wasn’t paying attention, and whatever the guy behind the dumpster wanted, it wasn’t to smack my ass and tell me to pay attention.
Most male attention comes with a crude carnality that is so deeply off-putting as to be disgusting.
I have so often felt like I am nothing but a piece of attractively shaped meat to the men I am around.
The fact that I have a brain and a personality has more often been an inconvenience that has to be tolerated than something that is appreciated.
That changed with Teddy, though, and when he was killed, I thought that part of my world had forever ended. Maybe it has. Maybe not.
The tattoo thing he said, though? I’m not going to listen to that. I need a new one. There’s something about the process of being inked that feels like being reborn. Doing something permanent, something that involves pain, art, and another person marking me forever… there’s nothing else like it.
That’s why I was scrolling on my phone, trying to decide if I want a custom piece, or if one of the flash tattoos would work for me.
I don’t know if another cutesy little baby duck is going to scratch this itch for me.
I want something bigger. Maybe a giant duck rising from the ashes like a phoenix, stretched all the way across my back?
Most of my tattoos so far are small, but the pain I am in now demands some painful answer, something that comes from the outside and makes sense of it.
I wonder if I will see him again.
That man who cared enough to intervene when most men would have kept on walking, or worse, watched. He must be a very, very good man. He punished me, he gave me comfort, but he took nothing for himself. Not even a quick grope.
As I walk in my front door, I am aware that there is a smile on my face that has no business being there—and a dampness between my thighs that is even more sinful than the smile.