Red Grow the Roses

by Janine Ashbless

  ‘Fuck the slut!’ someone shouted from the crowd, but was silenced by others: a rumble of irritation.

  Leon gave his hard-on one more preening tug. ‘No. I want to see the Boss.’

  The crowd went absolutely ape. There was no mistaking their approval. This, thought Jacqueline wildly – this was what they’d come here for tonight. The men behind her surged up against her, bouncing her against the mesh, and she felt her hardened nipples snag on the wire with a sensation of physical shock.

  ‘Herrin! Herrin!’ they started chanting.

  From the Olympian heights of the mezzanine floor came movement: a glass elevator was descending to the main level of the club. Jacqueline couldn’t see the door open because of the crowd, but she saw when the occupant emerged into view from the back of the stage. There was a collective roar, and then everyone went quiet. It was like they were holding their breath.

  The Boss was a tall black woman: over six foot in her heels, her hair a 20s-style platinum-blonde bob, with lips painted the oozing red-black of Angeleno plums. She strolled into the open cage with the lithe, swaggering arrogance of a lion-tamer. Jacqueline’s glance, once she’d got over her surprise, was critical: the woman was, she thought, only saved from being categorised as wiry by the jut of her breasts and bottom. Both of those were wrapped in a shimmering dress, as white as her hair, that clung to every curve and was slashed in a multitude of places to show slivers of her skin, the satin skirt long enough to trail on the canvas but split to her hips.

  Around her hips was tied a pale suede belt with no buckle. The effect was oddly medieval.

  That’s a wig, Jacqueline thought, trying to find some chink in that aggressive and overwhelming beauty, as if it would make the woman any less unnerving. She looked so completely at ease there, surrounded by those excited men and practically swimming in their testosterone, looking Leon up and down as if he were a horse she’d been asked to judge. Her luscious lips curved in a faint, amused smile. She lifted a hand and signalled off-stage, and staff hurried on with a padded bench – the MC having already made himself scarce by this point, taking the dancer with him. Meanwhile she approached Leon and looked him long and coolly in the eye. His gaze didn’t falter, though his chest was rising and falling sharply, all the adrenaline now making him unsteady. He just gripped his erect cock tight in his fist.

  ‘The hero of the hour,’ said she. Her silky voice needed no electronic amplification: everyone in the room was hanging on each word. She glanced down at his purple-headed glans with no apparent interest, then drew two fingers down his chest, over his ribs, probing at an enflamed red patch before licking her fingertips to taste his sweat. Leon gritted his teeth. ‘Strip,’ she ordered, turning on her heel and going over to sit on the bench.

  Leon took a deep breath, then pulled off the shredded shirt that clung, transparent, to his shoulders and arms. The Boss crossed one long bare leg over the other, sitting with her back very straight, her attention entirely on him. He dropped his trousers next, kicking them away, and stood with his legs apart, naked.

  ‘Arms out.’

  He raised them wide. The stance emphasised the breadth of his chest. He was still a fine-looking man, thought Jacqueline, shot through with pangs of very physical admiration. His erect cock bobbed slightly.

  ‘Turn.’

  He turned, showing her the pale flash of his untanned rear, then faced her again. Her smile broadened momentarily.

  ‘Kneel.’

  Without a word he went down on his knees. Jacqueline’s mouth had gone dry. She hardly believed what she was seeing, unable to reconcile the everyday Leon she knew with the warrior, unable to reconcile the proud warrior with such obedience. Unable to defend to herself her own reaction to the sight.

  ‘Are you hurting, hero?’

  He didn’t answer. He just jerked his chin in affirmation, keeping it high. She unfurled her long legs and stood again, approaching him. Now that he was on his knees she could look down into his face without effort.

  ‘Think you can take more?’

  ‘Yes,’ he croaked, his cock twitching.

  Whipping back her hand, she slapped his face hard – hard enough to knock his head sideways. His eyes widened and he blinked fiercely: Jacqueline could almost see the rush of adrenaline through his system as his face went pale, leaving the red imprint of her palm to bloom slowly on his cheek. Jacqueline herself had to grip the wire to hold herself up, so shocked was she.

  ‘You sure, hero?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said through set teeth.

  She backhanded him on the other cheek: this one drew blood, because she was wearing heavy silver rings. ‘Really sure?’

  The breath hitched in his throat, but his cock didn’t falter. ‘Yes.’

  The Boss laughed, low and delicious. Then, stepping back, she untied the suede belt from about her hips, looped it round her hand and swished it through the air. Leon clenched his jaw. The lash whipped out and snapped at him, right across both nipples, with a crack like something breaking. His head jerked, but he didn’t utter a sound.

  ‘Good,’ said she, lifting the belt again.

  She whipped him on the chest and the back and the thighs. She whipped his clenched ass-cheeks. She whipped each of his outstretched arms as if trying to pull him down from an invisible cross. She shortened the strap and beat him on the face. She snapped the very tip of the leather across his penis. She was fast and accurate and incredibly strong: she beat him over and over and didn’t tire, didn’t get sloppy, didn’t miss. Not once. Leon began to groan with every strike and roll his eyes, but he didn’t protest or lower his arms or flinch. His erection sagged – but only to half-mast. Sweat rolled down his body in rivulets, but she didn’t even start to perspire. And Jacqueline’s world turned upside down and inside out as she watched, appalled. She didn’t recognise this Leon. Her husband was a man who took shit from no one: she didn’t understand why he was kneeling there and soaking up the pain and the humiliation like that. What sort of man was he?

  Then she looked round the other faces at the wire and knew that they were all that sort of man. They were watching in avid wide-eyed silence, quivering at every blow, every one of them wanting to be up on that stage. Imagining themselves in his place. There was a strange charisma to his suffering: a nobility even. And the women – did they see themselves in the role of the Boss, or were they picturing themselves being punished? She couldn’t tell. She just knew that they were pressed to the mesh, mesmerised by the spectacle of her husband’s pain. One woman had pulled down the top of her designer gown and thrust her small breasts into the diamond gaps between the wires and was plucking at her big dark nipples. Jacqueline’s own body felt like it didn’t belong to her, awash with sensation that made no sense, off-balance and trembling, her sex swollen like rising dough despite herself.

  At last, when the scarlet welts on Leon’s torso had melded into one burning glow, the Boss halted. She took his jaw in her hand and lifted his face, then stooped to as if to kiss him – but she wasn’t kissing his lips and his cheeks and his forehead: she was licking him, mouth wide, sucking the salt of his pain and the ooze of the little cuts left by the fight and her own hand, mumbling greedily at every gash and bruise. The whole crowd groaned low at that.

  ‘Can you take more?’ she growled, forcing him to look at her. Her eyes were flashing now, her voice suddenly laced with an accent that sounded French. Jacqueline had always thought dominatrices were supposed to be ice-queens: not this one. She was far more fire than ice.

  ‘Yes,’ he rasped.

  She picked him up. Jacqueline’s eyes widened, but she had ceased to balk at anything now; the line between possible and impossible had dissolved in Leon’s sweat. The Boss hefted him to his feet one-handed, gripping him under the jaw, and flung him down on his back on the bench where she’d sat before. Then she straddled his belly – her incredible legs taut now and bare to the thigh – and raked her nails down his chest, hard enough to bring blood welling up
in breadcrumb trails. She bent to lick her way up each red path from belly to heart, while the audience murmured. Then she opened her mouth wide and sank her teeth into his chest, framing his left nipple. Leon arched and jerked his legs: his cock rose from where it bounced on his thigh and stuck straight up, jabbing the woman in the rump. She lifted her head, eyes feral, and lips now much more red than black. Her own arousal was more subtle than his but equally shameless. Adjusting the fall of white satin at her groin, she pulled his cock to the hidden cleft of her sex and sat back hard, engulfing him.

  Jacqueline took a broken breath. She felt with all the envy of memory that cock filling her own hole.

  ‘Give me your hurt, hero,’ the Boss crooned, sinking her nails into his skin and making him spasm. ‘That’s right: give it up. Give it up to me.’ She started to rise and fall on his cock, slamming her hips down, and as she rode him – as she fucked him, because there was no doubt about who was active and who was recipient here – she dug the nails of one hand into his flesh and struck him with the other, aiming at his face. The heave of her hard round ass over his thighs was dazzling. Little barks of pain escaped Leon’s chest with every blow, a mindless animal noise, but he didn’t struggle. And she didn’t take long: her orgasm was on her swiftly, making her shudder and hiss and lose all rhythm and finally arch her back and nearly fall forward over him.

  There’s no difference in their reactions, thought Jacqueline. If you’re watching, not feeling it, pain looks just like pleasure. You can’t tell them apart.

  Then with a wrench the Boss was off, standing, and Leon’s cock stood bereft, glistening with her moisture. She raised her hand over her head and clicked her fingers, pointing at the ceiling, at the winches and drums of cable. Things began to descend with an electrical hum: a small box on a snaking length of cable; chains; some sort of metal bar with shackles at either end. She took the bar and with swift, practised movements bound Leon’s ankles in the shackles, which meant his legs were spread wide and helpless. Then she attached the chains to the bar and, using the remote, raised the chains again. His legs were lifted from the ground, higher than his recumbent body – and then he was pulled up bodily from the bench, swinging with head down, his arms hanging limp over his head. The Boss took up the fallen belt she’d used to thrash him and bound his wrists behind his back. Jacqueline could see that his eyes were wide and glassy, almost unblinking.

  What now? she wondered. The audience were waiting for something, shifting restlessly, almost swaying on their feet, pressing forward. The air felt heavy in her lungs; every breath she took was laden with male sweat and the reek of their impatience. She could hear the men on either side of her panting.

  Spinning him on his chains the Boss thumbed the control once more, raising him a foot or so, putting them face to face. She kissed his upside-down lips cruelly, more bite than kiss, then dropped him back with a jerk. Her head was on a level with his chest now. She twisted his nipple between her fingers, then stepped in to embrace him and took a big hard bite. No kiss at all in that. For a moment suction hollowed her cheeks, then she pulled back with a wet noise and bit him again, a little further over. A thin trickle of scarlet ran down toward his throat. She worked her way up his body bite by bite, lowering him on his tether to get access. Leon quivered in every fibre, his legs jerking, and a long dark note of suffering tore from his chest.

  And this was what the crowd had waited to see: this feeding. They groaned softly with every bite. The guy to Jacqueline’s right had his hand on her bum-cheek, someone had his spread fingertips planted in the small of her back, and the one at her left had his flies open and was jacking off. She didn’t look. She didn’t care. It wasn’t personal. She wasn’t the focus of their desire because that was the woman up there on stage, the one with the teeth and the thirst; she – Jacqueline – was just a part of the crowd, one of the worshippers, a fragment adrift in a sea of longing and lust. The scent of her arousal was another note in the crowd’s scent, the gasps of her breath just some of a thousand thousand whispered prayers. ‘Bite him,’ they prayed with every breath: ‘Bite him; bite him; bite me.’

  Then that monstrous goddess reached Leon’s cock, which hung down stiffly against his belly. There was a momentary pause before – at last – she took it in her mouth. Her jaw clenched. Leon roared, thrashing in his bonds, arching backward then banging his head on her thighs and pubis. There was agony in his cry but ecstasy too: broken words shot from his mouth like spittle, a hailstorm of blasphemy and obscene release. Jacqueline felt the crowd surge forward and she was shoved against the wire, hot bodies grinding against her back, the whole audience writhing in sympathy with the hanged man’s immolation. A nubbin of curved wire rubbed against Jacqueline’s own pubic mound and in a moment she found her own orgasm: not a big earth-shaking one, because she didn’t have a cock inside her or a vibe pressed to her clit, but a twisting shameful thrill of pleasure that spread through her whole body in a slow-motion wave, leaving her gushing and aching in its wake. ‘Oh, fuck!’ she squeaked under her breath, her words echoing Leon’s roar.

  He kept on groaning even when he ran out of breath for words. He kept groaning even when the Boss let him go and walked away back to the elevator, her eyes heavy-lidded with satisfaction, her beautiful dress no longer white or pristine. His cock was purplish, swollen, still grossly erect, and it pulsed and jerked as he hung there shaking just as if it was ejaculating, even though no emission was visible. He was still coming, Jacqueline realised, appalled. His balls had been sucked dry by that bitch-goddess and he was still coming, empty.

  It took him a long time to stop. He was still groaning softly when the staff came to lower him down.

  As the crowd unfurled like a poisonous flower releasing its sticky scent of semen and lust and male sweat, individuals drifting away, she wove slightly unsteadily back toward the cloakroom. Moisture slicked her inner thighs. She felt filthy and shamed and excited. There were stains on her designer dress too, stains from other crowd members; she’d actually felt the man on her left splash against the split of her thigh. It didn’t matter. She had seen: she had taken part: she had understood. She’d seen her husband with new eyes. Seen him not in relationship to her but most primitively, as a man. A body. An object of desire. She’d got hot and wet for him in a way she hadn’t since their earliest years.

  And she understood Leon. In a few days he’d be healed up and recovered, and when he came home she’d be waiting for him. She understood him now: his need for pain, his ruthless hyper-masculine urge to test his courage and endurance, the demand of his body to be taken to the very limit. She needed to consider everything, and to be ready.

  She still had her purse with her, and the divorce papers inside it. Let them stay there. She had other plans now.

  (Estelle)

  And this is Estelle: beautiful irresistible Estelle. ‘The Boss’ is her nom de guerre only in some of the establishments that she owns; she has half-a-dozen different titles and four times as many businesses under her control. She’s had time to build up quite a portfolio since the 1920s.

  She was born in Mississippi, but she doesn’t like to remember that these days and when she’s excited or tired her accent slips to French rather than that of her childhood. The eldest of seven daughters, she grew up on a farm her father worked as sharecropper for a white landlord and she spent most of her youth chasing round after her siblings, trying to keep them fed and safe and obedient. Her family were good churchgoing folk and the girls all learned to sing long before they could spell out their alphabets. A few of them could sing really well, Estelle in particular, so they became a regular feature of Sunday meetings, and with the addition of a name – ‘The Seven Little Sisters of the Lord’s Gracious Mercy’ – they began to tour the circuit of country churches and gospel gatherings.

  Estelle was sixteen when a visitor from out of state spotted her potential and persuaded her to come to Chicago to try for a singing career. Alcibiades Nash was like no local man she k
new: smooth and scented and cultured, full of stories and a knowing humour, he carried himself with an arrogant confidence even around white folk and didn’t appear to mind the danger. Yet with her he was always polite, seeming almost awed by her talent. He called her ‘Miss’ and told her she was beautiful and walked with her after church, describing how much the people up north would love her for her voice and her lovely face. He said she had a glorious future ahead of her, and he took her hand and stroked her palm and wrist with one finger until she was squirming and wide-eyed and half out of her skin with wanting what he had to give. The stranger woke in the young girl feelings stronger and wilder and sweeter than any she’d known before, and she fell for every one of his honeyed words.

  Her father and mother, rigidly respectable folk, wouldn’t hear of their daughter going into the theatre, so she ran away with Alcibiades Nash.

  Estelle grew up fast after that. Fast and bitter. Too proud and ambitious to break, she hardened instead, losing old comforts and finding new consolations. Knowing that the powerless obtain no mercy, she worked hard not to be in any one man’s thrall, playing one off against another to find her independence somewhere in the cracks between. It was a risky strategy and she took her share of pain, but she survived and more.

  These things are beautiful to Estelle: ruby beads of blood like strung gems on masculine skin; the thickness of a weightlifter’s neck, tendons corded with strain; the gather of sweat at the very base of a man’s spine, just at the cleft of his proud butt-cheeks, and the way it hangs and drips from his balls; the smell of his anguish, sharp and bitter on the oozing skin of his crotch; the gasp of agony and surrender as his skin gives between her teeth. Above all she wants to see the look in their eyes that tells her that they need her, that they need the pain she brings.

  You will not find Estelle casually, and she will not seek you. You have to be the right sort of person, and you will have to go looking for her, and you will have to bring her the things she desires. Offerings to her divinity.