Vacation

by S. J. Lewis

He drew back. Her eyes were still tearing, but she gave him a brief, wan smile.

  “Please…,” she croaked, gulped, licked her lips. “Please don’t let the others…do that to me.”

  “Not a chance, Red,” he chuckled. “Your sweet little ass is mine alone.”

  She smiled faintly, closing her eyes, and nuzzled at his hand. She said nothing more.

  He freed her ankles, but left the ropes around them. He also removed the choke-rope around her neck. Aside from a groan of relief, she made no move or sound. When he unlocked the handcuffs from her wrists, her arms fell limply to her sides. There was a blanket hanging from an old hook. He took it down and spread it out so that they could sit side by side, backs against the saddle, and cradled her in his arms for a while. He could hear the others doing things to and with Dianne. Claudia rested her head on his shoulder.

  “I’m gonna miss you, Red,” he told her, ruffling her hair. She murmured something he didn’t quite catch, snuggled closer. He had an arm around her shoulder, and moved his hand to fondle a breast. The nipple swelled under his palm almost immediately.

  “Is…” she licked her lips, swallowed. “Is it…over now?” she asked shyly.

  “Wish it wasn’t, Red,” he replied, ruffling her hair.

  “All right,” she sighed. “You’ll take us back to the bungalow?”

  “In a little while,” he nodded. The barn sounded oddly quiet. They must have let Dianne down by now.

  “When you do…,” she said faintly…” Just leave us there, please? Don’t stay.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to have to say goodbye tomorrow,” she murmured.

  “Neither do I.” His arm tightened around her.

  “No, please…,” she went on. “I have so much to do, and I can’t put it off for a minute. If you’re there, I might…be tempted to…”

  “Okay, Red,” he agreed a bit reluctantly. Tonight, for the first time, he felt as if he’d really reached down inside her, drawn her out. There was so much he’d still like to do. “Maybe I’ll look you up once you’ve had time to get settled.”

  “Um…” she rubbed her head on his shoulder. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Please don’t. This was…a one-time thing. I couldn’t stand a regular diet of it.”

  “You say that now,” he chuckled. “In a week you’ll be wanting it again, bad.”

  “In a week I’ll be too busy,” she smiled, stroking his cheek with slim fingers. “I will miss you, though.”

  “Don’t have to miss me,” he replied.

  “No, really. I’ll need to be alert, and sharp, and busy as all hell. You’d be too much of a distraction, Sam.” She waved her arm, taking in the stall, the barn, the bungalow, all in one gesture. “This was…intense. I’ve never done anything even close to this. I’m not going to do it again. I couldn’t take it.”

  “Couldn’t take it?”

  “It’s too much,” she said. “I’m all worn down, worn out, used up. I can’t do this again.”

  He lifted her chin to kiss her. “Why’d you do it this time, Red?” he asked.

  She sighed, snuggled minutely closer. “It was you,” she said after a moment. “I think if you’d been the least bit less sure of your damned self I’d have backed out. But you looked so smug about it, so dead certain. I felt…kind of…challenged. I wanted to show you I could take anything you could dish out, and then some. I was a little crazy.”

  “I’m kinda used up myself right now, Red.”

  “I’ve got marks, bruises.” She held up a hand to show him. “I’m sore all over. How about you?” She jabbed him lightly in the ribs with an elbow, grinning. He laughed, quietly.

  “So please,” she went on, serious again. “Let it all end tonight. I went skydiving once, to see what it was like. It was wild, and exciting, and scary, and once was enough for me. This is just like that.” She leaned over to kiss him, softly, lingeringly. “Thanks for the ride, Sam. I really mean it.” Her eyes were bright in the lantern light. “But this was my one time, okay?”

  “Not okay, Red,” he answered.

  “I have too much work to do,” she said. “This….this was something weird and special, and I’ll never forget it, not even when I’m an eighty-year-old grandma. Don’t push it, please, Sam. You’ll ruin it for me if you do.”

  He sighed, wishing he had another of Hub’s cigars. It would give him something to do while he thought up the right answer.

  “I’ll give you some time, Red,” he conceded at last. “But I ain’t gonna forget you. One day I’ll look you up. You know that.”

  “No, you won’t,” she responded. “You’re not that kind of man. You’ll move on, find some other woman to torture so deliciously. Once she’s all yours, body and soul, you’ll leave her and move on to the next.”

  There was no good answer to that. He was a bit irritated that she’d judged him like that, but he had to admit to himself that she’d been painfully accurate. He could tell her that she was different, special to him, but that wouldn’t make much of an impression on her. To be honest, he had said it a few too many times before. He just hugged her a bit closer with one arm and kissed her again.

  ***

  It was time to go. They wrapped the women in blankets, bundled their clothes and jewelry into a bag. Nobody spoke on the way back to the bungalow, and both women fell asleep. They were grumpily irritable when they were wakened and walked into the bungalow. Sam made sure there were clean sheets on Red’s bed before they laid the women in it and covered them. It took a little while to reassemble and rearrange the furniture in Dianne’s room, but they did that before they left. Rom left with them, riding behind Sam on his chopper. Rom wanted to talk. Sam didn’t.

  ***

  Both women felt stiff and a bit sore the next day, but now they had a schedule to keep. Claudia had a little trouble walking, so Dianne helped out with the packing and loading the minivan. Neither said much. Claudia was leaving to start a new career and Dianne was sad to see her go. The final goodbyes would be painful enough without starting them now.

  At a stoplight on the way to the airport, Dianne reached over and put a hand on Claudia’s shoulder. Claudia saw tears in Dianne’s eyes, and felt them starting to well up in her own.

  “I’m going to miss you, partner.” Dianne said with a shaky smile. Claudia leaned over to hug her as best she could. “I’ll miss you too,” she replied. “Please come visit me.”

  “Oh, I will.” Dianne nodded vigorously. She brushed away tears with the back of her hand as some impatient dolt in the car behind them began leaning on his horn. The light was green. Dianne pulled out….slowly, to annoy the bastard a bit more.

  “Claudie…” Dianne began hesitantly. “The barn….that was your idea?”

  “More like Sam’s.” Claudia answered. “ He said I talked in my sleep, and I guess I was dreaming when I was doing it.”

  ”Must have been some dream.” Dianne observed. “Why didn’t you tell me about it? I’d have gone along. You know that.”

  “By the time I knew what was happening, I didn’t have a chance to.” Claudia replied. “But, yes, it was some dream.”

  “You’re….okay?” Dianne looked at her sidelong. “You’ve been pretty quiet.”

  Claudia snickered. “Oh, I’m fine,” she said. “ I’m just…sore…in a spot I haven’t been sore in before.”

  “Ah…what did he do?”

  “Oh, my friend…” Claudia yawned and stretched. “Last night I lost my last virginity.”

  Dianne looked puzzled for a moment. Then her eyes went wide as realization set in.

  “He didn’t!” she exclaimed. “I thought I heard you scream, but I was pretty out of it.”

  “Oh, he did.” Claudia said. “And let’s say no more about it for now, okay? But you were right about it.”

  ***

  At the airport, they hugged one last time before Claudia boarded her flight. “Many thanks.” Claudia whispered into Dianne’s ear. “I
’m going to remember this vacation for a long time.”

  Dianne grinned, almost giggled. “You’re going to be so busy….I hope it is all you hoped it would be.”

  They parted. In spite of her lingering soreness, Claudia walked away as if nothing were wrong, if a bit slowly. Just before she got on the plane, she turned to smile and wave.

  ***

  The next two years were impossibly busy, but Claudia loved the work she had set for herself and did it well, establishing herself as a thorough, competent and discreet investigator. It took some doing, because she was a woman in a field populated mostly by men. When she reached the point where she could pick and choose her clients rather than scramble after every one, she knew she’d achieved at least some success. When the clients began chasing after her, after her first year and a half, she moved to a bigger office and hired her first two employees. Marabel was a formidable looking woman in her mid-fifties, an inch shorter than Claudia but eighty pounds heavier, tough as ten-penny nails and very good at her job. She looked more than a bit like Winston Churchill in drag, with a bad wig of frizzy brown hair going grey. Marabel ran the office, kept the files straight, answered phones, took notes. She could size up a potential client with one shrewd look, and was expert in getting rid of unwanted salesmen. Jerry was a bit of an enigma: Mid-forties, short, plump, balding, and baby-faced, he always looked a bit rumpled and confused, as if someone had just awakened him from a nap. He drove an old battleship-gray pickup, and his shoes never seemed to have been shined. In spite of his resume and references, Claudia had been unsure whether to hire him at all until Marabel had looked him up and down and grumped, “He’ll do.”

  He did do. The innocent blue eyes behind the wire-rimmed glasses he wore were less and less innocent-looking the longer you looked into them, and he had a knack of finding almost anything or anybody just by using his office phone. People seemed to like to talk to him. Inside of five minutes, total strangers would be telling him their life stories. He didn’t talk about himself much, though.

  After his first month, Claudia knew he was good enough to have his own agency. He just didn’t want one. He liked ferreting things out while letting someone else worry about payroll, taxes, insurance and all the rest. After two months, Claudia knew that all she had to do was point him in the general direction, and he’d handle it from there, quietly and completely.

  With those two helping to share the load, Claudia found that she now had some time for a social life. She hadn’t really had much of one when she’d been on the police force, though, and after all the hectic months of building her own agency she found that she was terribly rusty. She still looked good. From the start she’d enrolled at a health club and worked out regularly. Men still approached her, asked her out. She was careful not to mix business with pleasure, and had had to decline a number of invitations from clients, or potential clients. This meant that all of the men she did go out with had no idea what she did for a living. She discovered that telling them what she did on the first date usually meant no second date. Well, most of them had only been one-date material anyway. It was funny that men seemed to be put off by her career, or by the fact that she was licensed to carry a concealed firearm, or by her unarmed-combat training, or by….the list went on. It was a bit funny, yes, but more than a little frustrating. Just how deeply frustrating she didn’t realize until she began to have those dreams. She could never recall them clearly afterwards, but some of them made her wake up gasping, sweating, and terribly, terribly…hungry. Hungry was a good word for it. She debated having a one-night stand with the first reasonably attractive and intelligent man who asked her, but decided against it. That sort of thing could kill her reputation stone cold dead if it ever got out, and a part of her realized that it would only be slapping a band-aid on a compound fracture anyway. The marks Sam had left on her body might have faded a long time ago, but she was beginning to realize that she was indelibly marked someplace deep inside. She hated that feeling. It was as if she’d been somehow branded, somehow diminished.

  One late and lonely evening, things had become almost too much to bear. She thought of calling Dianne…just to talk. They were still close friends. Very close, she thought wryly. Dianne and Rom had gone their separate ways nine months back. Dianne had always said it wouldn’t last, and had seemed to accept the inevitability. Once it had actually happened she just had to come and visit so Claudia could help her with her mourning. Both of them were feeling low and lonely at that point, and they’d somehow wound up in bed together. It had been a good thing for both of them, but Dianne sort of owed her a reciprocal shoulder to cry on now. If the shoulder-crying turned into something else, it might help scratch that maddening itch she was starting to develop.

  ***

  She was just reaching for the phone when it rang. Startled, she flinched at the noise, then laughed at how keyed-up she seemed to be. She picked up the phone, wondering who could be calling her at home at this hour, half-hoping it was Dianne.

  “Hello?” she said into the receiver.

  There was a dry chuckle at the other end. “Hi, Red…..”

  Part Two

  The sound of that voice, calling her by that name, hit her like a physical blow, even after two years. She realized that her heartbeat was thudding in her ears. For a moment, her vision blurred. She took one long, deep breath to try to calm herself before answering him.

  “How did you get this number?” she demanded. “I said I didn’t want to see you again. Ever. Remember?”

  “I remember real good, Red,” he chuckled. “If YOU remember, I never agreed with you ‘bout that.”

  She gritted her teeth for a moment. “How did you get this number?”

  “Oh, that. Little Dee gave it to me. She says ‘hi’.”

  “I told her….” Claudia began, but he cut her off.

  “I know what you told her,” he said. “Same as she told me at first. Don’t be too hard on her, Red. I kinda forced it out of her.”

  Claudia felt suddenly cold. He’d always struck her as a man capable of violence. “What…” she swallowed. “What did you do to her? If you hurt her…”

  “Aw, hell, Red,” he laughed. “Nothin’ like that! We didn’t do anything you and I didn’t do. Remember? Got her all tied down to the bed, and then got her wantin’ it so bad she’d just about do or say anything to get it.”

  Claudia shivered at the recollection. If he had gotten Dianne anywhere near as aroused and desperate for release as she had been that day….yes, she could understand how Dee would finally talk to end that exquisite carnal torture.

  “I’m going to hang up now,” she said.

  “I think she’s feelin’ kinda bad about that now,” he went on. “You wanna talk to her?”

  “She’s THERE?” Claudia exclaimed.

  “Hell, sure,” he chuckled again. “She can’t leave ‘til I untie her from the bed, Red.”

  This was too much. Too much! “Let her go.” Claudia gritted. “Now.”

  “Or what, Red?” there was laughter, mocking laughter, in his voice now. “What’ll you do? You don’t even know where we are. Besides, I don’t think little Dee’s quite done yet.”

  Claudia took another deep breath. Damn him! There wasn’t a single thing she could do about Dianne. She realized that on one level, but he sounded so damned smug about it that on a much lower level she dearly wanted to shoot him, or kick him in the groin with as much force as she could muster, preferably while wearing heavy, pointed boots. How had he gotten to Dianne? She quickly realized that that was a stupid question. Almost any woman would be attracted to him on a physical level, and Dianne was vulnerable after breaking up with Rom…

  “Let me talk to her,” she said at last.

  “Not polite, Red,” he admonished. “Say ‘please’.”

  Claudia heaved a long sigh. “All right,” she conceded. “PLEASE let me talk to her.”

  “Wasn’t so hard, was it?” he went on cheerfully. “Hold on; let me
get the gag out of her pretty little mouth.”

  There was a ‘klunk’ as he put the phone down on some hard surface. Then she could hear other noises: Creaking bed, rustling sounds, a feminine voice, muffled, protesting something.

  “Here we go, Red,” he came back on. “I’ll hold the phone so she can talk. Close friends should always stay in touch, don’cha think?”

  “Just put her on.” Claudia paused for just a moment before adding, “please.”

  “You still learn fast, Red.” Another of those annoying chuckles. “Here she is.”

  “Claudie?” Dianne’s voice sounded weak, shaky. “Claudie, I’m sorry…I’m so sorry.”

  “Are you okay, Dee?” Claudia asked. “Really okay?” Dianne might have called her ‘Claudie’, one of their old code words indicating that everything was all right, but if he had gotten her phone number there was no telling what other information he might have also picked up. He would be thorough, she was sure.

  “I’m….I’m okay. Really.” Dianne replied. “I mean, he hasn’t hurt me or anything, but…”

  “But?”

  “Oh, Claudie, I’m so sorry! I didn’t want to tell him! But he…he…I was so …I don’t even REMEMBER telling him!”

  “It’s okay, Dee.” Claudia said soothingly. She remembered all too well the state he had gotten her into back in that bungalow, on that bed, and shifted uncomfortably in the chair before standing up to begin pacing the room. “I can always change the number. You didn’t tell him where I live, did you?’

  “N-no.” Dianne sounded unsure. “I don’t think I did, but an awful lot is pretty fuzzy…”

  “Think hard,” Claudia urged.

  “He’s listening in, Claudie,” Dianne warned.

  “I thought he would be.”

  “You know me pretty good, Red,” he broke in. “Just to letcha know, she didn’t tell me where you live. I didn’t ask. Not yet, anyways.”