The Roller Derby game was held on a ninety-foot track in the arena’s basement. When Mazie had first been introduced to Roller Derby, she’d expected a slanted track, like the ones on televised games, but tilted tracks were too expensive and most tracks nowadays were flat. The bleachers were jammed, nearly half the seats taken up by fans of the despised Skokie Scorchers, who’d driven up from the Chicago area to cheer on their team and cause mayhem. The Scorchers were the Brewer City Brawlers’ archenemies and currently the league champions, known for their willingness to play rough. Rival fans were already catcalling and jeering at each other, ready to rumble—which probably explained the presence of a few police officers stationed around the rink.
Mazie spotted the Brawlers, already suited up and gathered in a huddle at the west end of the track. There were seven women on the team—five regulars and two alternates. They all turned to stare as Mazie hurried up, Lester in her wake.
“Everybody,” Mazie panted, “this is Lester. My—uhh—date.”
Lester’s chest expanded.
“Pleased to meet you,” Lester squeaked, nodding politely around at all the skaters, who regarded him with hard eyes. They were in game mode, not girly mode, pulling on their tough chick personas to armor themselves for the game. Juju was the only one who shook Lester’s hand—and was it Mazie’s imagination, or had something just ignited there between them?
“I watch all your games. I’m your team’s number one fan!” Lester babbled. “I can’t believe I’m meeting you all in the actual flesh. Not that I mean flesh in the sense that I can see a lot of your skin showing—which I can and it looks very good, but I’m not like, ogling it or anything, I just mean—” Alarming splotches of color were blooming all over Lester’s face and neck. “I mean … excuse me for a second, ladies—but I think I’m going to faint.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Lester’s eyes rolled and his legs buckled, but he didn’t collapse. Mazie managed to steer him to a seat in the front row of the bleachers. She made him put his head between his legs and, when he was able to sit up, gave him a drink from her water bottle.
“I disgraced myself,” he moaned.
“Yes, but in a good way,” Mazie assured him. “Wait here for a minute. I’ll be right back.” She hurried over to the inner track to help the women with their last-minute gearing up. The Brawlers rocked a Catholic schoolgirl look—striped ties, white shirts that tied at the midriff, and red plaid skirts so short, they’d have gotten the wearer expelled from an actual Catholic school. Beneath, they wore stretchy black panties and fishnet panty hose.
Mazie helped Juju, whose skate name was Lady Whambamya, adjust her tie. The preferred method was to wear the tie slung low at a rakish angle, so it’d flap in the breeze. “How’d your discipline session go last night?” Mazie asked.
“I had my first flogging job.”
“Was it fun?”
“No.” Juju scowled. “Everything went okay at first. I slapped cuffs and chains on the submissive, then I yanked him over to the flogging block, a metal thingie that makes the guy bend over. I told him he needed to be punished and I was going to hurt him. He was loving it, quivering with excitement.”
Juju tightened the Velcro on her elbow pad. “I picked up the whip and cracked it on the floor a couple of times like I’d been practicing and yelled, ‘This is just a taste of what you’re going to get, vermin!’ Then I brought the whip down across his bare butt. I didn’t think I hit him that hard, but the guy screamed like he was being tortured. He had this big red welt on one of his butt cheeks. I dropped the whip, ran out of the room, and threw up. Another dominatrix had to go in to finish the punishment, so I didn’t even get paid.”
“Maybe you should stick to dog collars.”
“No, I’m done with being a dominatrix.” Juju bent over to lace her right skate more tightly. “I’m obviously not cut out for it. Maybe I should—”
“Hey, Whambamya, get your ass in gear and let’s go.” Jackie O’Sassin, the Brawlers’ team captain, skated over and handed Juju her helmet. A solidly built woman in her mid-forties with overprocessed hair the texture of cotton candy and safety-goggle eyeglasses, Jackie looked like a schoolgirl who’d repeated sixth grade about twenty times. The other Brawlers were doing last-minute battening down of braces and pads. Bootsy Bumpsalot was a slim African American woman who was the team’s best blocker; Carmen Maulranda had artificial fruit hot-glued to her helmet, and Lady Shatterly had a living-dead thing going—green facial makeup, black lipstick, and festering pustules stickered onto her cheeks.
“You want to watch out for Girlzilla,” Jackie O’Sassin warned Juju. “She’s vicious.”
Juju snorted. “You think I can’t handle her?”
Jackie set her own helmet on her head and adjusted the strap. “Just watch your back. Also your front and your sides.”
The lights dimmed, spotlights played across the floor, and the crowd whooped as the Brawlers suddenly zipped onto the track like shooting stars, pumping their fists, blowing kisses, and flinging candy to their rowdy, cheering fans. Then it was the turn of the Skokie Scorchers, who took a turn around the track, whipping up their own fans.
The skaters got into position, the starter whistle blew, and the action began. Mazie squeezed into the bleachers next to Lester and watched. Skokie jumped off to a quick lead, but then Juju lapped three players, putting the Brawlers in the lead.
“Do you understand how the game is played?” Mazie asked Lester.
“I don’t know the exact rules,” Lester confessed. “I just like to watch cute girls in skimpy outfits. Not that I judge people on their—”
“Okay, it’s simple. There are four blockers on each team and one jammer. You can tell who the jammer is because her helmet has a star.”
“That’s Juju, right?” Lester said.
“Right. She has to get through the defending blockers. She scores a point for every player she laps. Her blockers try to keep the other team’s jammer from breaking through.”
“I think I’m following—ooh—that was dirty!” Lester was on his feet, pointing.
The Scorcher’s lead blocker, Girlzilla, had abruptly whipped her arm backward, whacking Juju in the face. An accident, she pantomimed to the ref, all innocence.
“Isn’t that illegal?” asked Lester.
“Technically, yes,” Mazie said. “But it’s like wrecks in auto racing. It’s why people come to the track. They expect to see women beating each other up.”
Juju flashed past, her tie flying back over her shoulder, her skirt flipping up to reveal her skimpy black panties and artfully ripped fishnets. She whizzed between two Scorchers before they even realized she was moving up on them. Because Juju was smaller than the average middle schooler, she was quick, elusive, and capable of weaseling through impenetrable blockades. Tonight, though, Girlzilla was giving Juju lots of trouble. Tall and muscular, Girlzilla had long hair dyed the exact shade of the Scorchers’ flame orange jerseys and inner tube–sized boobs that were living advertisements for silicone. There was no mistaking that she was out to get Juju, elbowing, shoving, trash talking, and tripping.
The lead seesawed back and forth. As the clock ticked down to the last minutes of the game, the level of brutality increased. Bootsy was tripped, went flying into the bleachers, and fractured her wrist. Her sub, Ida Tripter, went in for her. Carmen got kicked out of the game for punching an opponent, forcing the remaining sub, Dirty Harriet, to go in for her. The Brawlers were behind by two points when Juju, ambushed by Girlzilla, wiped out, skidded across the floor, and hit her head against the rink railing. As the ref whistled for a time-out, the Scorchers’ fans cheering and the Brawlers’ fan screaming in outrage, Mazie rushed over to Juju, who was hauling herself to her feet.
Play was suspended while a doctor checked Juju.
“I’m fine,” insisted Juju, whose forehead was growing a tennis ball–sized lump. “I need to go back in.”
“No, ma’am. You are out of
the game,” pronounced the doctor. “League rules. You bump your noggin, you sit out.”
The Scorchers, who’d gathered around like vultures, squealed in triumph and raced around the rink with upraised fists, celebrating. Without a full complement of players, the Brawlers would be forced to forfeit the game.
Juju grabbed Mazie by the collar and jerked her head down. “You have to go in for me.”
“I can’t!” Mazie protested. “I’ve never played.”
“It’s only a minute. You can do it.”
“For Pete’s sake, Juju—it’s just a game.”
“Just a game—can you hear what you’re saying? It’s not a game; it’s a matter of life and death.”
Right, Mazie thought. My death.
Knowing she was going to regret it, Mazie finally agreed to do it. The referee called a five-minute time-out for the replacement and Mazie rushed down to the locker room. Bootsy, who was leaving to get her wrist treated at the emergency room, lent Mazie her uniform. Mazie hauled it on, then grabbed her own skates out of a locker and jammed her feet into them. She was back on the rink just as the time-out ended, so terrified, she could barely stand.
“No pressure,” Jackie O’Sassin told Mazie. “But you need to lap three players in fifty-nine seconds.”
Mazie was familiar with the rink because she took a few cardio-laps around it after the team was done practicing, but she’d never attempted derby skating. The thought of competing against women who looked like they worked out by lifting Volkswagens terrified her.
And now the whistle was blowing and—oh God—she had stepped into one of her nightmares by mistake, only this was a lot worse than the one where she showed up naked to teach her class—and there was only one thing to do now—skate for her life! Forget about scoring; she just wanted to survive.
Up ahead, a clot of Scorchers looked back over their shoulders with sharkish grins, their body language stating: Go on and try it, we dare ya! Getting through them would be like trying to slide a bowling ball through a soda straw. Skating up behind, Mazie saw no way to get past.
But wait—a narrow gap had just opened to the left of Roxy Scarmichael. Maybe she could worm through. Putting on a burst of speed, Mazie dove through the hole. Then Roxy veered sideways at her, smirking, while the skater on Mazie’s other side—Pound Anya—squeezed from the other direction. She was caught like a walnut in a nutcracker.
Then Girlzilla roared up behind, boxing her in.
Stupid, stupid, stupid! She’d fallen into a trap!
“Hey, guys—know who this pipsqueak is?” Girlzilla taunted. “Mazie Maguire—offed her hubby and got away with it. Hey, jailbird, let’s see how tough you are.” She shoved Mazie, sending her reeling into Roxy, who bounced her off Pound Anya, and the two of them began knocking her back and forth like a human bobo toy.
Then, a stroke of luck—Wanda Whiplash, the Scorcher in front of Mazie, lost her footing and went down. Suddenly there was a patch of daylight ahead. Mazie lunged toward it, eluding Roxy and Anya, which meant she’d lapped them. Two points—game tied! The Brawlers fans roared.
Girlzilla caught up with Mazie, face set, teeth clenched, out for revenge. A hard hip thrust sent Mazie sprawling to the floor, her hastily donned knee pads slipping, her knees agonizingly scraping across the rink’s hard surface.
Instant, searing pain. All she wanted to do was crawl off the rink and bawl her eyes out, but after a moment spent checking for broken bones, Mazie hauled herself to her feet and launched back into battle. Her thighs screamed for mercy, her lungs were being skewered, her knees burned as though she’d been walking over hot coals, but she was flying, she was booking, she was the 101st Airborne! Thirty-six seconds left, and the Scorchers thought they’d left her behind, but she was coming up and she was going to bite ’em in their skanky orange asses.
The crowd was making so much noise that Mazie thought her ears would blow out, but above the roar she could hear a man’s voice bellowing her name. “Go, Mazie!”
Ben Labeck’s face registered in the instant Mazie zoomed past—he was plastered against the railing, yelling his lungs out.
Or maybe it was a pain-induced hallucination.
She was back up on the Scorchers pack. Call me a jailbird, huh? Mazie threw an elbow at Roxy Scarmichael. Here’s a cell block 19 special for you, creampuff! She hip-checked Roxy, who collided with Pound Anya, and they both went down. Mazie made an impossible leap over their rolling bodies, miraculously landed on her feet—and that was two more points, putting the Brawlers in the lead. The crowd noise made it impossible to think—there was just her pumping arms, her thrusting legs, her laboring lungs. Up ahead were two more Scorchers—maybe she could lap them, knock in a couple of cushioning points.
But something was slowing Mazie down—half-turning, she saw Girlzilla, grinning wickedly as she yanked on Mazie’s shirttail, hauling back as hard as she could. Buttons popped, fabric tore, and the shirt nearly ripped off Mazie’s body.
Enough from this cow! She braked suddenly, Girlzilla rear-ended her, and they both tumbled to the floor. Yelling and cursing, they flailed at each other, Girlzilla on top, snatching Mazie’s shirt off, exposing her lacy black brassiere. Giving a convulsive heave, Mazie rolled Girlzilla off, at the same time snatching at the Scorcher’s jersey, ripping it from top to bottom.
“Pink!” Mazie sneered, as the giant breasts in a pink bra exploded. “Real women wear black. You’re just a girly-girl.”
“More skin!” chanted the men in the crowd, who sounded ready to storm the floor.
Girlzilla spat at Mazie. Good aim. A big gob of spit dribbled down Mazie’s cheek.
Mazie hauled back and smacked her in the mouth. That’s for us jailbirds!
Then the buzzer sounded.
Scorchers 59. Brawlers 61!
Chapter Twenty-Two
The noise from the lower floor attracted Ben’s attention as he emerged from the Snowplows’ locker room. It sounded like a riot going on down there. The Plows could have used a little of that enthusiasm during their hockey game tonight, a 4–3 loss. One of the reasons they’d lost was that he’d kept watching the audience, hoping Mazie would show up.
He ought to head home. He still had to pack and needed to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to drive to Illinois. Instead, Ben allowed his curiosity to get the better of him, and he headed downstairs to find out what the commotion was about.
Roller Derby. Milwaukee versus Skokie. He’d always thought Derby was as scripted as pro-wrestling, but after watching a couple of times, he’d realized that the matches were for real. He could understand why it attracted an enthusiastic male following: the skimpy uniforms, the flashes of boobs and ass, women being aggressive with one another—sexy as hell.
The sound nearly bowled him over as he stepped into the gym. The audience was on its feet, screaming and whistling. Glancing at the scoreboard, Ben saw that the Brawlers were down by two with fifty seconds remaining. The Brawlers’ jammer flashed past on the track. Terrific ass, Ben noticed, and great—
Mazie!
She wasn’t even on the team. What was she doing out there, skating like Bobby Orr on wheels, burning up the track? Then he noticed Juju sitting on the sidelines, holding an ice pack to her head. They must have run out of subs and told Mazie to go in. She was fast—skating up on the opposing team’s blockers—but she’d been suckered into a trap; she was boxed in—then one of the Scorchers went down and Mazie somehow broke through her captors, lapping them and tying up the game.
Ben inhaled sharply as the orange-haired Scorcher bodychecked Mazie, flinging her against a railing. She sledded across the floor on her knees. She was hurt! He started toward her, all his protective instincts kicking in, but Mazie was already scrambling to her feet. Now she was mad; no mistaking that body language. He found himself at the railing, bellowing at the top of his lungs, “Go, Mazie!”
Five yards to go … two … she was moving up on the Scorchers’ blockers like an avenging fury. T
hen she was on them. Ouch! Nasty elbowing there—only this time it was Mazie doling out the punishment, knocking a couple of Scorchers to the floor and—holy shit!—leaping over them like she was doing high hurdles, giving the Brawlers a two-point lead with only seconds remaining. That should have been the game, but the orange-haired woman roared up and grabbed Mazie’s shirt, intent on ripping it off her body.
“Flagrant foul!” Ben roared, trying to get the attention of the stupid, blind referee. Then he switched his attention back to Mazie, who’d stopped on a dime, causing a rear-end collision with her pursuer. Both women fell to the floor, biting, kicking, and scratching, their skirts flying up to reveal skimpy panties, the guys in the crowd whooping their approval.
Ben found himself torn. On the one hand, he thought he ought to stop the fight, but on the other hand, he hated to end the erotic spectacle. Women never really hurt each other; usually they just ripped each other’s clothes. Whoever was left with the most exposed skin was the loser. Both women were half-topless now and Ben found himself getting aroused by the sight.
Mazie ended the brawl by smacking her opponent in the nose.
Then the buzzer sounded and the fans poured onto the floor. Ben’s heart was pumping as though his team had just won a hockey playoff game. He glimpsed Mazie limping away, her knees scraped raw and bloody.
She needed him.
It took a while to fight his way through the crowd, but eventually he found the locker room. Oops! The Brawlers were in there, undressing. If he’d been expecting outraged maidenly modesty, he’d been wrong. A chorus of whistles and catcalls erupted. Someone flung a ball of wadded-up panty hose at him. A brassiere hit his head and hung briefly from his ear. A pretty blonde woman flashed tits at him, giggling.
“Hey, good-lookin’—wanna party?” asked another half-dressed woman.
“Leave him alone, you guys—he’s taken.” Juju Danda, who was holding an ice pack to her forehead, came to Ben’s rescue. “Mazie’s in the first-aid room.”
The Sexiest Man Alive: Life and Love on the Lam (A Loveswept Contemporary Romance) Page 14
