“You know what you girls are?” He takes off his suit jacket, lays it across the back of one of the chairs. “You’re my slave girls. And like all bad slave girls, you need to be punished.”
He unbuckles his belt, slips it out from around his waist. He folds the two ends together, then steps forward and raises it back behind his head.
He does the Hispanic girl first. One solid slap with the belt across her ass. From the corner of my eye I see her jump, clench her jaw, squeeze her eyes tight. She tries to hold back a yelp but still it escapes her mouth.
“Yeah, baby, you like that shit?”
He steps behind me, raises the belt behind his head. I brace myself for the impact, staring ahead, and then—WHACK!—it’s over with and I grit my teeth against the pain, I manage not to yelp or make any noise at all even though I know it’s stupid.
It’s stupid because it makes Jerold want to hit me again.
Which he does a second time—WHACK!—and then a third.
Still I don’t make a sound.
“So you think you’re tough?” Jerold chuckles. “Okay, baby, we’ll see just how tough you are.”
He steps close, grabs a fistful of my hair, yanks me back. He puts his tongue against my cheek, gives it a good lick, and whispers, “I’ll save you for last.”
He pushes me away. I stumble backward at a bad angle, lose my footing with my heels and fall to the floor. He looks at me and laughs, then leans forward and whispers something to the Hispanic girl. She whimpers. He laughs even louder. Then he’s leaning back, dropping the belt, loosening the knot of his tie.
He grabs the girl’s hair, yanks her back, says, “Ready to have some fun?” then pushes her down on the bed.
I’m frozen on the floor. My heart is pounding.
Jerold gives me a glance. He grins, showing me that gold-capped tooth of his, then winks.
He gets onto the bed, slowly, like an animal approaching its prey.
He grabs the front of the girl’s dress, pulls it down.
I look around the room once more, try to spot something to use as a weapon, but the lighting isn’t good, it’s too dim.
The girl whimpers again and Jerold whispers, “Shh, baby, shh,” and my eyes fall on the belt he’s dropped on the floor, the thick leather thing he used to punish us, his slave girls, and with the jazz playing from the stereo and the girl whimpering as Jerold places his big hands on her breasts, I jump to my feet, grab the belt, and launch myself onto the bed.
I come down hard on his back, wrap the belt around his throat. I cross it behind his neck and squeeze, the best I can, I squeeze even as he tries to stand back up, tries to buck me off. His hands move away from the girl. They reach beneath the belt, try to give his Adam’s apple some breathing room, try to give his fingers some kind of leverage. He keeps one of those hands there and with the other grabs at me, finds my hair, pulls, yanks, rips.
But I don’t let go. I can’t let go.
Jerold is big, and strong, and determined, and with me holding onto his back he steps off the bed, twists back and forth like he’s a bull and I’m riding him for eight seconds, and then when he realizes that won’t work, he rushes backward into the wall.
It knocks the wind out of me. The back of my head strikes the wall, making me see stars. The world tilts. I start to lose my grip. Just a little slack but it’s enough for Jerold. He rips the belt away, turns, lets me drop to the carpet. He kicks me in the gut with the tip of his designer shoe.
“Stupid fucking cunt,” he says, and kicks me again, and again, and again.
The world tilts even more. My wind still hasn’t returned and I keep wheezing. The pain is intense. And still he keeps swearing, spitting, kicking, kicking, kicking.
The girl attacks him without a sound. She comes from the left, the house phone in her hand, and smashes it into the back of his head. It doesn’t drop him, it hardly even fazes him, but it’s enough to make him pause in his kicking, to allow me to get my wind back, to make the world slow its spinning.
He turns away. Glares at the girl. Balls his hand into a fist. Raises that fist—
I reach out and grab his ankle, sit up and shove the heel of my palm into the center of his shin. It’s a bad angle but I’m a pro and the bone snaps, just a little, enough to cause the bodyguard to cry out, stumble, fall to the ground.
I’m on my feet a second later, the world still spinning, the floor tilting back and forth, but I step forward and raise my right foot, bring the sharp end of my heel down on his head. He tries getting back up but I do it again, and again, and again.
The girl drops the telephone. She places her hands to her face. I glance at her briefly and see tears in her eyes.
I have a crazy thought that I don’t want to ruin my heels more than I already have. So I step away, bend down and grab the phone, turn back and smash it once into Jerold’s face.
The girl is murmuring something. I can hear it just beneath the jazz that keeps going and going, someone now doing a saxophone solo. Her hands are still to her face and it takes
