Florida Women, Part VIII

By Kim

My name is Kim, and I work in housing administration at a liberal arts college in South Florida. In my last story, I described the second half of my trip to the Bahamas with Claudia, her boy toy Chris, and Debleena. We had been brought there by William and Sandra, an obscenely wealthy and slightly disreputable couple from Boston who had been exiled to Florida. They had paid for Claudia to have a catfight with Sandra, which Claudia won. I fought Mollie, a woman from Seattle I had met at the resort, on a yacht that William had procured for the day and won. And Debleena brawled with Julia, William’s assistant, in a topless fistfight with the two of them handcuffed together by a leather strap. Debleena would have become William’s new assistant had she won, but she lost. Debleena’s loss set a dismal tone for our last day at the hotel. We learned that Sandra and their adoptive daughter had already left for Boston, and William and Julia were gone by the next morning. Claudia and her guy spent the day in town, and I lay in bed with Debleena, who was now jobless and covered in bruises and scratches. She was a beautiful woman, and my heart ached for what had happened to her and the fear that she was feeling and would never acknowledge to me over the damage Julia had done to her face. When she wasn’t sleeping she was worrying, and I held her and traced the edge of her black hair and her graceful chin and thought deeply about who she was.

When we got back to South Florida, I found that I was living alone again. Anna, the college student that I had been seeing, had moved out while we were in the Bahamas, and although we stayed on good terms and got together a few times to talk, the passion that we both had thought was there, wasn’t. I spent a lot of time working, exercising, and sitting in the dark. I watched movies and started keeping a journal, and I received a promotion at work, to director of graduate student and family housing. That meant more meeting and travel, but I moved to a large, modern condo with a great view of a lake. Two, then three, and then four months passed since the trip to the Bahamas. My fight with Mollie left me with a sense of longing, in my mind always leaping forward and straining and pushing myself against another woman. The sprints and weights and treadmills satisfied less and less, and while I went on a few dates with both men and women, I never felt any desire to know them or even to touch them.

Debleena eventually found a new job, as the admissions officer for a private school, one of the top schools in the state. Her days were spent judging the merits of the average applicants and curtsying (metaphorically, I assumed) to the families who could bring in the serious donations and press that the school needed. She always had a serious expression on her face, but I knew that inside she was happy with her new job. Telling those rich women that their kids weren’t quite excellent enough appealed to her. We didn’t speak too much immediately after our return from the Bahamas; I knew that she had a lot of complicated feelings to sort through and that her being unemployed made her all the more apprehensive and embarrassed about what Julia had done to her. The first time I saw her in Florida after the trip was a month later, and her face had healed very well and no one could have known about her history, her desires. On seeing each other we hugged, but when I went to discreetly kiss her she turned her cheek toward me at the last second, and I knew that we had a long way to go but that she wanted me to continue pressing, only slowly. And that was what I did. Coffee shops and walks through outlet malls turned into lunch, which turned into movies and strolls along the lake by my new condo. I wanted to hold on to her and tuck her hair behind her ear, but she wasn’t ready for that yet. She and I stayed in that pattern for another month.

Around the same time, I met with Claudia. We needed to talk through a lot of things and to clear the air. I also wanted to see her again and to confront her. She had arranged our vacation with William and his money, and while my experiences with the other women and with Mollie had been stimulating, I wasn’t happy with Claudia’s lack of leadership and the way that she disavowed Debleena after her loss. I had not asked Dee about it, but I knew that Claudia had not been in contact with her. We agreed to meet in a state park on the coast north of the city. I got there first, and I parked above the beach and stood leaning against a rock wall looking out over the ocean. So different from the trip. Claudia was late, and I stood by myself for nearly half an hour. By the time that she pulled up in her black Mercedes, I was pissed and stood staring at her while she talked on her phone before getting out. We still smiled and hugged, but with obvious tension. She was wearing a short-sleeve blouse that was unbuttoned halfway down and khaki shorts, and her straight black hair was blowing in the ocean wind. She had put on some heavy make-up. The day before I had gotten a new haircut, heavy waves that hung down just below my ears, and I had on a t-shirt and jeans. I felt proud that I had deliberately dressed a step or two under and still, I felt, looked just as good as she did. Claudia told me that my hair looked great, and I thanked her and we both knew that she didn’t mean it. The looks we got from the men going by confirmed it for me. We went for a walk down onto the boardwalk that wound through the dunes that straggled for miles along the coast, overlooking the sand and the poor whites watching their kids play on the free beach and farther on the hotels and condos with private beaches.

We walked in silence. “I’m so glad that you called,” Claudia said at last.

“I have been so busy lately. I got a promotion to the director of family and grad student housing, and I have to do a lot of traveling now. And all of the meetings. I have been spending some time with Debleena, too.”

“How is she doing?” Claudia asked in a very quick voice.

We both came to a stop and looked each other right in the eye. “She’s doing a lot better. It was hard for her at first, and not having a job didn’t help any. But she’s working at a private school now, and she really likes it. She’s in a good place right now, given what happened.”

“It was too bad the way that she lost to Julia. But really, Kim,” Claudia started, and she paused, touching my arm. I wanted to pull back, but I made myself stay in place. “Something like that is going to happen to everyone eventually. I know that you’ve taken your lumps. That wasn’t the first time that Debleena’s lost a fight. I have. You can’t get hung up on one bad event for anyone. And you can’t expect people to respond perfectly. You do what you can and you move on to the next day. The next woman.”

I honestly didn’t know what to say to that. She was saying things that were true on their own but evading the real topic, her own abandoning of Debleena. She was describing her own behavior, attributing it to me, and then lecturing me on it. Not knowing what else to do, I reached out and hugged her. We stood like that, hugging, and then we continued walking along the beach.

“Tell me something new about yourself,” Claudia said. “Something that I don’t know about. I want us to get to know each other better.”

“What about you?”

“You first.”

She was watching me eagerly, with a tight smile. “My dad was a pretty rough character,” I said before I thought about it. “He never touched me or my mom, but there were a few times he came home on Saturday night with a black eye or a broken hand. He had boxed after high school, and he could take his nose and bend it to the side until it was flat on his face. He used to let me play with it when I was little. Deep down I think that I liked the charge that he had on his face when he came home those nights,” I finished saying, all in a rush. I had never thought about the connection between sitting on my dad’s lap when I was five, helping hold the frozen peas on his hand while my mom poured herself another glass of wine. “Wow. I don’t even talk to my parents anymore. My dad left when I was twelve, because of my mom’s drinking. She drove him away. I don’t know. It was just the way it was in our house.”

Claudia stared at me for a long time. “That’s really intense,” she said at last. “A lot more than I was expecting.”

“Hey, you said you wanted to get to know each other. I think that might be the start of my interest in all of this.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” she agreed.

“So what’s your big secret?” I asked, elbowing her gently in the side.

“I don’t think that I can top a brawling father figure. But I once stole a pair of shoes from a girl that I hated in order to provoke her into attacking me. We lived on the same floor at Rice, and I had already gotten into a lot of trouble for drinking and boys. But I wanted to kick her ass so badly. So I took her shoes and made it easy for her to find about it. She never did, though. I guess she was afraid of me. I’d still like to get hold of her. She was just such a bitch to everyone, someone needed to take her down a notch.”

And listening to Claudia describe her hatred of some girl from her college years, I realized that was what she needed herself. Her looks, her car and her clothing and her jewelry and shoes, and her connections with the world of real money like Richard’s and her positions as the queen bee of that world of wealthy perverts who would sponsor the fights that she put together. Someone needed to take her down a level. Or two. We had reached the end of our path, and there was a little hut of a restaurant at the end where I suggested we eat some lunch. We both ordered chicken salads and water after talking about being bad with some fries and chicken strips, with the typical vapid girl talk about maintaining waists and upper arms. While we ate, I said that I would be interested in getting a match at the next meeting of her well-to-do friends.

“Well, we don’t have anything set up for a while. But I’ll totally talk to some women and see who’s interested in a match with you. I have some pictures from the trip to show them, and I know enough of your history to give them a sense of what you’re like. And when I have a few who are interested, I’ll come back and talk to you about them.”

We agreed and smiled our smiles. I knew that she wasn’t being straight with me, though. I would never hear from her about that match-up, and she knew that I saw through her and she didn’t care. At the end of lunch we walked back along the path to our cars, where we said our good-byes. I went back to my condo and lay on the couch, watching the swans on the lake. And then I had a glass of wine, and I called Anna, the college student that I had been seeing for a few months. We had been living together, or nearly living together, until my activities became too much for her. One night she and I went to a sports bar with a ring, and we had a very intense oil wrestling match with two other college-age girls. The relationship got rocky when she watched me lose a fight with Gemma, a British slag my age who had kicked my ass at a party. And then when I went on the trip with Debleena and Claudia, I knew that she wouldn’t be there when I returned. She didn’t answer my call, and I left a voice mail that I knew she wouldn’t listen to that I was heading to a new club and that I would like for her to join me. And then I drank another glass of wine and watched the swans some more.

The bar was called Whole Moon. It had opened a few months previous, so now it was still cool to go to but the new bar freshness had worn off. I was wearing tight Prada jeans that I had spent four hundred dollars on, new hot sandals, and a red blouse that was too tight and open halfway down, showing off impressive cleavage, and I as I left my car I brushed my hand through my sexy new haircut one last time. The bar was full of too rich, too cool thirty- and forty-somethings, men and women who had turned prep school and college into a lifestyle, exchanging sororities for cell phones. The bouncer at the door let me past the short line, and I went in and took a seat at the bar. There were more women than men, but both were overdressed and overprimped, just as I was. The women kept an eye on each other, and they were playing for keeps. Quite a few of them were wearing heels and pants that were expensive, some of the pants over a thousand dollars. And some haircuts that were from the most exclusive salons in South Florida. But, on scanning the competition, I could say that I was as pretty as any of them, and none of them had a natural rack that could stand with mine. I put my chest out a bit further and ordered a second wine.

After two glasses, one of the guys who had been giving me the eye sat down, and we started talking. He was wearing a Tag watch and a thin necklace that probably cost nearly as much, and he spent most of his time talking about his boat, his surgeon’s career, how much he had won on the NFL the previous weekend. His name was Christopher. His head was empty, and he had a lot of nice things, and he was buying me some very nice vodka. We drank, and I smiled and touched my hair and let him look down my shirt, and by the time that I had had too many of them we were leaning against each other, and he had put his hand on my leg and started whispering in my ear. He said that I was the hottest woman at the bar and that I had the greatest set of tits he had ever seen. I finished my vodka and his, a shot of courage. He slid his hand along the swell of my breast, and I rubbed his cock through his pants and asked if he had someplace else that we could go. That was the moment that someone shouted “Get your hands off of him!” and yanked me off the stool by my hair.

I was lying on the ground, and Christopher and an Asian woman were standing over me. “What the fuck?” I said, but neither of them was paying attention to me.

“Vanessa texted me that you were here hitting on some slut, but I told her that she was crazy, but then she sent me a picture of her.”

“Baby I’m sorry. She was the one who came on to me.”

“You lying dickhead,” I said, getting to my feet.

“Stay out of this, you stupid cow,” the girlfriend said, stepping in front of me. “You don’t mess with my man unless you’re …”

At that point I grabbed her by the hair and she grabbed mine. We tugged each other around the bar, but as I ran her into a table, two bouncers grabbed us and pulled us apart. We were both reaching out for a hold on each other, but they carried-slash-dragged us both out the front door, along with Christopher. We got some hoots and hollers from the audience as we went, and more than a few of them, men and women both, followed us outside. A spectacle was sure to follow, and they wanted to catch it all. She and I walked briskly to the parking lot across the street from the Whole Moon, neither of us looking at the other and a good distance between us. We went to the back of the lot, where there were some empty spots, and we squared off. But as I as kicked off my sandals the last vodka hit me, and I stumbled and fell against the back wall of the lot. Everything went fuzzy for a second, including the Asian woman standing across from me.

“You don’t look so good,” she said.

“Don’t feel sorry for me.”

“Bitch, you don’t need to worry about that. I’m going to rip those tits right off of you. Teach you a lesson for sticking them in my man’s face.”

I ran at her and threw a wild punch, but she got out of the way. She hit me in the head and got my hair, and then she hit me in the stomach with two solid punches. Everything just drained out of me. When she let me go I fell against the side of a car and threw up all the booze that was in my stomach. I put my hands up to defend my head, but I was still bent over and she kicked me in the stomach. I fell to the ground and curled into a ball. My ribs and chest went into convulsions, and all I could feel was my lungs trying to move again and the pavement digging into my side. Some interminable time later, I felt myself rolled over onto my back and slapped hard across my face over and over. The world went swimmy again, and then I felt my blouse ripped open and her hand on my breast.

“Call me if you want a second round, you dumb whore.”

By the time I got up, the crowd had gone back into the bar. I slowly rolled onto my hands and knees, and then I pressed myself up but then fell into a sitting position, legs sprawled out in front of me. As I did a card fell out of my bra. On it she had written a phone number and her name, Wendy Yi. I was angry at myself and at the guy for being an asshole and I wanted a piece of Wendy Yi, to make her feel the humiliation I felt sitting in that parking lot with puke on my clothes and my new shirt ripped open and my breasts exposed to everyone and having gotten my ass kicked by some yuppie bitch. A yuppie bitch just like you, I thought. The humiliation of having put myself in the situation and having made myself helpless for her to get at me like that. And my having gone to the bar alone because Anna didn’t return my call and in all probability had moved on and had no need of an aging newfound lesbo. At best I had traded up from oil wrestling in trashy bars and winning to getting too drunk and getting whipped in trendy bars. I sat like that for a long time, and when I felt like my head had cleared I gathered my things up, put the card in my back pocket, drew my ruined blouse together as best I could, and staggered to my car and drove home.

I spent the next day on my couch, letting my bruises and ego heal and waiting for the tide of my headache to recede. The day was cloudy, and I lay on the couch much as I had the day before, my aches and misery and sobriety the only differences. As the sunlight faded, my self-hatred had blossomed into hatred of Wendy and a deep need to make her suffer. Nothing she could do to me would be enough to keep me from her throat. I called Debleena, and to my relief she came over. She brought takeout, and I told her about what had happened and she put her arm around me and drew me in to her deep accepting chest and held me there, and as we two enveloped each other she whispered in my ear that she would stand with me regardless. I pulled her shirt up over her head and took her face in my hands and kissed her deeply and then I moved down and kissed her dark sweet nipples, lingering my tongue on their hard tips. She sighed and ran her fingers through my hair and as she did I brushed my lips across the brown skin of her breasts. She shoved me onto my back and pulled down my sweatpants and kissed a line down my abdomen. Across the line of my waist. The swell of my hips under the tight grip. Her tongue glancing and then probing and sucking on my pussy as I ground my hips against anything that I could find and tugged on her hair.

Late that night I sent Wendy a text: “This is Kim. We met last night.”

“You looking for a second helping?”

“Soon as you can cook it up.”

“I’d love to serve up something special for you.”

“Friday afternoon.”

“6 pm. My place. My fiancée will be out of town.”

Debleena agreed to go with me as backup; if Wendy was home by herself, then she could stay in the car. We talked lying in bed late into the night, she behind me with her arm draped across my hips. She said that she understood why I had not called her about going to the bar but that she still wished that I had. Her new job had turned out to be a joke. Education was a field that people went into to avoid other fields, she said, and the people that she worked with did not know what they were doing. She was better educated, more refined, and more capable than they were, and they were not warming to her charming personality, as she put it in her English-seeming accent, for which I gave her a light slap on the thigh. I reminded her that I worked at a school, but she said that did not count because it was college. She was facing the usual problems she had at work, too, men who loitered by her office for no apparent reason and women who avoided her for the same. The parents respected her well enough, although she had already had tense conversations with a few mothers who thought that their children were of a certain caliber. Debleena had sternly informed these mothers that they had overestimated their child’s abilities, and she enjoyed doing so.

My encounter with Wendy and her dickhead had been on a Saturday night, and I would meet her the next Friday. Debleena and I had dinner together in the middle of the week, but that was all we saw of each other. I went to the gym three days in the middle of that week, working off the alcohol and the stupidity I had taken on. After I had finished my workout on Thursday, I ran into Melinda, a friend of mine from my old gym as she came in. We talked for a minute, but she seemed concerned, and when I pressed her on it she drew me outside. She said that Gemma had been spreading gossip about me in our circle of women at our old gym. Melinda said that she had stopped going there because of it, along with some other things that Gemma had been doing. It seemed that Gemma had been bullying some of the female customers whom she saw as being below her, in looks or in social standing. She was being a bitch, and it was starting to cost the gym some business. With a sinking heart I asked Melinda what Gemma had been saying about me, and when she said that it was about my dad being a drunk and typical white trash, it was as if I knew what the words would be before they came out of her mouth. As calmly as I could, I thanked Melinda for telling me and went to my car.

Gemma had been my introduction to fighting. She had been talking about me, telling other women that she thought I had implants, and she had been deliberately rude to me in her aerobics class. I went to a party I knew that she would be at and provoked a fight with her, and I lost. I fought her again out in the country, and I lost again. Now she and Claudia were conspiring against me, making me into an object of mockery. I had been so stupid to share anything with Claudia when I had known, deep down, that she was against me. She had betrayed me, using me to get in close with Gemma, maybe looking to give Gemma that contest that she had said she wanted to set up for me. I felt violated. She was threatened by Debleena and by me, both of us prettier and smarter than she was. There wasn’t anything to Claudia except her car and her clothes and her body. And I wanted to hurt that body of hers so much, to yank her by the hair and sink my nails into her voluptuous assets and to slap the shit out of that pretty face. Ruin her expensive clothes. “Fucking bitch!” I screamed inside my car, hitting the steering wheel. The elderly couple passing by gave me a look, and I flipped them the finger and drove home.

I went home and changed into jeans, sneakers, and a t-shirt. I checked myself in the mirror, the shirt the right sort of tight over my D-cup breasts and the jeans poured over the curves of my hips and thighs. I reapplied my makeup, checked my hair, and drove over to Wendy’s house. It was a large two-story at the end of a cul-de-sac. I rang the doorbell and stepped back, but when Christopher answered I gave him a deep, long kiss, pressing myself against him, and then I slapped him across the face.

“Kim?” he managed, holding his face.

“Just show me where that bitch of yours is,” I told him. I took my shoes off and left them by the door, conditioned by years of life in the suburbs. Without another word, he led me inside and upstairs to their bedroom. Wendy was sitting in a recliner, reading, but when she saw me her eyes went wide and she leapt to her feet. “You promised me a second round. I’m here to collect.”

“You let this whore into my house?” she screamed at Christopher.

“Your man just can’t resist me.”

Her eyes narrowed on me, and she froze into place. She was wearing sweat pants and a t-shirt. She really was quite pretty, and from her sharp features I suspected she had some European blood mixed into her heritage. She looked athletic, lithe, and she had short hair and small pert breasts that seemed to hold themselves aloft by sheer will. Her hands were clenching into claws, and both of us were breathing hard. I was about to rush her when Christopher stepped in between us.

“You can’t fight here,” he said to her.

“You’re right,” she said. “We should go someplace where nothing valuable can be broken. Like your place, Kim.”

I kicked Christopher in the balls and he fell to the ground, holding himself and crying. I had thought that the surprise would work to my favor and I could get on Wendy before she responded, but she crashed into me while I was still standing over Christopher. She was strong and moving fast, and she drove me back into their dresser and then into the corner. She hit me in the side a few times, but I yanked her head back by her hair and then pushed her face away by her chin. I shoved my way out of the corner, and as we came apart I slapped her hard across the face. She stumbled backward, turning away, and I gave her a swift kick in the ass as she went that sent her onto her bed. With a shriek I dove on top of her and we were catfighting on the bed. We pulled each other’s hair, and she grabbed my boob through my shirt and bra and I slapped the side of her head and her ribs. After some exchanges, she got her hand up under my shirt and really dug her nails into my feminine asset. I squealed and writhed to get away from her. In doing so I ended up sliding off the bed and spilling onto the floor. I raised my hands to defend myself and scrabbled to get to my feet again, but Wendy was on me.

She yanked me up by the hair, but I slugged her in the stomach and as she bent over I hit her in the face with an uppercut. She went down in a heap, and I took advantage. I rolled her onto her stomach and stamped her on the small of the back. The bitch moaned and tried to crawl away, but another stamp from my foot set her straight. I seized hold of her shirt and lifted up while I put my foot down on her bubble-shaped ass, and soon the fabric ripped away. I twirled the grey souvenir above my head, gyrating my hips, and then I slinked over to Christopher, who was now sitting against the dresser watching us and as much massaging his balls as he was protecting them. But his eyes went wide as I dropped my trophy across his lap, and I turned just as Wendy grabbed me by the hair. She flung me into the dresser, and her makeup and jewelry crashed to the ground. The metal knockers and the wooden edging dug into my back. I hit her across the face, but she hit me harder and then whipped me by the arm out into the middle of the room. She slapped me back and forth across the face, and then as I was spun away from her she seized me in a bearhug and ran me face first through the open door of the bedroom and into the wall of the corridor.

I hit chest first, and her hands clenched into a knot around my stomach knocked the wind from me. Wendy dropped the bearhug and stood over me. I was lying on the ground, head spinning and my face, breasts, abs throbbing in pain. I could hear her sucking in air and her fiancée still moaning in the bedroom. She yanked me up by the air and kneed me in the tits, twice, and on the second she threw my head back against the wall. I slid down the wall so that I was sitting on my ass, air askew and my breasts on fire. She was standing over me, and she started kicking me in the legs and sides with short quick strikes. I grabbed onto her leg and tried to yank it out from under her, but I didn’t have the strength for it and she toppled onto me. Her hands were in my hair, and her weight bore me down to the carpet. She was on top of me, had me pushed up against the wall so that I couldn’t get free of her. We were both pulling hair, but then she started bouncing my head off the floor and I let go of her hair and tried to pry her hands out of mine. With a growl that came from deep in her chest, she hoisted me up to my feet and then slugged me across the face. I put my hand out to catch myself, but there was nothing but air behind me and I went down the stairs and crashed in a heap at the bottom.

“We aren’t done yet, you cow-titted bitch,” Wendy said. Before I could regain myself, she lifted me up and wrenched my arm behind my back and propelled me forward into the kitchen island. She slammed my head down onto the granite, pushed my face into it. “Let’s see how pretty you look now,” she hissed in my ear, and she poured wine all over me. “Now you’ve made a mess of yourself. We’ll have to get that out of your cheap clothes.” And she pulled me over to the fridge, slamming me into the metal door. All the energy had gone out of me, and I felt barely able to keep up with Wendy as she had her fun. “Some milk will get that out,” she said, and she poured what felt like an entire jug of cold milk over my head and torso. I spluttered milk out of nose and mouth, and my shirt was drenched. “Now the outside of your shirt matches your udders: wet, fat, and ugly.” And she tore off my shirt and seizing hold of my hair and tilting my head back she rubbed the shirt over my face. “Is getting your ass kicked any more fun sober?” she snarled.

I lunged up and toward her and raked my nails down the front of her chest. Red lines appeared in dashes from her collarbone to her stomach, and I snagged her bra and tore it down. Her arms were entangled in the straps and the remains of her bra, and she was howling in pain and anger. Her eyes flashed and she glared at me as I rose, bracing myself on the door of the fridge. I hit her across the face and then in the stomach, and as she was leaning forward against the counter I finished tearing off her bra. Then I hit her across her upper back and slammed into her from the side, driving her into the living room, over the back of the couch and to the floor in front of it in a mass of whirling female flesh. She ripped off my bra, and we both gave each other’s breasts a good working over, squeezing and scratching and slapping. We pulled hair, rolled over each other, our torsos and legs and hips grinding against each other. Moaning and gasping for air. As we struggled I felt her growing weaker. I mounted her, sitting across her stomach. She grabbed my breasts, but I pulled her claws off my chest and as I did I saw real panic in her eyes. I held her head down by the hair with one hand and drove hard slaps onto her breasts and the side of her face, over and over until the skin was bright red and she was sobbing.

“You had enough, bitch? Or do you want another round?”

With her eyes closed and tears on her face, she said, “I quit. You win.”

I pushed myself off of Wendy, giving her one last kick in the process. Christopher was standing at the foot of the stairs, one hand over his junk, staring at us. It looked like he would have been enjoying himself very well if it weren’t for the blow I’d given him. “Go get me a fucking shirt, something nice” I snarled at him. While he did, I washed the sticky milk off my chest, my arms, my face. Wendy was still lying on the floor. He returned with one of her button-down blouses, the front of which I could barely bring together. I paraded in front of her in the living room. “Look at me, Wendy. I can hardly fit my D cups into this thing of yours. But at least your fiancée is enjoying the show. Let me know if you want to try and get it back.” And with that I limped out of the house and drove home.