Best Women's Erotica(59)

My heart pounds and my ears buzz, and I feel like with my next breath I could pass out, be sick or maybe just expire entirely. The soft early evening breeze pushes Gus’s laugh across the air to my ears. I shiver.

I walk as fast as a human can and worry at my stick with my fingertip. I’m not sure when I started that ritual. Maybe the first time Gus brought me here to train, rewarding me afterward. He punished me hard, making me run until my body was so out of control I shook with the force of my anxiety. But when my galloping heart slowed to a pound and my eyes regulated themselves so the bright spots disappeared from my vision, he gave me my just rewards. And I was hooked.

I rub at the stick like a string of worry beads, rounding the corner of the track where he stands. My stomach sizzles with nerves and I feel lightheaded. What will the verdict be? I snap off a tiny section of the stick and drop it. It is my way of tracking laps, of passing time, of delivering my own bit of punishment to a dried-out twig from a majestic tree.

“Run and then walk and then run this one. So one third of running, one of walking and that last third, baby, you better haul ass,” he says, his voice harsh and dark.

I run. I picture—to pass the time as I mete out punishment to my own struggling body—his fingers coming at me. Cool with dark paint. Gentle due to my hard, hard work. I picture him laying me flat in a bed of black and taking me there under the skies that soar like black velvet domes with pinpricks of starlight for accent. I picture Gus, flipping me, bowing me low, ramming into me from behind and fucking me until the only light in my world is the bright strobe of my own emotion behind my closed eyelids.

I feel the telltale slide of moisture in my sports panties that is most definitely not sweat. I feel the subtle kiss of my nylon running shorts on my bare legs that tempts me like an inanimate lover. I walk, forcing my elbows to fly high, my legs to stay true. And when I round the section where the announcer’s platform sits, I start to run full out though my skin is tingling in that bizarre way that says I am flirting with the line of too much, too fast, too far.

I round the bend, my sneakers smacking the track with a vengeance. He is laughing. I can hear him. “Come on, Robbie. Roberta Jean Monroe. Hustle. Make this count. This is mile five. Final lap. Slam it,” he roars, and I take off like the devil himself is nipping at my heels.

I rub that stick so hard I expect it to catch fire. I’m desperate to go anywhere in my head that is not focused on my distraught body. I need to go to any mental place that allows me to find a Zen state. To find a way to push away the ache and throb in my left knee, the stitch in my right side. Any place that makes the unstable bang of my heart in my chest less frightening or blots out the hot cold war of my skin because it is struggling to cool me despite the calm, gentle breeze of the May evening.

I am desperate and I run, proving myself to me, to him, to anyone watching. And when I have proven myself, Gus will prove what a good girl I am. That is my reward and I push my mind to find that place in my head, that place where Gus is showing me that I am his good, good girl.

Before I know it, my sneakers trip past that final white line and Gus whispers, in the now near-dark, “Walk it off, Robbie.”

I drop my beloved stick. Stagger past him for one more lap, letting my discordant body find its rhythm again.

When I come to pass him again, he is standing on the lip of the grass where the high school kids play football on Sunday; where someone has put a few spectators’ benches—I can only assume so that watchers can get an up close and personal view of folks abusing themselves for the sake of health. I laugh out loud and Gus smiles. I can barely see the flash of his grin in the navy blue night.

“If you’ll report to the long jump arena, we’ll take care of business,” he says in a faux announcer’s voice, but his words are dark and gruff and I can hear the want in them now.

He is always the most eager to get at me when I have been pushed past the point of reasonable pushing. I wonder again why I ever took up running. I wonder yet again why I ever told Gus. But I know deep down—because my stomach has curled in on itself and my cunt has double clutched around nothing but a memory—that Gus is about to remind me.

My feet are heavy but my insides feel floaty as I hurry to the sandpit for the long jump. The sand sucks at my sneakers and whispers with each step. I hear Gus’s belt buckle in the dark—first the merry jingle and then the sound of his zipper.

“Shuck the clothes. Get down on your hands and knees, Robbie,” he says, his voice a lick and a murmur in the blackness.

After kicking off my shoes and my footie socks, I drop my shorts and my panties, my running top and jog bra. The cool night air kisses me between the legs and under my arms. It runs a cold tongue of air under my breasts where I am hot and sweaty. My skin revolts with a legion of goose bumps, and when Gus reaches out in the dark to paint me with eye black—the black cream that football players use to ward off the sun—I whimper. He’ll make me as dark as the night and then he’ll fuck me. Out in the open, but invisible to see.