"Small Town"
"So..." Betty asked brightly, "what do you think of our little town?"
Willow smiled a forced smile, twirled a lock of bright purple hair through her fingers, and said to her sister-in-law in a cheerful tone, "It sure is...um...little, that's for sure." It sounded painfully fake, even to her, and she mentally cringed at the multiple 'sures'. Betty was bound to be upset with her. But then again, nothing ever seemed to upset Betty.
It was hard to get upset with Betty, either, for that matter. Sure, she looked like a blonde Betty Crocker and never drank anything stronger than lemonade. Sure, she sounded like a female Ned Flanders and had to leave the room when they watched 'Pulp Fiction'. Sure, she and Aaron wound up together because they were both winners of the Dullest Potential Couple On the Planet competition, and it only made sense to get married after that. (Wasn't true. They actually met chaperoning a church dance. But if there was a Dullest Potential Couple competition, they'd surely take that into account in the scoring, right?)
But she was anything but judgmental, she never said boo about Willow's hair or her tattoos or her piercings or her art or her politics, she didn't mind Willow hanging out with the nephews (even unsupervised) and Aaron said that Betty had actually been looking forward to her visit for a while now. Willow couldn't actually dislike Betty. It'd be like kicking a puppy.
But at the same time, this town...Betty had picked her up at the airport while Aaron was at work ("Doctor's hours!" she'd said with that same chipper perkiness that she always seemed to have), and drove her the two hours back from Knoxville's tiny airport to the even tinier town of Pasture Rose, population 842. The whole ride through town, Betty had pointed out landmarks--"That's the First Lutheran Church, it's been standing for over seventy-five years now!" "That's the Town Hall, Pasture Rose is going to be celebrating its Centennial next year, dontchaknow!" "That's the Gray Goose Supper Club, Sam and Ethel run it, they do the best meatloaf you'll ever taste!" "That's Old Man Vernon, you can just call him Vern, he makes the loveliest hand-made furniture, you'll see when you get into the guest room, the wah wah wah wah, wah wah wah..." Not that Willow deliberately tuned Betty out, but after a while she started to kind of sound like the grown-ups on 'Peanuts'.
She abruptly realized that she'd just done it again. "Sorry," she said, smiling sheepishly at Betty, who seemed to be expecting a response. "Long flight, I'm a little worn down. What were you saying?"
"I was just saying how nice it was to get out of the big city and find a place where people really get to know each other, you know?" Betty repeated, not in the slightest put out. "I mean, don't get me wrong. I know you love New York, but I just like to live in a place where I don't have to lock my doors every night."
Willow got the feeling she was about to kick a puppy, but she couldn't help but ask. "But, I mean...what do you do for fun around here? What's there to do in Pasture Rose?"
Betty ticked events off on her fingers. "Well, there's picnics, of course. The church holds a picnic every Sunday, the kids just love it! And then there's the movies; we're only about a half-hour drive from Erwin, and they have one of those brand-new sixteen-screen multiplexes!"
"Well, yes," Willow said, "but what about...art? Culture?" She tried very hard to keep the disdain from her voice; just because Willow felt like she'd have to be sentenced to live here didn't mean that everyone else felt the same way.
"Oh, we've got PBS on the satellite dish," Betty responded without a trace of apparent irony. "And Ms. Ida, up the road a piece, she plays piano every Friday night, she is just lovely. She used to live in Nashville, but she moved out here about five years ago, says now she never wants to live anyplace else."
"Oh," Willow said. There didn't seem to be a whole lot else to say.
Betty didn't think so, though. "And the kids at the high school, they're doing a production of 'Our Town' this next week, and all the proceeds are going towards building a new gym, and the kids say--" Willow was saved from having to find out just what the kids said by the doorbell, which rang with a cheery 'ding-dong!' Betty hopped up out of her seat. "Somebody must have seen me driving into town with you!" she said. "Just let me see who it is."
She opened up the front door, and Willow's eyes widened. Standing outside was a statuesque woman with black hair, well over six feet tall in those heels...stiletto heels, on the ends of thigh-high black leather boots that had been polished until they shone. Just past the point where the boots ended was a matching leather miniskirt, one that barely dipped down below the point where the woman's thighs came together. Above the waist, she wore a black leather cleavage-enhancing bustier, one cut so low that Willow could actually see the woman's aureolae peeking up above her clothes. Elbow-length leather gloves and sunglasses completed the outfit. The only thing that seemed even slightly out of place was the backpack the woman had slung over her shoulders.
"Well, land's sakes, Mabel!" Betty said. "Come on in, you'll sweat yourself to death in this heat!"
Mabel walked right past Betty. "Don't mind if I do," she said, taking off her sunglasses and setting down the backpack. "Oh, it is a scorcher today! Mister Whilloughby, over by the Post Office, said he heard on the radio that it was going to be up near ninety! And me having to do the rounds on foot today, too, because the Buick's still in the shop. Darned near broke a heel up on Second Street, where they're putting in that new sidewalk."
Betty patted Mabel on the shoulder. "Oh, you poor thing!" she said. "Well, you just let me fetch you some lemonade before we do anything, honey. Won't be much today, anyway. Just need my hide tanned a little, and maybe a good going over with the strap-on. I've got company in."
"I can see that!" Mabel said, giving a little wave to Willow. "I'll just top you quick and you can stop by with the check when it's convenient, I don't want to keep you none." Willow, for her part, just took the whole thing in with eyes as big as saucers. Every time her brain tried to process the events she was suddenly looking at, she hit a wall of complete and utter disjunction between everything she thought she knew about...about Betty, about Pasture Rose, about everything in the world, honestly...and the woman standing in front of her, dressed like a dominatrix and talking about--did Betty really just say 'strap-on'?
"Oh, where are my manners?" Betty said. "Mabel, this is my sister-in-law Willow, she's just in from New York City, she'll be here for a week. Willow, this is Mabel, she's our town dominatrix."
Willow's jaw just hung open for a long moment. No matter how many times she ran the sentence through in her head, it never started making sense.
"Pleased to meet you, Willow," Mabel said, sitting down as Betty went to fetch lemonade. Willow couldn't help but notice that Mabel wasn't wearing anything under that miniskirt. "Betty and Aaron have talked so much about you, I feel like I know you already. I love that hair, by the way. Is that how they're all doing it up in the big city?"
Willow just stared. She knew she was being rude, but...how exactly did you make conversation with the town dominatrix? Who the hell had a town dominatrix anyway? Willow felt totally unmoored from reality by the whole thing.
Betty came back in from the kitchen with a long, tall glass of lemonade. "You'll have to excuse Willow," she said, handing the glass to Mabel. "She just got in, poor thing, and she's still a little tired from the flight and the long drive." She shucked her dress off, folding it up neatly and setting it on the arm of the couch.
"Actually," Mabel said slyly, "I think she might not be used to the way we do things here in Pasture Rose." She leaned back in her chair and took a sip of her lemonade, spreading her legs just a little bit more to lewdly expose her pussy to Willow's stunned gaze.
"Oh, I know!" Betty replied, unhooking her bra. "You never see any kind of door-to-door service in the big cities nowadays, it's all about 'convenience stores'. What's more convenient than someone dropping right by your house to drop off milk or fix your car or whip your ass with a riding crop, hmm? That's what I always say!" Betty's panties joined her bra on the floor for a brief moment, before she picked them both up and set them on her dress.
Mabel took another sip of her lemonade as Betty put her hands behind her head. Willow tried not to look, but the whole thing had a sort of train-wreck-ish quality about it. Betty seemed perfectly content to stand there, nude, waiting for this woman to finish her lemonade and start whipping her. (And she'd kept her figure after two kids. It was totally unfair to girls like Willow who had to sweat a week for every pound they gained.)
"Kids!" Willow blurted out. "Betty, what about Ben and Billy?"
Betty smiled. "They're in school when Mabel does her rounds, honey. Which reminds me, Mabel, you'll need to catch Aaron tomorrow at the office for a little foot worship. He's off at the Stevenson place, looking in on old Fern. Her hip's acting up again, and you know what she's like when she gets to talking. I don't think Aaron'll be back until nightfall."
"Aaron?" Willow had thought her brain had snapped before, but that was nothing to how she felt now. "You and Aaron, I mean, both of you, and she..." She pointed at Mabel, stammering incoherently. "All of you?"
"Everyone in town, dear," Mabel drawled, finishing her lemonade. "Well, not the old folks. Not at their age. Although I think Old Man Vernon would probably give it a go, the old goat!" Both Mabel and Betty chuckled as Mabel stood up, unsnapping her skirt and taking it off. "Well, I'd best get at it. Don't want to take up your whole day." She reached into the large backpack, pulling out a heavy leather paddle. "On your knees, slut. It's time for your punishment."
Betty's eyes rolled up in her head in an obvious expression of sublime bliss, and she knelt down, whispering, "Yes, Mistress."
Willow just sat there, shaking her head as Mabel approached. "You...you did something to her. She wouldn't, she'd never...she thought 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' was racy!" Willow paused, her thoughts in chaos. "And she actually used the word 'racy'!"
Mabel reared her hand back, and swung the paddle into Betty's buttocks with a loud smack. "One," Betty shouted out in a cross between a moan and a yelp.
