My name is Kim, and I work in housing administration at a liberal arts college in Florida. In my last story, I described how I met Claudia and learned about a group of women in my city who arranged catfights between women, contests with rules in controlled environments. In the weeks that followed that first night, I met more of these women and spent time in their circle. I had not been to another fight, though; Claudia had said that I should focus on getting myself into shape and getting ready to tell Joel, my boyfriend. But when I watched Joel play Xbox and check his twitter account all evening, sitting on the couch gaining a little more pudge, I could feel myself turning away. I kept my new interest a secret from him, and as far as he was concerned I was hitting the gym for his sake and not because I'd found a new life for myself that he wasn't ready for.
Going to the gym took on a new intensity for me. No more searching for motivation to do another lap on the treadmill. Now I was going to the track and sprinting laps after hitting the weights, and I was trying out the squat rack and not using the pink barbells in the corner and drinking stacks of plastic water bottles like the other women. One of the rules of Claudia's club was no professional training, meaning no boxing or martial arts lessons, but she told me that I had to have my cardio and muscular endurance levels to a higher stage. I was already in pretty good shape, but as I raised my level my face, abs, and arms thinned out while I still kept my curvy shape. I was always going to be a busty woman, and I would always be proud of that, but having a trim waistline would be a necessity when I stepped on the mat myself. We were women, after all, and when I stepped on the mat it would be an extension of my femininity and not a denial of it.
Things were heating up for me at the gym in multiple ways. There was a new queen bee, and she was a real looker. Her name was Gemma, and she was a British woman who had moved here with her husband Richard, who was a visiting math professor at the college. My office was in the same building as the payroll department, and we had talked in the hallway a few times. He was cute in a European-gent sort of way, and it seemed like he was just here to hang out in Florida for a year, which had a strange sort of appeal to it. At the risk of sounding a bit full of myself, it was obvious that he thought that I was pretty hot, and honestly, it felt good to get that sort of attention from someone like that. We talked in the hallway a few times, and then he would stop by my office and chat for a minute whenever he was in the building. I knew that there wasn't any real reason for him to have so many payroll problems, but he seemed to like the view, and by that point I knew that I wasn't feeling any particular reason to avoid attention from other men even though I wouldn't cheat on Joel with any of them.
I don't know if Gemma knew about any of this and I don't see how she could have, but she sure treated me as if she did. Given that we were the two best looking women at the gym—and frankly, that's saying something in South Florida—it was probably natural that we wouldn't get along. We gave each other the once-over the first time we met, talking by the front desk, and things never got beyond chilly between us. But we did the fake smiles and "how are you's" in the gym and steered clear of each other. I was hitting the free weights and doing a lot of track work, and she spent all of her time in the cardio area. We were staying clear of each other's space, and while in the past I would have been fine with that, now I wanted something spicier. And I got it when one of the other women sat down next to me in the locker room. After some small talk, she said (with a little spark in her eye), "Gemma's been telling everyone that your girls are fake," and she made a little nod to my boobs. Well, if that was how Gemma rolled, tit for tat.
I went to her high-intensity cardio class and staked out some territory to stretch. I was wearing a new tank top that gave everyone a view of my very real boobs. The men who came to Gemma's classes to see her could only manage the Medium level at best, and the only men who came to the advanced class were gay. I had aimed the volley directly at Gemma and I did it in front of the other women, and it wasn't about the drooling silly men at all. Gemma was a real blonde with a very impressive set of boobs herself, and she showed them off to just the right degree, suggesting trashy and slutty without actually being it. I got exactly the response that I wanted, too. While we were stretching she looked me over and then said, "This is the advanced class. Someone like you might be better off starting at one of the other levels." She said this standing over me with her hands on her hips and her chest stuck out.
"Someone like me?" I asked, and by now everyone was staring at us.
"Someone who needs to know her place," she replied, taking a step forward.
I started to step forward toward her and then I stopped and said, "You're right, of course. I should head back to the beginner class, and then work myself into shape to be in here with the big girls." With that, I turned and headed out. I knew that Gemma would think that she had won a battle here, and that the other women in the gym would think that I had backed down as well. But that was fine. Let them think what they would.
There was a party coming up in a month that everyone would be at. It would be given by a real estate tycoon, Earl something, a player in the area's hotel industry. Every year he threw a themed party at the beginning of February, and he had gotten a reputation as a bit of a perv. The word was out that this year's theme was "pirates." I talked to Claudia and she said that she could get me an invitation on the basis of my looks (as I said, the host had a bit of a reputation), and I had it on good authority that Gemma and her husband would be there too. This good authority was Richard himself, who was easy to ply for information in the hallway a few days after the sendup in the aerobics study. I talked to my boyfriend Joel about the party—which would require him to wear a costume, meet new people, and watch his girl get in a catfight—and he soon enough had to go to New Orleans for a convention that weekend. I guess that I should clarify that I didn't tell him about the last part of the evening, although by this point I wasn't sure that anything at all was enough to bring Joel back to life. When he told me about the convention, I smiled, pecked him on the cheek, and left him to his Xbox and went back to planning my costume.
The big night had arrived. Unfortunately, my wingwoman Claudia had not, having come down with the flu that week. I arrived on my own on what can only be called a South Florida estate, a sprawling compound on a few hundred acres. The house was a two story monster in the center, with a guest house to the left and a pool and guest house to the right. I parked my little Beamer in the gravel next to a Jaguar and a Porsche, sucked it up, and went in. For tonight it was cris-crossed with hanging lanterns, pitchers of rum, and paper mache swords and pistols. There was even a faux beach set up around the pond, with sand piled around and plastic cannons perched atop the mounds.
I was surprised by how few people were here, considering the party's reputation. The night was cool, but only by Florida's standards, and most of the guests were outside. There was a noticeable skewing in the ages: the average male guest was somewhere on the wrong side of 50, while the average woman was closer to the right side of 30. And there were a few girls who looked like they had been snagged from a sorority. Everyone had the right look, though. The men were obviously upper management, bankers, lawyers, with just the right level of paunch, and there was a consistent conservatism to their costumes, all leather jackets, flappy hats, and the occasional eye patch. Their female companions, who were mostly second wives with a few mistresses-slash-new-girlfriends thrown in, were all over the place, but again, in the expected way. Lots of open blouses, short dresses, and whore boots.
