A NOTE from The Gardener: While this story leans much more toward the style of romance and fantasy than some of the others in its category, it does contain themes of light bondage and consentual-nonconsent. Please read at your own discretion. Thank you.
"It's one of those weird Southie things, serious. You tie a black ribbon 'round your door handle and they'll come get ya. No safe-word or nothin'. Just pure, raw animal fuckin'. Did it in the--right there in the back'a the bar, last time. Ever been fucked out a'ya body? They done it to me."
Lily Vantadeer kicked her feet up on the top of the high-backed stool beside her. The cherry-red tip of her hand-rolled cigarette glowed in the dim light of the barroom. She still wore her serving uniform; black skirt, white blouse, fake pearl earrings. Her black shoes had been kicked off under the bar stool, and her bare toes flexed slightly as she crossed her heels across the backrest of the stool. Lily was the kind of girl who could get away with anything. It wasn't just that she was pretty--she was, but that wasn't it; it was that she was fearless. She didn't look before she jumped. She was one of those people you met a few times in your life that were more like a figment of your imagination than an actual person. Katerina had heard her described as wheat-stem skinny, and it suited the girl. Her blonde hair had been pulled back from a sharp, pretty face, and stuck out from the holes in her wooden clip at crazy angles. When she smiled, it looked like her small white teeth were trying to bite through a stick. A pair of narrow grey-green eyes stared out at the other waitresses, judging their reactions.
"Even for Southies'... I don't know. Sounds like an old wives-' tale, to me."
That was Morgan Dellins. She was the only dark-haired young woman in the room; her hair had been cut flat around her shoulders, and she rocked slightly on the back two legs of her chair as she spoke. Her legs were raised in a similar position to Lily's, but lower--her heels rested on the top of a round wooden table. She also wore her uniform, though it was obvious from the way that her nipples stood out through her white blouse that she had done away with her bra earlier--whether it was before or after service, Katerina had not noticed. Her dark hair was parted in the middle of her forehead, and she hung the lip of a beer bottle between two fingers and let it swing back and forth as she spoke.
"Nah, it's a Southie thing for certain. That much be true, but as for the rest..."
The third young woman spoke with the same clipped, almost lisping intonation as Lily. They were both
Southies
, which meant that they came from South Bend, the town a few hours up the river. That was the only thing similar about the two women.
The speaker was Selka Meeres; she sat on the flat top of the bar, balancing her beer bottle on the top of her thigh. She was tall and fine-boned, with a shock of strawberry-blonde hair held over her head in a tight knot. Her serious blue eyes stared out from under long, curled eyelashes and thin eyebrows; they gave her face a severe kind of beauty. It was a face that would have looked more natural staring out from the canvas of an oil-painting than on a young woman. The bones of her cheeks were high, her mouth fixed and Victorian. She was wearing a pair of sweatpants and a baggy grey sweater over her serving blouse, but even they could not hide the almost fragile slimness of the young woman's body. She was reserved; not quiet, and not exactly unfriendly, but distant. Her cool blue eyes touched Lilys' for a moment, and she lifted the lip of the beer bottle to her own for a moment before speaking. She did not drink--she just tapped the lip of the bottle against her bottom lip a couple of times, as if she were thinking.
"The
black ribbon
," the young woman's faintly accented voice spoke, as though she were merely speaking her thoughts out loud, "I've heard people do it, though I don't know anybody who has."
"I done it," Lily grinned around the mouth of her beer bottle. The smile was all teeth, "Those boys'll know what t'do with it, tomorrow's tips on it."
Selka seemed to consider it, but shook her head after a moment. The other young women all shook their heads--even Romana, though she was not included in Lily's searching stare--as Lily turned her eyes on them, absolutely confident in that simple way of hers. Finally, she shrugged and settled back deeper against the backrest of her chair.
"Tomorrow's tips on it?" Katerina asked curiously. Lily glanced at her, and Morgan raised her eyebrows slightly as Katerina spoke.
"Tomorrow's tips.
Bet
." Lily's smile could only be described as feral.
"Done," Katerina nodded as she met the other woman's eyes. Morgan whistled between her teeth.
Katerina was nearly a foot taller than Lily, and only a few inches shorter than Selka. She was not as slim as either woman, though she was far from heavy herself. A pair of soft brown eyes, a brown so light that they almost seemed beige when the light passed over them, stared out from a pair of round glasses. Behind the thin metal circles, her eyes were wide enough that she should have appeared constantly startled, but did not. It was the face that held them, which stopped her from appearing surprised by anything; her cheeks were smooth, her lips touched by a coy, secret smile--as though she were constantly laughing at a private joke. She wasn't; it was just the shape of her mouth. It was a face that would have taken well to womanhood, but had forgotten to let go of the roundness and carelessness of childhood.
"You really going to take that bet?" Morgan's voice asked from the other side of the table.
"Sure," Katerina shrugged, "It's either free money or good sex."
"It's one step away from being rape," Selka's voice was distasteful.
"Like I said," Katerina grinned at the other girl. Across the bar, Lily laughed--a light, knowing kind of laughter.
Katerina Lynn-Fedorov was twenty-seven, but kept the last seven years hidden away somewhere that nobody could find them. She might have kept them in the circles of her soft brown eyes, which were too old for her body, if not for how set and open they were behind her glasses. She might have hidden them in the blonde hair that hung in loose curls around her temples and neck, or in the pockets of the woven sweater she wore over her waitress uniform, or between the rosy-beige of her lipstick and the soft pink of her real lips. She looked twenty. She knew that the other waitresses thought of her, genially, as bookish. She wasn't.
She touched Lily's eyes across the barroom--the deal was done.
The final figure in the room, who sat drinking quietly as she listened to the young womens' conversation, was Romana. She was the youngest among them by a decade, at only eighteen. A girl, truthfully. It hadn't really been a choice to let the girl drink with them after service--she had just kind of done it her first night, and none of them had said a word about it since. Maybe it was because she was quiet, and her occasional interjections--usually questions--made the other girls laugh; occasionally even Selka, though the tall young woman laughed as though the idea of feeling humor hurt her in the way of a personal insult.
The objects of their conversations' attention were the two young men who had come in out of the rain a few hours before closing. They were Southie boys', by their accents and their mannerisms. They had sat at the bar for only the time it took to drink a single mug of beer, and then disappeared to their room upstairs. It had been more than enough time for each waitress to get a good look at them--and a good look it had been. Both men were attractive. One was slightly taller, with a swath of sandy-brown hair and dark brown eyes.
The other was dark-haired, with the same brown eyes as the other. Both men were sun-tanned and had bodies that made it obvious they did hard labor for a living. They wore slightly faded jeans and button-down checkered shirts of different colors; one grey-white and the other orange-brown, which they kept rolled to their elbows. They spoke quietly, nodded respectfully to Selka, who had been working the bar, and tipped exceedingly generously. Then they had disappeared, and had not reemerged since--much to Lily's disappointment. There had been much speculation since. Katerina's bet was that they were gay, and had come to the inn to get away from Southie for a few nights of privacy. The bet, she figured, was easy money.
"You girls go on and get some sleep soon, yeah?"
The man's voice called from the doorway, slightly chiding. The girls looked toward the open doorway, which led down into a long hallway of dark carpeting and paneled wood. They recognized the man's voice immediately. Lily draped her head back over the backrest of her bar-stool so that her blonde hair hung down toward the floor and she stared at the man upside-down. He was Mr. Hatch--never Bernard--only Mr. Hatch. He was about sixty-five, though the hunch in his back and the heavy grey eyebrows added another ten years to him. He did not use a cane, but he certainly should have. His hands were liver-spotted, and shook slightly even when they were tucked into the pockets of his khaki pants. He wore a heavy tan rain jacket, and a golfing cap was pulled down over what remained of his birds nest of white hair. He and his wife Lorinda--Mrs. Hatch,
