Ever noticed how there is always someone who has to be different? Take the street I live in for an example. All the houses have similar sorts of front gardens. Typically, a low or no fence, a lot of lawn and flower beds running around the edges. There's a lot of variation between them, but they all seem to follow the same generic plan.
Except one place. This guy has a hedge. It's not your standard privet hedge or anything like that. From what I can see, the guy planted a series of different bushy type trees and then just let them run into each other. The result has been this dense hedge of bushes all running into each other, and no way to tell where one bush finishes and another starts. Some of the bushes are actually intertwined with each other.
I'll admit the owner keeps them trimmed, but the final result had been a hedge about six foot high and six foot deep, except for one lone yucca that has been allowed to grow, sticking up out of the thicket like a sentinel.
Recently, one of the bushes carked it. It didn't just die and have to be pulled out. It just fell over, out onto the footpath. The owner removed it pretty smartly but the hedge now looks as though some passing animal had taken a big bite out of it. There's this gap about four feet wide and four feet deep. Lazy sod hasn't bothered to plant anything new; he seems quite happy to let the remaining bushes spread out until they fill that area.
Walking past this morning, on the way to work, I saw that some wag had placed an old chair in the gap so anyone who wants to take a break can sit down for a while. Ha. Good luck with that. I'll lay odds that the chair is stolen before the week is out.
Now you're probably wondering why I've been rabbiting on about this hedge and its missing bite. It's like this. . .
I work night shift as a checkout chick down at Big W. Our Manager has always insisted that the night shift girls be adults. He apparently feels that if the girls on at night are under age he has to spring for a taxi voucher if they go home after ten. Adults he doesn't, as they usually have their own cars or they can take public transport.
Being an adult I don't rate a taxi, but there's an excellent bus service with a stop right at the end of my street. I disembark, trot down the street, and I'm home, and I don't have to worry about crazy drivers on the road.
On this particular night I'd knocked off and found that my normal bus wasn't running. It had been involved in an accident and I had to wait for the next one. It was pushing eleven when the bus dropped me off at my stop and I was five minutes from home. I just ambled casually down the street, heading home, the way I've done a hundred times before.
I was passing that damned hedge and had just reached the bite out of it when it happened. An arm reached out of the hedge, grabbed me and pulled me into the bite. One moment I'm walking along, the next I'm sitting on the knee of someone who was sitting on the old chair that someone had put in the bite.
"Speak quietly if you're going to say anything," a soft voice advised me. "Screaming would make me very nervous and I'd have to take steps to stop it. You don't want duct tape on your mouth, believe me."
I believed him. I knew very well that I didn't want to have my mouth taped shut.
"Who are you and what do you want?" I hissed at him. "Let me go."
"Who I am doesn't matter," he replied. "As to what I want, what the fuck do you think I want when I drag a woman off the street and into my temporary lair? I'm going to fuck you. If you cooperate, fine. If you don't, still fine from my point of view."
To add to this assertion, his hand was running up my leg, sliding under my dress and already pressing against my panties. I started struggling, trying to push myself up away from him, but the arm he had around my waist was like a bar of iron. I couldn't budge it.
"It's going to happen," I was told. "You might as well just relax."
Yeah. Easy for him to say. He wasn't the unwilling victim. I considered screaming and actually took a deep breath. A finger promptly poked me in the side so I lost my breath.
"Remember the duct tape," came the warning. "No more chances."
