Tangled Rose (6 page)

He held his beer can over her and poured it on her. She was shocked. It was awful. She just lay there as a stream of beer flowed from the can down onto the new cotton shirt that Patrice had bought her. Why was he doing this? It was humiliating.

She stayed in her position watching the beer soak her new shirt. After a few seconds she was so wet that she could see her breasts through the clinging cotton. It was soaking the bed too, ruining it, staining the sheets.

Fat Boy still had that awful snarl on his face as he watched the beer pour onto her. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. He had a steel lighter. He flicked it shut with a snap and put it back in his pocket, then went to the side table and got another can of beer.

“You thirsty?” he said to her.

She said nothing.

He opened the beer and the sound of the can opening reminded Rose of a gun being cocked. She pictured using a gun on Fat Boy. He held the second beer out over her and again began pouring it over her. She couldn’t believe it. Why was he doing this to her? What possible pleasure could there be in this for him? He poured the beer over her breasts, then lower, over her sweatpants. To Rose it looked as if she’d soiled herself. It felt like that too. She hated being there, lying on the bed while he did this. He let the beer flow over her chest and then onto her face and mouth.

“Drink,” he said and laughed.

She looked at him and could tell from the fierceness in his eyes that he meant it. She opened her mouth and let the beer flow into it. She swallowed as much of it as she could.

“Good girl,” he said. “Swallow up for daddy.”

She lapped up the beer and almost choked on it. When she coughed he laughed at her. “Come on,” he said, “you can do better than that.”

He opened a third can of beer.

“Get up,” he said.

She sat up in the bed in her soaking wet clothes and he handed her the can.

“Drink it,” he said.

She looked at him. There was such a cruel twist to the snarl on his mouth that it scared her. She didn’t want the beer but she was too afraid to refuse. She opened it and brought the can to her lips and took a sip.

“I said drink it,” Fat Boy said.

Rose shook her head. She couldn’t understand why he was doing this. Why was he being so cruel? What was wrong with this place, with these men? She brought the can to her lips and took deep gulps of the beer.

“That’s it,” Fat Boy said.

He got himself a beer and the Snickers bar and sat back down heavily on his chair. He opened his beer and began to drink it. Rose sat on the bed in her soaking wet clothes and drank hers. She felt like a mess. Her clothes, the new ones that Patrice had bought for her, were covered in beer and clinging to her skin. She felt awful. She wanted to change but she knew she wasn’t allowed. She eyed Fat Boy warily as she drank the beer and when she was finished he went and got the two remaining cans and handed one to her.

“I can’t,” she said. “I’ve had enough.”

“You’ve had enough when I say so,” he said and sat back down.

Reluctantly, she opened the can and took a sip of the beer. Her stomach was already full and she was beginning to feel a light buzz from the alcohol. Fat Boy had finished his candy bar and was smoking another cigarette as he sipped the last of the beers.

“Why are you making me do this?” she said.

Fat Boy sneered at her. She looked away but looked back at him when he spoke.

“Let’s just say that I’m a filthy, horrible man,” he said and laughed.

Rose nodded. That much was true. She brought the can to her lips and sipped some more of the beer. Her stomach was already full but she was able to drink it slowly. She didn’t know where he was going with this. One thing she did know was that there had only been six cans of beer in that grocery bag and this was the last of them.

She tried to relax as she sat there in her wet clothes and finished the beer. When she was done she turned the can upside down to show Fat Boy that she’d finished.

“Good,” he said. “Very good. Now take off all your clothes.”

She looked up at him. There was a pleading in her eyes that she knew he would take as weakness but she couldn’t help it. She didn’t want to go through again what he’d done to her last time. She didn’t want to feel like that ever again as long as she lived. She couldn’t take the humiliation, the disgust it made her feel at herself.

“Please,” she said, “don’t do this.”

“Take off your clothes,” he repeated, more firmly.

Rose sat there for a moment without moving, she weighed her options. There were none. There was nothing she could do about this situation other than comply with him. Anything else would only make things worse for her.

She took a hold of the cotton t-shirt and pulled it over her head, revealing to Fat Boy’s hungry eyes her soft breasts and vulnerable, pink nipples.

“And the pants,” he said.

She pulled them off. She wasn’t wearing any underwear so she was completely naked now. She shivered in the cool air. It was completely dark outside now and she wished there was some heat in the room.

“I’m going to have to tie you to the bed again,” Fat Boy said.

“What? Why?”

“Don’t ask questions.”

“But Patrice said I could be untied.”

“Patrice said?”

Rose had made a mistake and she knew it. How could she be so stupid? Patrice was just a prospect. He wasn’t even a full member of the MC. Fat Boy was fully patched and was a full voting member. She was crazy to mention Patrice’s name to him like that.

“Well maybe I’ll just show Patrice what I think of him, next time I see him.”

“No,” Rose said, “don’t.”

He looked at her, thoughtfully. “Why the hell do you care?” he said.

She’d done it again. She was going to have to learn to keep her big mouth shut if she was going to survive for long in this place.

“You sweet on that kid?”

It was too late. She’d given too much away. All she’d wanted was to remain untied. She couldn’t stand the thought of being tied back up. She couldn’t bear it.

“Please,” she said as Fat Boy took the leather cords from the table where they’d been since Patrice had untied her. “Please don’t.”

“Shut up, bitch. I’m going to have my fun.”

Rose struggled and squirmed as he straddled her and rested his full, crushing weight on her. She tried to resist but it was hopeless. He was heavy and he was strong and he grabbed each arm and fastened her by the wrists to the bedposts. Then he did the same with each of her ankles. She kicked but it made no difference. At one point she managed to kick him in the face but she knew that only served to anger him.

Now she was lying just as she had been the first night when he’d come in and raped her. She was spread-eagled, stretched out toward the four posts of the bed, and this time she was completely naked.

XI

R
OSE FOUGHT BACK THE URGE
to scream. She didn’t want Fat Boy to beat her. She didn’t want him to smother her. She didn’t want to provoke him any more than she already had. There was no point fighting him. She was tied to the bed, spread wide open. If there was any fight to be had between him and her, he’d already won it.

“Now,” Fat Boy said, “how about a little television?”

Rose had been holding her breath and she exhaled in relief when Fat Boy grabbed the remote for the television and turned it on. That was the last thing she’d been expecting. She’d thought he was going to start hurting her. Now it seemed all he wanted to do was watch television. It was weird.

But her instincts told her not to let her guard down. She hoped that Fat Boy was going to watch TV all night, but she knew enough not to let that hope get too high.

“What do you want to watch?” he said as he flicked through the channels from his seat in the corner.

“Anything,” she said.

“I like nature shows. You mind if we watch something like that.”

“Whatever you like.”

Fat Boy flicked to the nature channel. There was a documentary about grizzly bears and he sat back in his seat and lit another cigarette. “This is perfect,” he said. “This is my favorite show.”

Rose didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know what to think. What was going on? She watched as the grizzly bears wandered the forests, foraged for food, mated.

“Of course, we don’t get them like that up here. All we get is black bears,” Fat Boy said.

“No,” Rose said, keeping one eye on the television and one eye on Fat Boy.

“You’ve got to go out west to get a real bear like that. Those boys would eat our bears for breakfast.”

Rose nodded. He was looking at her as he talked.

“They don’t frighten me though. I’ve been out in British Colombia and Alaska. I’ve seen grizzlies.”

There was something strange about the way Fat Boy was talking. He wasn’t just making casual conversation. She knew that. He was edgy, tense, maybe even a little crazy. She was scared.

“Is that right?” she said.

“I’ve come this close to one,” Fat Boy continued, stretching out his arms to show her how close he’d come to a grizzly. “Face to face.”

“What did you do?”

“I just stared him down,” Fat Boy said. “He come up to me and stopped dead, not three feet from me. He saw something that only animals can see. He saw me for what I really was.”

There was something sinister about the way he was talking. It was almost as if he was reliving the memory.

“What’s that?” she said, already afraid of what the answer would be.

“He saw that I wasn’t a man at all, but a monster.”

Rose let out a little cry. She hadn’t meant to, but there was something deeply disturbing about the way he was talking. She was so vulnerable. He could do anything to her, even kill her if he wanted to. She didn’t want to hear him talking like this.

“I had a .375 Ruger and I raised it up and pointed it right in his face.”

“And pulled the trigger,” Rose said.

“That’s right, little lady,” Fat Boy said and nodded.

There was definitely something wrong with Fat Boy. He didn’t talk like a normal person. Everything about him was edgy and irrational. It seemed to Rose like anything could happen. She was so uneasy that she was shaking in fear in the bed as Fat Boy continued his rambling.

“That bear didn’t know what hit him,” Fat Boy said. “He just roared out.” With that, Fat Boy let out a roar of his own. He leaned forward in his chair and roared like a bear. He actually looked like a bear. He had thick, strong limbs covered in dark hair. She could see how hairy his chest was through the open buttons on his shirt. He had a beard. He was dirty. He was the type of man that people would describe as looking like a bear.

He stopped roaring and then burst out laughing.

“Minute later and he fell down dead.”

“That’s terrible,” Rose said.

She didn’t know what he wanted to hear but she knew he was expecting her to react to the story.

“Terrible for that bear,” Fat Boy said and continued laughing.

Rose didn’t see what was so funny but she let out a half-hearted laugh of her own. She wasn’t enjoying talking with Fat Boy but it was a lot better than the alternative. She’d talk to him all night if it would mean he wouldn’t lay his horrible, hairy hands on her.

He got up from the chair and went over to the grocery bag. He’d forgotten that he’d already drank the last of the beer.

“Damn,” he said. “I should have brought more over. Or maybe I shouldn’t have made you drink so much,” he said.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” Rose said.

“Oh well, I have my reasons, little miss,” he said and sat back down on the chair.

That worried Rose. What possible reasons could he have for getting her to drink a few beers?

XII

I
T WASN’T LONG TILL SHE
found out. About two hours had passed since Fat Boy had forced Rose to drink those beers. He’d been sitting, watching the television and she was lying there, naked, tied to the bed. She tried to watch the television too, it was a way of getting her mind off the situation, but it was difficult to concentrate on anything. Fat Boy chain-smoked and flicked the channel so much that anytime she started to get lost in a story, he’d switch it.

And gradually she noticed that she needed to pee. At first she tried to ignore it but drinking all that beer had filled her bladder and there was no way she could ignore it forever. She didn’t want to say anything to Fat Boy, she didn’t know if he’d let her use the washroom or not, and things were going well, she felt. He seemed to be engrossed in the television and hadn’t been paying her much attention at all.

She felt it would be crazy to disrupt that situation, to remind Fat Boy that she was right there, naked, so she held her pee for as long as she could. After another thirty minutes or so it started to become unbearable.

Fat Boy had put on some mindless, low budget movie about a secret agent who had to blow up a Soviet army base. He was distracted. He wasn’t thinking about her. He wasn’t harming her. And she had to go and do the one thing that she didn’t want to do. She had to get his attention.

“Hey,” she said, squirming in discomfort on the bed. She really needed to go.

“What is it?”

“I really could use the washroom.”

And there it was, that same evil sneer she’d seen on his face earlier when he’d forced her to drink the beers.

“Of course you do, sweetheart. You drank all my beer. What did you think was going to happen?”

“Please untie me,” she said, “so I can use the washroom.”

Fat Boy looked at her. His eyes ran slowly from her face, down over her body, before coming to rest on her vagina. She was in pain, she had to go so bad. She was trying to cross her legs but it was impossible because of the way she was tied.

“Maybe you can pee after this movie,” he said, sneering at her. “I don’t want to miss it.”

Rose nodded. She knew she was in trouble. How was she going to make it to the end of the movie? It was only halfway through. And that awful look on Fat Boy’s face? What had that meant? And then she realized, he’d intended for this exact situation to arise. This was the reason he’d forced her to drink all that beer. He’d wanted her to suffer like this.