The Long Day of Revenge (18 page)

“You’ll have twenty more,” Lucinda reaffirmed.

Esmeralda had taken advantage of the brief repose being offered and raised to rub her naked rear with both hands, crying tears of sorrow as she did.

“Owwwwwwwwwww...”

“Get back down there and remember to count,” Lucinda ordered. “Now.”

As Esmeralda bent submissively over, Lucinda placed her free hand on her back to hold her down and took aim. The blow was resounding.

“Owwwwwwww!” Esmeralda screamed. “One.”

Again, Lucinda brought the belt back, hearing it whistle through the air as it came down and landed hard in the center of Esmeralda’s already burning ass.

“Owwwww! It hurts! Two!”

“Take your punishment,” Lucinda ordered as she delivered another belt whack on the right side of Esmeralda’s ass.

“Owwwww! Three!”

The next blow came, hard and merciless.

“Owwww! Four!”

“Remember this day and how you’re going to turn your life around! Just remember the pain you have caused others and the pain you now feel because of this! You cry now, but you will laugh later, when your life is together again!”

The fifth blow came, on the left side this time.

“Ow! Five.”

Another blow came, then another and another. Esmeralda was blubbering so wildly it was hard to hear the count.

“Six! Seven! Eight! Owwwwww!”

Two more strikes came, alternating and wicked.

“Nine! Ow! Ten! Owwwww!”

Lucinda stopped to observe the damage, and as she did, another intense sexual rush came through her. She felt as if she was going to orgasm in her clothes.

“Take this, damn you! Take this and learn!”

The eleventh blow was the hardest yet, and Esmeralda jerked, rising to place both hands over her bottom. She jolted so hard she arose, even with Lucinda’s effort to hold her in a bent position.

“Move those hands!”

Esmeralda yielded and bent back downward, exposing her flaming rear to the remaining blows she knew were coming.

“Take this! Remember, it is your penitence! Go and sin no more after this!”

Esmeralda screamed.

“Count,” Lucinda reminded her.

“Twelve! Twelve! It’s twelve! Twelve!”

There was desperation in Esmeralda’s voice, leading Lucinda to wonder if she now regretted the idea of absorbing such grave corporal punishment. She had, however, asked for it and was getting what she wanted.

“Thirteen!” she shrieked out as the next blow came. “Owwww! My ass is on fire! Owwww! It hurts!”

“This should hurt!” Lucinda instructed, remembering one of Manolo’s favorite phrases. “Remember you’re being punished!”

The next blow came on the upper right leg, and Esmeralda flinched again when it happened.

“Owwww! God damn this! Fourteen!”

“Don’t you lose count!” Lucinda ordered her. “You get ready for the rest, or I’ll start over!”

The next blow landed on the other leg, and Esmeralda stood, reaching down to protect herself.

“Get back down,” Lucinda snarled. “You aren’t done yet! How many?”

“Fifteen,” she cried. “Oh, fifteen! Fifteen!”

“Don’t tell me you’re getting turned on by this!” Lucinda lectured. “You’re supposed to be beyond that now.”

“No! It burns too bad! It hurts too bad!”

“You’re lying, and lying gets you spanked hard!”

To emphasize her statement, Lucinda delivered yet another destructive blow.

“Owwwwwwww! Sixteen! Owwwww! This hurts me!”

Again, Lucinda aimed for the glowering ass, striking in the center.

“Yeowwwwww! Seventeen! I promise I’ll be good! Stop! Stop! I promise I’ll do better!”

Lucinda’s only response was another slamming blow with the leather, leaving another mark on the many welts already there.

“Eighteen! Owwwwww!”

Her voice blended into one long sob as she choked on her tears.

Another blow came on the poor girl’s tortured rear, causing her to shriek yet again.

“Nineteen!”

Lucinda tried deliberately to make the last blow the hardest and cruelest of all, but Esmeralda had been so severely punished already it scarcely mattered.

“Owwwwww! Twenty! Thank you! Thank you! This is what I’ve been wanting for a long time! I’ll never do anything wrong again! I promise!”

With her pants still all the way down, Esmeralda turned to face her tormentor, revealing her hairy black pussy once again. Though she wanted very badly to finger herself, she only looked into Lucinda’s eyes and then down at the sand.

“Pull up your pants! It’s over. I did what you wanted, so now you can go in peace. I wish nothing bad to befall you. I never really did.”

Esmeralda shuffled and grimaced as she covered herself. The fabric of her underwear was grating against her agonized bottom.

“Owwwww, but that hurts. That has to be the worst spanking I ever got, and I had every bit of it coming.”

“Do you feel better now?”

Esmeralda tried to smile.

“My ass doesn’t. But I do.”

Suddenly, impulsively, the two women embraced. Their lips locked in a kiss, which was the closest Lucinda had ever come to cheating on Manolo. As they separated, they stared at each other for a long moment.

“I’ve got to be going, and so should you,” Esmeralda whispered. “My car’s out front and I am going to have a long, hard ride on a sore, red bottom. It’ll give me a lot to think about on the way.”

Lucinda stared blankly, surprised at what she had been proven capable of. Then she managed a quick smile.

“So you’ve forgiven me, and I can leave here with a clean conscience over everything?” Esmeralda asked, still rubbing her butt beneath her clothes.

Lucinda again smiled.

“There was never anything to forgive. I never hated you.”

“But I hated myself,” Esmeralda answered. “For the first time ever, I hated myself. Now I have to go, but I wish you would, too.”

“Go where?”

It was Esmeralda who managed a pained smile as she wiped her eyes with her hand.

“Back to Manolo Garza. In spite of everything, I think you need each other. I can tell.”

This time it was Lucinda who looked dejectedly at the sand.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, think about it,” Esmeralda begged as she reached out to touch Lucinda’s cheek. “Think about it. Do what’s best for you.”

Lucinda said nothing. It was only then, as Esmeralda turned to leave, that she realized she still had the belt in her hand.

“Hey, your belt,” she called out.

Esmeralda turned and indicated her pants were staying up just fine.

“Keep it. It’s a good one.”

And with that she was gone, leaving Lucinda alone.

Chapter Fourteen

Manolo looked through the window of the adobe wall separating the rest of the Nogales bullring corral and the pen where the bulls were kept. Also with him was an annoying reporter from the paper up in Phoenix who came down to cover this bullfight. He knew little about the formalities of the same, but had heard the tale of a matador obsessed with killing just one bull.

“Normally, there would be at least one other matador sharing the card with me,” Manolo explained. “Tomorrow, on the day of the bullfight, we would draw lots to determine who would fight what two of the four bulls here. That’s why I went through the trouble to rent this old bullring, buy the bulls, and promote this bullfight myself. I wanted to be sure the one bull I mention falls to me.”

Manolo looked back through the window and let his gaze fall upon a huge black bull standing apart from the others. By now, he knew Gaditano well. Gaditano returned the empty gaze, and somehow he knew the animal recognized him.

“The story has been told so many times,” Manolo continued. “I have relived it over and over again every waking day. It reminds me to never get careless in the ring. I don’t mean cowardly by that, but careless. I am careful never to trip like I did back then.”

Manolo rethought of how the injury had happened. He remembered tripping and seeing the little bull coming at him, but in that position it did not look so small. Then, he was being dragged across the ground. He knew he had been gored but did not know how badly. At the time, he really hadn’t been able to process that much. It was afterward that his fixation would come.

“It was at a tienta where they test the bulls on a ranch for bravery, determining which go to the stockyard and which go to the bullring. I was new in the profession and invited to take part, which could have been a big break for me. That was on the Eliseo Manzano ranch down in Hermosillo where the animals are from. Anyway, Gaditano came into the ring, and I tried to lead him away from a fallen man on the sand. That’s when I tripped, being younger and dumber than I am now. Gaditano, likewise being younger and dumber, gored me in the intestines. Had he been the size he is now, I would not be here today.”

“But did that goring not make you famous?” the reporter asked. “You owe your fame to this bull, and now you will kill him for it?”

Manolo continued to glare at Gaditano, who shook his head menacingly, as if to indicate the gigantic pair of horns were ready. Tomorrow, the time would come.

“The long day of revenge is coming,” he whispered, not to the reporter, but the bull. “The time is coming. I’ve waited long for this. We have waited long for this. I will take back everything this bull has taken from me.”

“And what exactly has he taken?” the reporter probed.

“My wife and I are separated, and one of the reasons is because of this bull. I have listened to her, over and over again, telling me how I have lost my mind and am obsessed with what I plan to do tomorrow. Well, that’s okay, because in the afternoon ahead, everything comes down.”

“Do you plan to retire after this fight?”

“Now that’s a stupid question. Of course, I do not. I plan to go on with my life.”

“A life without your wife in the way?”

Manolo turned and frowned. The reporter was truly annoying.

“I’ll tell you why my wife and I split up. You can report it tomorrow, because if I get killed it won’t matter anymore, and if I live we will never get together again anyway, so let everyone know. I went to the Casa De Campo right here in Nogales. If you haven’t ever tried it, I would recommend it to you wholeheartedly. Anyway, she wouldn’t suck my dick for starters. Second, I like to spank people. I never did until this one training session where I was working out with Lucinda, and she had this pair of bull horns which she hit me right in the balls with. So I pulled down her sweat pants and spanked her. That’s where the whole thing got going. As we got together, I spanked her before sex. I spanked her when she was bad. I started thinking that giving her a spanking before a bullfight would bring good luck. We all have our superstitions, you know. Some men won’t wear green costumes because they think it is a color bringing bad luck, but I don’t give a fuck, and I’m wearing green tomorrow. Me? I like to spank people. Period. Maybe I’m just weird, okay. Oh, I like fucking and I love to have my cock sucked, but spanking gives me one very big thrill.”

The reporter stared disbelievingly. He could, of course, print none of this word for word.

“That’s where the trouble is. You see, when I was a kid, I was taught that spanking was a great way to correct problems. Since we had already spanked before, I decided to use spanking for its intended purpose. It wasn’t just for romance. I spanked my wife as an adult when she did something stupid or something I didn’t like, just like one would do with a little kid. I don’t know. I guess it got overboard. I never beat her or abused her like these dickheads slapping and punching women around. I don’t believe in it. I never did. But I spanked, I whipped, and I paddled her ass, and always bare except when she was having a damned period, and then if we had to, we did it with the pants up. I never hated her back then. I still don’t really hate her now. I look back and wonder if I fucked up.”

Again, he looked through the window, evading the other bulls and gazing upon the horns of Gaditano.

“For some reason, right here in Nogales, I went to the Casa De Campo. De La Torre, who was killed here, recommended it to me as he was more of a typical bullfighter than I am. He had no qualms about cheating on his own wife. Anyway, I went there to find a whore who liked spankings and dick sucking. I found one named Esmeralda, and here is where life really takes a strange fucking turn. If Gaditano gored me in the intestines, life gored me right up the asshole.”

The reporter raised his eyebrows.

“My wife found out about the Casa De Campo. I think when I was really drunk I blabbed something out about it and De La Torre, so when we were in Nogales a few months ago, she tells me she’s going shopping and goes to this goddamn place instead. She has a gossip session with Esmeralda, and as she is leaving, I walk in. Now I assumed she had been cheating on me somehow and doing a girl on girl thing, but before I could say anything, Lucinda realized just why I was coming there, and that’s the end of the two of us.”

The reporter nodded.

“So anyway, when I come back to Nogales, I set up another appointment with Esmeralda, and she tells me my wife came to her trying to find out more about spankings and how to make me happy. Go fucking figure. If I’m lying, I’m dying. That is what I was told. By then I had shot my marriage in the ass. I may be a man at the top of the world as far as the fans go, but I am a real piece of shit. I know all of this now. I admit it.”

The reporter again nodded.

“If you want to go to the Casa De Campo and follow up on the story, you won’t find Esmeralda. She’s gone from there. Felt guilty and moved, I guess. I have no idea where she is now, but she left a message with the madam. I was told to get back with my wife at any cost. Easier said than done. In fact, I have spent the past month or so whooping it up with whatever woman out there who wants to party. You know? All that shit about filling a void. I spanked the shit out of a lot of women and fucked some of them, too, but I’ve been using condoms at least. You won’t see my cock drop off from prick rot!”

Manolo gave yet another look through the window. Gaditano was waiting for him. He even let out a casual snort to verify he knew the day was coming.