by Violet Blue
You could quite easily walk past the Red Mill and never know it was there. It’s a bizarre little pub, set into a long terrace of Victorian houses, with a polite notice taped on the door asking drinkers to keep the noise down as they leave for the benefit of the neighbors. With its sun trap of a beer garden out the back, bar billiards table, and jukebox packed with albums from seventies dinosaur bands, it attracted what Cameron, the fat, fortysomething landlord, called a “select clientele”: mostly bearded real ale drinkers and their aging hippy girlfriends, and the sort of football fan who wanted to discuss the result of the match with the opposition supporters afterward, rather than glass them over it. The only concession Cameron made to the younger drinker was to stock a range of sickly alcopops in Day-Glo colors. But I quickly came to love the atmosphere, the feeling that you’d somehow been invited into the landlord’s front room for a pint. Within days, the Red Mill became the stable center of a world which, for me, had been so thoroughly tipped on its axis.
So when Cameron announced that he and Jean, his wife, were taking a couple of months off to visit her elderly, ailing mother in New Zealand, my first thought was to ask how it would affect me. “The brewery’ll send a temporary manager, Stella,” he told me blithely. “You’ll be fine.”
And that was how Ian Todd appeared on the scene, and from the moment I saw him, I knew I wouldn’t be fine at all. I turned up for work on the Monday lunchtime, and there he was, bringing a crate of mixers up from the cellar. It was too soon after Martin had walked out on me to be assessing another man sexually, and yet with Ian, I couldn’t help it. As his gaze met mine, my pussy clenched with a sudden spasm that was almost painful. It was a reaction no one had garnered from me since Martin. No, make that including Martin.
I don’t go for men like Ian, I never have. My ideal is a swarthy, cuddly little bear of a man, just like Martin. Ian was just the opposite: tall and lean, with dishwater blond curls falling to his shoulders, and eyes of a green so pale it was almost colorless. When he spoke, it was with a Liverpool accent, which immediately raised my hackles. It isn’t a rational prejudice, but that’s the one accent I simply can’t stand. It goes all the way back to my old comprehensive school, and the art teacher I had then, Mr. Prior, from somewhere on the Wirral. I was never going to be in the top stream for art—to be honest, most of my efforts gave the impression I just about knew which end of the pencil to draw with—and he was one of those teachers who took great pleasure in ridiculing the less able pupils in a class in front of all the rest. I dropped art as soon as it was no longer compulsory, but even now the sound of those flat Scouse vowels was enough to bring memories of my frequent humiliation at Mr. Prior’s hands flooding back.
“You’ll be Stella,” Ian stated. It wasn’t a difficult process of deduction. Cameron only employed two barmaids on a regular basis: me, and an Australian girl called Gill. With her pale, freckled skin, beaky nose, and seventies dress sense she was as far from the Neighbours stereotype of the antipodean beach bunny as it’s possible to get, but she had a good rapport with the customers and she worked hard. As did I. Or so I thought till Ian launched into his spiel.
“I don’t know quite how much you’ve been getting away with before,” he said, “but I don’t stand for any shit. You turn up on time, you don’t slope off early because you need to pick up your kids from the babysitter or your period’s come on, you don’t accept drinks from customers and you make sure the tables in this place are always spotless. No dirty glasses, no full ashtrays. And no slacking. And if you don’t like it, tough. Bar staff are ten a penny, and if you don’t pull your weight, I can get rid of you like that—” He snapped his fingers contemptuously.
Part of me wanted to tell him to stick his job. Part of me wanted to tell him to stick his fingers in my knickers. What I did was just shrug, and say, “Well, there’s nothing like knowing where you stand.”
“As long as we understand each other,” he said, and turned his back on me to go and fetch another crate of bitter lemon. Oh, I understand you, I thought. You’re a shit and you get off on being a shit. It’s not big, it’s not clever, but I love working here and I’m not going to let you spoil it for me.
Keeping that resolve wasn’t easy. It seemed everything I did, everything I said rubbed Ian up the wrong way. Even though I was there from well before my shift started till well after it ended, I always had the feeling he had one eye on his watch as I walked through the door. If he caught Gill and me chatting together, in that first, dead half hour after opening time, he would glare in our direction until one of us went to wipe the already clean tables, or fill bread rolls with cheese and ham and wrap them in clingfilm, ready for the lunchtime rush. We kept smiles plastered to our faces for the benefit of the customers, even when we were calling Ian every name under the sun beneath our breath. And we never, ever gave him the satisfaction of letting him see just how badly he was getting to us.
At the end of the week, he would hand us our pay packets without a word of thanks for our efforts, and I would bite back the urge to tell him not to expect me the following day, since I would be looking for alternative employment. God knew I could find it easily enough: as Ian himself had told me, bar jobs were ten a penny round here. The sensible option would have been to go down to the Internet café on the high street and spend half an hour updating my CV in an attempt to get another management post—something I should have done long before now, in truth—but I was determined that Cameron and Jean would not return from New Zealand to find me gone without an explanation.
What made it more difficult to hold on to my composure was the fact that I was constantly aware of Ian’s eyes on me, whether I was stretching to take a shot of whiskey from one of the optics, or bending to load a rack full of dirty glasses into the dishwasher. It was the beginning of August, stiflingly hot, and I was dressing for work in skimpy little vest tops or short, flimsy rayon dresses in a vain attempt to keep cool. As I moved, as Ian watched me, I was sure that he was hoping to catch a glimpse of flesh—a bare, tanned thigh or a small, braless breast—through a gap in the loose fabric of my clothes. And sometimes I would catch his gaze, his expression a mixture of disdain and something darker, something greedier.
If Ian had come on to me, I could have coped with it. Years ago, when I had been barely out of my teens and working as an assistant in a shoe shop, I’d had a boss who had taken delight in brushing up against me in the stockroom, “accidentally” touching my breasts and making suggestive remarks. Not knowing how to react and fearful of getting the sack if I spoke to anyone about what was happening, I had stupidly put up with it, even the time he had pressed his hand to the bulge in his regulation black twill trousers and groaned, “You’re making it hard for me, Stella.” What I should have done was squeeze his balls till he was begging for mercy, P45 or no P45; instead, I put up with his lecherous advances for the next three months, before leaping at the chance to be transferred to the Gillingham branch. I’d already let one man drive me out of my job; perhaps that was why I was so keen it wouldn’t happen again. Or perhaps I was just waiting to see whether Ian would finally make the move that proved he wanted me as much as I thought he did, before the tension between us became as unbearable as the heat that assaulted me every time I stepped out of my front door.
Gill didn’t seem to have picked up on the situation, but then she was too busy inventing endlessly imaginative ways of torturing Ian, the mildest of which involved stripping him naked, smearing him in honey, and staking him to an anthill. If he’d shown any interest in her, she would have been pretty much oblivious to it anyway, wrapped up as she was in her latest boyfriend, Steve, a burly prop forward for the local rugby team. She described their marathon sex sessions with the same graphic relish she used in her never-ending plans for disposing of Ian—indeed, a couple of them featured the same kitchen utensils. And then Ian would shout across the bar and ask us why we were gossiping when there were customers to be served, and I would go to refill glasses, leaving
Gill to wonder aloud just how long it would take Chip and Lemmy, the beer garden rabbits, to nibble Ian to death after she’d shoved carrots in all his orifices.
Although she hated him as much as I did, Gill was openly pleased with the fact that, unlike Cameron, he never let anyone drink in the pub past closing time. Most Friday and Saturday nights, Cameron would have a lock-in with four or five of the regulars, drinking till the small hours of the morning, and he would expect Gill or me to stay behind and join them, at least for an hour or so. Ian wanted us off the premises as soon as possible so he could count the takings, and that suited Gill, who was usually itching to get home to Steve and his amazingly versatile tongue.
I just appreciated the chance to get an extra hour in bed—or at least, that was the plan, until the night I was woken by what sounded like crockery smashing downstairs. Startled, I switched on the light and squinted at the bedside clock. Just gone one in the morning. Through the floorboards, I could hear loud, angry voices. Costas and his wife, arguing. It was a regular occurrence: they would fight, and then they would fuck, the second part of the process being just as noisy as the first. Usually, I would reach for my personal stereo, using music to block out the unwanted sounds of their coupling, but that night I found my hand straying down to part the curls of my bush, a finger slipping inside my pussy to find it moist and wanting. I frigged myself in time to the banging of the bed below me, and in my mind I pictured Ian pressing me down against the mattress, thrusting so hard into me that the breath was forced from my lungs. My fantasies were never this brutal; normally, I imagined myself being stroked and caressed by gentle hands, a soft mouth moving down to tongue the folds of my sex and suck on my clit. Ian, I was sure, would fuck me without these preliminaries, just yank down my knickers and shove his cock into me, while I moaned and begged him to take me, use me like a cheap whore. I was mouthing the words silently as my fingers moved faster, slithering in the wetness that spilled from my cunt. “Use me, Ian, take me, fuck me.” My movements speeded up as the creaking and groaning in the other room got louder and faster, and then Mrs. Costas gave a howl and came, and my own orgasm was triggered by her wild, unearthly cries. In my fantasy, Ian shot his load inside me, then wiped the sticky length of his cock in my hair and walked away.
Needless to say, I didn’t mention to Gill that I was fantasizing about being used and abused by Ian Todd; that sort of revelation would not have gone down too well with her. And I certainly couldn’t talk about it to the man himself. I mean, how did you tell a bloke you couldn’t stand that you got wet at the thought of him holding you down and fucking your brains out? It would have implied I had a personal life, for a start, and Ian never discussed anything even remotely personal with anyone. I didn’t even know if he was single: there was no ring on his wedding finger, but for all I knew he could have had anyone waiting for him at home, from a heavily pregnant wife to a garage mechanic called Barry.
We could have gone on like this until he finished his stint as stand-in pub manager, rubbing along together in this unhealthy mix of desire and mutual loathing, but on the last day before Cameron came back, everything went weird. The heat wave was at its height, with that thick heaviness to the air that usually means a storm is on its way. When Ian opened the door of the Red Mill to Gill and me, he was in a truly foul mood, like nothing we had seen from him before. He didn’t even acknowledge us as we stepped past him into the already humid interior of the pub.
“Someone’s got out of bed the wrong side this morning,” I muttered to Gill.
“That guy doesn’t have a bed,” Gill replied. “He hangs upside down in the wardrobe.”
We barely saw Ian during the lunchtime session; the pub was fairly quiet, and he disappeared into the upstairs quarters, muttering about having some paperwork to attend to. Free of his lurking presence, Gill acted like she often did when Cameron was around; flirting outrageously with the customers and putting all her favorite songs on the jukebox. I kept an attentive ear out for Ian’s tread on the stairs, but by the time he finally rejoined us, Gill had persuaded the final couple of stragglers that we would be open again in a couple of hours and they could finish their drinking then. He paid us as much attention on the way out as he had coming in.
We opened up again at five; when Ian let us in this time, his hair was wet, as though he’d just come out of the shower. A vision came to me: Ian soaping his lean, naked body as water beat down on him; his hand straying to cradle his cock and start to rub it, steadily—I shook my head: the man would be out of my life in a few hours. It wasn’t worth wasting any more of my thoughts on him.
He was still brooding about something, only this time he chose to do it downstairs, glowering at us as he leaned by the till.
“What’s eating him?” Gill asked as she passed me, half-a-dozen dirty glasses dangling from her fingers.
“Me, I wish,” murmured the small, disloyal voice in the back of my head. I just shrugged. “Frankly, Gill, I’m way past caring.” I’d been asked for a whiskey and green ginger, and I reached past her for the bottle of ginger wine that nestled with all the other rarely used liqueurs at the back of the bar. As my fingers closed round the neck of the bottle, still sticky from the last time it had been used, Gill took a step back from the glass washer and bumped into me. The bottle slithered from my grasp to shatter on the bare floorboards, spattering my sandalled feet and bare shins with liquid.
“Shit!” I exclaimed.
“Don’t move, there’s glass everywhere,” Gill ordered me, hunting under the bar for the dustpan and brush we kept there for incidents such as this.
“You know that’s coming out of your wages, don’t you?” Ian said. They were the first words he had spoken to me all evening, and something in the tone of his voice, after a day of contemptuous silence, made me snap.
“You’ve been waiting for this, you bastard,” I yelled at him, oblivious to Gill beginning to sweep up the glass fragments and the hapless bloke on the other side of the bar waiting to pay for his drinks. “You’ve been wanting me to make some mistake so you could bawl me out in front of everyone. Tell me, just what kind of kick do you get out of humiliating your staff? Do you go home at night with a hard-on, knowing you’ve made someone feel completely worthless?”
The words were falling out of my mouth too fast for me to stop them. Rage was blazing in Ian’s eyes, and I knew I’d gone too far, but it felt so good to finally tell him what I thought of him. Gill was getting to her feet, looking at me with something that veered dangerously close to respect, as Ian’s hand shot out and caught hold of my wrist.
“That’s enough, Stella,” was all Ian said, as he yanked me from behind the bar, past a knot of surprised drinkers, so fast my feet were almost pulled from under me. I struggled in his grasp, but he was stronger than he appeared, and that strength alarmed me. I’d intended to provoke some kind of reaction from him, but not this. He dragged me out onto the balcony, slamming the French door behind him, and then he let go of me. It was surprisingly quiet with the noise of the pub muffled; even at the height of summer, the neighbors went to bed early here, ready to rise at six for the following morning’s commute. There was enough light for me to see the expression on Ian’s face: anger and lust fighting to get the upper hand. Even though there were people sitting less than three feet away on the other side of the door, chatting and laughing over the beat of the music from the jukebox, I suddenly felt vulnerable and very alone.
“Come here,” he said, in a low voice that was as threatening as it was sensual. I knew what was about to happen; every moment of our time together had been leading up to this. I needed it—and yet still I feared it. I backed away as far as I could, until I felt the cool wrought iron balustrades of the balcony against the backs of my legs.
“Don’t make this difficult for me, Stella,” he said. “You want this as much as I do.”
And then his hands were on me, lifting me up till I was sitting on the balcony rail, limp as a rag doll in his grip. I kn
ew I shouldn’t have been so passive, but arousal was drugging me, making my limbs heavy and fueling my desire to give in.
His mouth met mine, tongue pushing insistently at my lips, forcing them to open and let him in. He tasted of peppermint and lime juice, and I found myself responding, my hands snaking up round his neck, fingers tangling in his messy curls.
He yanked at the neck fastening of my halter top, pulling it apart in one swift movement, baring my breasts to the night air. I broke the kiss in my urge to protest. “Please—someone might come out…”
“And if they do?” Ian’s reply was almost a sneer. “Come on, Stella, you know half the blokes in there want to see your tits. Everything you wear shows off those big nipples of yours, you little slut.” As he spoke, he took one of my nipples between his fingers, pinching it gently at first, then squeezing it until a moan slipped from my lips, part pleasure, part pain. I could feel my pussy opening against the white cotton of my underwear, the slow pulse between my legs more powerful than that of my heart.
I wanted Ian’s fingers in my knickers so badly, but if I asked him to put them there, I knew it would prove me to be the slut he’d already called me. My legs were wrapped round his arse, and I used the backs of my calves to push him a little closer to me, so that his cock was resting against my cunt, hot and vital even through the layers of clothing which separated us.