Chapter 24

After lock up we would talk for hours, telling each other everything. The screws never bothered Steve. There were agreements like that inside. Steve kept a lid on certain things for the screws, and they left her to do as she liked with her cellmates. Not that they didn't like to cop an eyeful through the peephole now and then.

With Steve's guidance I quickly settled into the prison routine, and even got a job in the kitchens, thanks to her influence. She said that there was even a chance I might get into the library, the cushiest number, when a friend of hers was released. My only visitor was Felicity, who, true friend that she was, came once a month without fail through my entire sentence. Apart from that, I was on my own, or would have been, without Steve. Before slopping out on my first morning, she told me there were women who would resent my instant elevation to being her slave, so she would treat me as hard as anyone else, maybe a little more even, because it was more logical that she would hate me than love me.

Steve said that when she first fucked me, I'd given her an awful dilemma. Years ago, when the police found her next to the body of her lover, she had vowed to never let anyone reach her inner emotions again. She'd begun to fall out of love with love at an early age, first with men - after having to go on the game to eatm when she was a teenager, and eventually with women - except in cold lust, after the death of her lover at the hands of a violent, drunken psychopathically misogynistic client, whose murder was Steve's reason for being incarcerated in this hell-hole for life. The solicitor and barrister assigned by the Crown not only failed to convince the jury that she had killed the man while trying to save her lover's life, but she'd ended up carrying the rap for her lover's death as well! The most awful irony was the blood that stained her hands from cradling Tracey's poor battered head would doubly convict her.

How was she to know that the bastard she'd killed was a respected circuit Judge? The whole thing was a frame up that made mine look like a safe conviction. She'd admitted straight away that she'd killed the man, kicked him in the head so hard he'd died, but what was she supposed to do when she stormed into that hotel room to find him screwing her lover's bleeding body? Say 'thank you sir and bless you for murdering the only human being I have ever loved, and by the way, why not kill me too while you're at it?' because it had been kill or be killed in that sordid Notting Hill hotel room in 1963, with the ghastly irony of 'She Loves You' by the Beatles on the radio as the judge slumped dead on the gritty carpet. She got life, with a recommendation to serve twenty-five years.

Steve's story broke my heart. Then she told me that it was Tracey, her lover's face, that flew into her mind, with laughing, candid blue eyes that seemed to wink in approval at the sight of me, sprawled helplessly. Steve wasn't convinced that it might not just be wishful thinking. All those years of soulless, emotionless prison sex - no matter how physically stimulating - had left a void that nothing seemed to fill. She tried, in her own way. She'd changed a few into the sexual creatures they had potentially been and set them loose into the system, but most of her victims would spend the rest of their lives trying to piece themselves back together after the big convict's brutal but clinically skilful attentions. All feared her for the way she could make their bodies respond, but she told me that never in her ten years in this jail had she been with a woman with an appetite or attitude quite like mine.

Though the vast majority of the women in Galloway were straight, and avoided any kind of romantic or sexual attachments, once you scratched the surface there were full-on traditional dykes and femmes, a few pain-loving S&M devotees like me, and others with even stranger perversions. Since Steve had established herself as queen-dyke and muscle-Mary of her wing, she told me she'd personally vetted all the inmates who attracted her, straight or queer, and gave them an unforgettable taste of her own brand of discipline. Until now.

Lying together on Steve's narrow cot, I dissolved with pleasure just to feel her strong arms encircle me. Despite the fact that I was in a notorious women's prison, in a small cell, paired with a convicted double-murderer who enjoyed a fully justified reputation for violence, I felt safe. I had come to prison for Sarah, for love really, and on the very first day of my proper sentence, the demon-in-chief had fallen in love with me! Not that it stopped the extreme sex, nor much of the violence, but in private, she allowed me affection and a safe word. For this, I gave her everything. I put my life into her big, hard hands. I told her everything about myself from birth to the moment we met. Steve was intrigued by my privileged life, but even more by my sexual history. My revelatory change from straight to lesbian, the orgies, the rock stars who had fucked me, the magic summer with Tori and David. My descriptions of the House in the Woods excited her very much, made her jealous and hot for me. I learned to tell the stories well, and invent new scenarios where she joined in.

Sometimes, rarely, I talked to her about Sarah.

"I've 'eard she's sumfing special ... she's a bit of an 'eroine. 'Arf the dykes in Styal must be after her!" Said Steve. I never realised that being young pretty and revolutionary would give us a fan club of gay convicts!

"I'm sorry it didn't work aht for you baby. Really 'ard luck on you, 'avin' yer love again and then losin' 'er to the fuckin' system ... But it don't explain why yew go for the rough stuff ... does pain reelly get yew off? I mean, it looks and feels like it does, but a lotta girls do try to fake it wiv me, 'cos they 'ope I'll stop sooner, dopey tarts!" Steve guffawed.

"It's something in me that ... Maybe I feel I don't deserve the life I've had, the good luck, the money ... maybe I feel guilty for what happened with me and Sarah the first time, and I need to be punished for fucking up her life ... but to be honest, I had the same tendencies even before we were lovers, I just hadn't learned how to express them. I'm just one of those strange people who enjoy sexual pain, and ... humiliation ... and excess ... as a kind of antidote. Like a chemical balance in my life. And once I tried it - after all, I suggested Sarah tie me up first. It wasn't her idea at all - I knew that stuff was for me ... Sarah unlocked it, and I think ... I think Margaret defined me sexually. She taught me how to really focus and take pleasure from the right sort of pain."

I cried a little as I remembered the good times with my Mistress, and how the delicious agonies I suffered at her hands had acted as a balm upon my troubled soul. The moment passed. Her vile duplicity could still made me coldly furious.

"Shit Steve, in a way, once I went on the run with Sarah, I had nowhere else to go but here. Losing her for the second time hurt too much, and I just had ... I think I needed to hit rock-bottom. I needed the shame and pain ... and I didn't realise it until I met you, but most of all, I think I needed someone completely real, and unlike anyone I had ever known before ... I needed you ... and you were there ... here." My voice cracked.

Steve tilted my face, and kissed me. It was very hard for her to say the three words that hung between us, but I knew they were in the air. Despite our incarceration, sometimes because of it, there were many fantastic ways for her to show me how she felt.

She took both my nipples between her fingers and thumbs, and rolled them hard, squeezing tighter and tighter, until I let out a shuddering gasp. My face turned red, while my eyes became soft and hungry. I could feel Steve's heart pounding with excitement. She couldn't leave me alone; the lure of my smooth skin was irresistible to her. As Margaret had discovered, it was good job I healed fast, though a few visible bruises helped to keep up our pretence at enmity. And as for me doing her ... she said that no one had given her pleasure like that since Tracey ... Eventually she confessed that it was even better, given with no reservations, no jaded, tainted loving after a long weekend of fucking for money.

"Seven," Steve growled.