Following Patrick’s ignominious defeat to Rosanne (Gallery 938), he stayed away from the gym for a few weeks. Sarah, who set the fight up to humiliate him, began to feel guilty. So what if he showed off in front of the girls? What harm did it do? So when she did finally see him in the gym, she went over to him and asked him how he was.

"Yeah, not bad, thanks," he answered, avoiding her eye. "You?"

"Oh, I’m fine, thanks," she replied. Then, tentatively: "I’m sorry it got a bit out of control with Rosanne the other week."

"I was a fool to agree to it."

"I’m sorry?" she reacted, surprised. "I thought you were the one who suggested it."

"Well yes, but I didn’t mean it."

"Oh, I must say you’re rather hard to understand."

"It’s just that all women fancy boxers, and I feel if they’re shy, I’ll introduce myself that way."

 

"I don’t know that we do all fancy boxers," Sarah told him, beginning to think he deserved what he got after all. "So you ‘introduced yourself’ and got two black eyes and a split lip for your trouble," she chuckled.

"That’s why I say I was a fool to indulge her."

"I’m sorry?" Sarah demanded, struggling to keep her temper. "I repeat, you were the one who proposed a fight. She indulged you."

"Yeah, but really I’m used to bare-fist fighting. You’d be surprised, but it’s a totally different contest. If she and I met in the ring this coming Saturday for a bare-fist fight, I guarantee the result would be different."

"Oh, okay, I’ll see what she says," Sarah told him slyly, while rattling away on her phone.

"What?"

"Shh. Here, this is what I’ve sent her. ‘Patrick wants a rematch on Saturday, but bare-fist this time.’"

"Hey, I didn’t …"

"Shh, she’s replying. Here we go: ‘Tell Patrick he’s a sportsman, and I adore his idea! See you on Saturday.’ Hey, girls!" she called her friends over, "We’ve got another fight on Saturday. Patrick’s challenged Rosanne to a bare-fist rematch!"

"Well it wasn’t exactly …" Patrick weakly tried to protest.

"Oh, wow!" exclaimed one. "I did enjoy the last one!"

"I can’t wait!" declared another.

"Oh fuck," thought Patrick.

*****

By Saturday, attitudes on both sides had hardened. From gossip, Patrick discovered that he had been "set up" from the start. In return, he made a disparaging (or complimentary) remark about Rosanne’s leotard, declaring that "her tits and arse looked as if they would push themselves out of it any moment". This was in fact true, and most men wouldn’t think it any bad thing, but when Rosanne got to hear about it, she was incensed. Tensions threatened to boil over when the ring they had used wasn’t available.

"I could just take you round the back of the gym and give you a hiding there," Rosanne suggested, meaning every word.

"How about right here and now, bitch?" Patrick responded.

"Come on then, mother’s boy!" she sneered, raising her fists.

"Whoa, get between them!" shouted Sarah. "We can use Dave’s gym. He’ll let us, because he fancies me like mad. Plus, we’ll get to watch it on a big screen, like in a cinema."

*****

"Alone at last, mother’s boy," Rosanne murmured to Patrick, stroking him ironically under the chin. (Meanwhile, Sarah sat next to an awkward, hesitating Dave in the darkened auditorium.)

"Fuck you!" Patrick replied, pushing her away and taking a swing at her that missed.

"You’re shit, just like last time," Rosanne gloated, sending him to his side with a right hook.

"Missed!" crowed a jubilant Patrick, successfully dodging an attempted follow up left hook. "Now who’s shit?" he continued, whisking his head to the side, out of the way of a failed right cross.

Rosanne snarled an expletive back at him as she blocked an abortive right. It was as if being without gloves meant that the formalities and courtesies were abandoned, and the pair of them hissed and cursed at one another as if they were in the street on a Saturday night after the pubs had closed. 

"Thank God for that!" one of the girls exclaimed, as Rosanne’s right fist struck home. They heard an unmistakable "crack", then yelp of pain from Patrick, as it rocked his chin upwards in a pulled uppercut.

"She had me worried for a minute," Sarah confessed, settling down to watch Rosanne crouch to avoid a left from Patrick, while driving her left fist into his chest.

Patrick groaned and bent double, so Rosanne helped herself to his exposed side, plunging her right fist deep into his kidney. Gasping, he rallied to throw a right hook, but she leant back beyond it and punished his chest again with another straight left. It was a hefty blow, and Patrick’s recent aggression gave way to regret over boasting about his prowess with bare fists.

"Isn’t she sexy when she fights?" Sarah whispered to Dave next to her, whose eyes were bulging at Rosanne’s breasts, which swung as she punched her opponent. The excitement of the fight had clearly got to her, and in close-up shots on the screen, her hard, enlarged nipples poked into the fabric of her space suit-style leotard.

"It’s black eye time!" one of the girls called out joyfully, watching Rosanne’s right fist bludgeon Patrick’s left eye. "That’s brought a smile to her face!"

Certainly, for the first time, Rosanne looked pleased. Crouching low, she fired an upward left cross which caught Patrick expertly on the jaw and sent him staggering. 

"My God!" croaked Dave, loosening his collar, as Rosanne punched Patrick on the nose.

"Is this turning you on?" whispered Sarah.

"No!" he insisted; then jumped as she felt the front of his trousers. Chuckling to herself, she could tell he was lying.

"Shh," she coaxed, slipping a slender hand inside his trousers.

Rosanne was building her own momentum. Having made Patrick’s eyes water with her punch to his nose, she made some of the viewers in the cinema look away as she belted it with her other, left fist. When he staggered back, eyes brimming with tears, she ran after him and put him on his back with a mighty left hook. 

"Isn’t she strong?" Sarah whispered to a whimpering Dave, while her fingers, now inside his underpants, tormented, teased and tickled.

Rosanne certainly was strong though, as the disorientated man on the mat testified. He struggled to his knees, shaking his head to try and clear it. Meanwhile his sleek, curvy opponent looked on unperturbed, one hand on her hip. 

Patrick got to his feet and squared up. Rosanne, relishing the prospect of further combat, echoed his stance. He lashed out with his right; she shifted her body out of the way instantly and struck home with yet another left to his chest. Keep exploiting the injury, why don’t you?

Talking of which, she got him in the same eye with her right. Everyone knows that if you get the simplest little injury (say, a splinter) the next time you catch it, it hurts more. Speaking personally, although I’ve had splinters and can vouch for them, I have never been given a black eye. But I imagine that if someone does give you one, it hurts even more if, about 10 minutes later, they get you in the same eye again, as this curvaceous lady did.

That same lady now let rip with an unrestrained, exuberant left uppercut. It caught Patrick both unawares and on the chin, and sent him crash landing to the mat once more, banging down painfully on his left shoulder. 

It was too much. This evil woman had humiliated him a few weeks previously, and she was doing it all over again, while all the girls would be cheering on his demise, gawping at the cinema screen. His chest burnt and his kidney still ached. One eye was more or less covered over and throbbing like mad, she had injured his chin and his jaw, probably broken his nose, and now he had crunched down on his shoulder. He wept tears of self-pity, while his pretty opponent looked on and mocked him. 

"You can concede defeat if you like," Rosanne told him, not bothering to conceal the laugh in her voice.

"Fuck you!" Patrick blurted out, on his feet and finally mastering his tears.

"Okay then," Rosanne agreed, ploughing her left fist hard and sharp into his stomach, cruelly adding one more pain to his collection. Patrick silently cursed his decision not to concede defeat, but he just couldn’t with her laughing at him – and she knew it. His hand went over his mouth, thinking he was going to be sick, but fortunately he wasn’t. As he blundered backwards, she doubled his speed with a nasty right to his temple.

"Oh, lovely!" whispered Sarah about Rosanne’s next punch, while she squeezed and lightly pinched inside Dave’s underpants.  "What a beautiful right hook! See the way she’s sent him spinning! I thought her bum would swing itself right out of her leotard with the force of that punch!"

"Are you okay, Dave?" one of the other girls asked, as he had a "coughing fit".

"Yeah, fine," he told her, trying to sound normal.

"You dirty sod!" whispered Sarah, chuckling and surreptitiously wiping her hand on a tissue.

Patrick fired a despairing, panic-stricken right. Rosanne didn’t even need to dodge it. She had hit him so hard, so many times, that his coordination was all to pot. Instead, she sent her left low into his mid-section, mercilessly tearing into the injuries she had already inflicted. Patrick recoiled and, in an echo of her earlier tactic, she burrowed her right fist into his kidney. It had still been smouldering from her previous assault – now it was raging hot once more.

For a second time, Rosanne needed to make no effort to escape a wayward punch (an attempted right hook this time) but let it sweep harmlessly round, before banging yet another one at Patrick’s tortured mid-section. 

"This has decided me," a girl who had said nothing so far declared. "I’m definitely going to learn to fight," she explained, pushing back her attractive blonde hair. "The next time a man won’t take no for an answer, he’ll get a nasty surprise!"

"Yeah, like 5 knuckles all over his eye!" another commented, licking her lips.

Applause broke out when Rosanne uppercut Patrick again. It was a brilliantly timed pulled right uppercut. For a moment, it looked as if her fist had wedged itself under his chin, the way it stayed with it after sending it upwards. One or two women laughed at the ridiculous sight of Patrick’s mouth, wide open but silent a few inches above Rosanne’s hard fist.   

Cheers were added to the applause when she sent Patrick reeling with "her best punch yet," according to one of the viewers. It was a ferocious left cross. It’s difficult to decide where it actually hit him on his face, because on impact he immediately fell to the side, and ran into the ropes to stay on his feet. No matter where it hit him – it worked like a dream!

Like a fool, Patrick returned to the middle, only to be dispatched on his way again. There was nothing pulled about this next uppercut of Rosanne’s, which was gloriously expansive. Her fist soared upwards while a howling Patrick fell away from it. 

Sensing victory, she went after him and landed a hefty blow to his jaw. How could a boxer look so graceful, shapely and feminine, yet be so deadly? There was something incongruous about this woman in her flimsy silver leotard - who looked as if she belonged in a fashion parade - belting a man on the jaw or knocking him down with an uppercut. 

Rosanne angled a crafty right under Patrick’s defensive hand to land on his already battered nose. She gave him no time to absorb the pain but, looking to finish him off now, got down low and sent a missile of a left cross up at his jaw. This must have been her favourite punch, because it made her smile again. Or perhaps it was hearing Patrick’s wail of pain, then watching him fall onto the mat.

Astonishingly, he looked as if he was going to get up again. She put a stop to that, however. She held him where he was (sitting on the mat) by placing her leg over his shoulder, then used her fist to persuade him to stay put. It crunched against his jaw from above and he collapsed in a sobbing heap, managing to utter: "Enough, no more."

As was her due, Rosanne stood and flexed beside him for the cameras, the victorious woman with the beaten man at her feet holding his injured face. She pushed him onto his front with her sparkly silver boot and flexed above him, like some ancient warrior goddess with her vanquished male foe.