OK, here goes ....

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It was a warm July morning and the sun rose brightly, illuminating wispy clouds in brief but spectacular hues. I nearly missed the sunrise, struggling to keep pace with the lithe woman at my side, though she was thirty years my senior.

“Are we almost home Aunt Rose?” I puffed.

“Almost,” she answered, but as we neared her cottage, she took an unexpected turn to the other side of the block.

I found myself walking up the cement steps of a small white church. The door was unlocked, but the building was dark inside, with the only light coming from a window high above the altar. I stood at the rear, catching my breath, but Rose strode to the front and knelt, looking upward. After I caught my breath, I glanced at my watch several times, but Rose was in no hurry.

Finally, she arose and led me back outside to the street.

“Shall we get some breakfast dear?” she asked.

I assented, finally hearing a suggestion from Aunt Rose that didn’t puzzle me. We crossed the street to a sidewalk café.

“I didn’t think you were the type for church,” I remarked, as the waitress brought us coffee, fruit and croissants.

“There’s lot of things you don’t know dear,” Rose noted. “Or you know them, but you’re in too much of a hurry to remember. Most people take their hats off inside a church.”

I blushed at the dear woman’s scolding. Though not my aunt by blood, my mother’s best friend from high school had been a presence in my life for as long as I could remember. She’d lived a different, more adventurous life than mom, and was always approachable on any subject. When I was a teenager, she had scolded me in a similar voice for having unprotected sex, then promptly took me to see her gynecologist. A decade later, her words of reproach prompted me to remove the pink satin baseball cap I had worn on our walk, laying it on the ground beside my feet.

“Too late dear,” Rose told me with a smile, “But you’ll remember when we go walking tomorrow.”

“You stop there every day?” I asked.

“Are you surprised?” she replied. “It’s a nice quiet place to collect my thoughts, and the Pastor is a friend.”

I smiled, trying to discern mischief in Rose’s clear blue eyes.

“Not a lover dear,” Rose clarified. “Just a friend. My garden and his church share a fence. A few years back, we worked together to get the town to close off the alleyway between us.”

“And do you grace his pews on Sunday morning?” I wondered.

“Just the other six days,” chuckled Rose. “I go for the peace and solitude. You can miss a lot when you’re in a hurry.”

“I learn something new about you each time I visit Aunt Rose,” I said, sipping my coffee.

“You didn’t come to inquire about my spiritual health,” Rose declared. “You came to get over a boy.”

“A man,” I corrected.

“The handsome man with deep blue eyes and the scary whip?”

I blushed, even though my silver-haired companion didn’t.

“I drank too much wine last night,” I explained. “I said more than I should have.”

“So I’m going to have to waste a whole day and another bottle of Chardonnay to get the rest of the story?” Rose pressed.

“There’s not much to tell Rose. Like I said, Justin likes to spank me.”

“Last night you said you like it when he spanks you Trish.”

“Well yeah, that too.”

“But the whip was too much?” Rose asked in the same tone she might use to inquire if my croissants were too dry.

“You told me never to put up with a man that hits,” I said, avoiding the question.

“Yes, I told you that. I didn’t say anything about men who whip.”

Rose smiled, bit into a strawberry, and repeated her question: “Was the whip too much for you dear?”

I shook my head and blushed crimson.

“No Rose,” I confessed. “I wanted it. I wanted it a lot.”

“Then why are you sitting here eating strawberries with an old lady, when you could be lying across his bed, eating strawberries from his hand?”

I tear rolled down my cheek.

“He said-” My voice trailed off and then I completed the sentence. “He said I’m always in a hurry. He said he can never tell whether I’m thinking about his hand on my ass or my day at the office.”

Rose reached for my hand, and asked the waiter for the check.

“Let’s go home dear,” she said reassuringly. “And don’t forget your cap.”

I felt only a little better when we reached Rose’s house, a small white cottage set back from the quiet street.

“I thought we might work in the garden for a bit,” Rose told me, leading me around behind the house.

She retrieved a two pair of work gloves from her tool shed, and we spent the next forty minutes quietly pulling weeds in the flower beds behind her house. When Rose reached the end of her flowerbed, she stood up and stretched for a moment.

“Trish,” she told me. “Just inside the shed, on the second shelf to the right, there are some plastic ties in a bucket. Could you get those for me and bring them behind the shed? I need your help with something.”

“Sure auntie,” I agreed willingly, glad to be done with the weeding.

When I brought the ties to her, Rose was contemplating a wild rose bush that had grown up along a trellis beside the shed.

“What do you know about rose bushes Trish?” she asked me.

“They have thorns,” I smarted off.

“True,” the old woman admitted. “But that just makes them more beautiful. This one’s almost ready to bloom, and I need to tie it up to the trellis.”

“How can I help?” I asked.

“Take off your clothes,” she told me.

My jaw dropped.

“Take off your clothes dear,” she repeated more forcefully. “All of them, right now.”

A glance into her eyes revealed that she was serious. Hesitantly, I began to unbutton my blouse.

“You can leave on the pretty pink baseball cap dear, since you seem to want to wear it everywhere,” Rose told me, pointing over the fence to towards the white church building, as I continued to disrobe. “I’m going to teach you a lesson.”

I felt ridiculous, unlacing my shoes and peeling off my socks, but soon I stood in Rose’s garden wearing only a bra, panties and the baseball cap.

“Trish honey, what part of ‘all of them’ don’t you understand?” Rose asked impatiently.

Blushing, I unhooked the bra and slid off my panties.

Rose stared up and down at my naked body.

“Very pretty,” she concluded. “I didn’t know you shaved your snatch. Have you always done that, or was that especially for Justin?”

“For Justin,” I answered shyly.

“Well you should keep shaving dear,” Rose advised. “A bare pussy looks good on you.”

“Can I put my clothes back on now?” I asked.

“Heavens no,” she answered. “I have something to show you.”

She led me over to the trellis and spun me around. She pointed through a gap in fence at the church beyond. High on the back wall of the little white church was a stained glass window in the shape of a rose.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“A little bit of Notre Dame right here in Iowa,” she agreed. “You’ve seen it before, you know.”

“When?” I wondered.

“This morning, from the inside,” she told me. “I go there every morning to watch the sunrise through that marvelous rose window.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“I know you didn’t.”

I stood transfixed by the shades of azure and crimson reflected by carefully arrayed petals of inlaid glass, forgetting my nakedness.

Then I felt a sharp poke in my tummy.

“Ow!” I exclaimed, realizing that Rose had pulled a long branch of the bush around my waist.

I turned my head just in time to watch her affix the branch to the trellis with a plastic tie.

“What are you doing?” I asked, with alarm.

“What does it look like I’m doing dear?” she replied. “I’m tying up the rose bush, with you in it.”

She carefully pulled a branch around my left leg and attached this one to the trellis also.

“Aunt Rose,” I complained. “Cut it out. This isn’t funny.”

“It isn’t supposed to be funny. Remember, I’m teaching you a lesson.”

The next branch encircled my bare arm and pinned my left wrist to the trellis. Then very carefully, Rose positioned a thorny branch around my chest, with the thorns pressed against my cleavage.

I trembled as a thorn broke the tender white skin of my right breast and a tiny droplet of blood welled up.

Rose placed her hand on my cheek and looked directly in my eyes.

“Courage dear,” she advised. “Broken skin heals faster than broken hearts, but don’t wiggle so much or you’re liable to hurt yourself.”

After a few more branches and plastic ties, I was pinned helplessly against the trellis behind me.

Rose took off her work gloves and smiled at me.

“You look lovely dear. How do you feel?”

“Scared and ridiculous,” I answered.

“And excited?” she asked.

“A little,” I admitted.

“Very good,” Rose said, gathering up my clothes.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Inside for a glass of ice tea,” Rose told me. “It’s going to be a hot day and I don’t have the luxury of being naked like you, so I’m getting rather warm.”

“You’re going to leave me here like this?” I asked worriedly.

“Oh you’ll be fine,” Aunt Rose assured me. “It’ll take hours for the sun to make your lovely white skin as pink as your satin cap.”

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.

“Enjoy the view,” she answered. “The window is almost as beautiful as you are, and you have all the time in the world.”

She gave me a wink.

“You know dear,” Rose told me. “It’s completely private here and I left your right hand free. Maybe you’ll find something to do.”

She turned to walk away.

“When are you coming back?” I called after her in desperation.

“I’m not coming back dear,” she replied. “But I am going to go through your purse. I assume Justin’s number is in your cell phone. I intend to give the young man a call and explain your predicament. It’s a four hour drive from the city, but if he’s the kind of man you said he was, he’ll be hear in 3 ½. He might even bring his whip.”

Aunt Rose gave me a wicked smile and walked away.