by Emily Tilton
Not only, Mindy’s smile said, did Cathy have a loving husband, but it now seemed very clear that the big Marine who usually came across as so gentle had a very dominant streak as well. Doug wondered if Cathy understood that she had already crossed over into her new life as a taken-in-hand wife. He had not the slightest doubt that John had made the decision to spank her, and to start getting what he had a right to get in bed.
Cathy turned to John, the red in her cheeks fading to pink. “Not here, John.” She swallowed hard. “Please?”
The Please? made Doug’s heart melt. In it he saw and heard the tender acknowledgment that Cathy had gotten it wrong, and for a good long while, too. He of course had no idea what path had led the Linds to the moment when they overheard Doug and Mindy engaged in the version of power exchange they found so satisfying, but the moment Cathy had joined John at their door, when Doug had invited them for dinner, he had seen that things between the Linds needed adjustment.
Doug didn’t think every marriage needed to involve dominance and submission—he had certainly met his share even of military men who wouldn’t know how to dominate their way out of a paper bag—but when the Linds had come over with the coffeecake the day after Doug and Mindy moved in, he had assumed that John had already taken Cathy in hand. It wasn’t just his size and muscularity and sheer Corps-ness: the gentle quality, too, and the control over himself that Doug discerned in the big man, all seemed to scream dominant husband.
Cathy had seemed harder to read, that first time, but Doug had—unconsciously, he supposed—assumed that she didn’t want to make a show of her submission to her husband. Now Doug understood exactly what the puzzle had been: Cathy hadn’t known she was submissive. She probably even fought against her instinctive deference to John, disrespected him for no reason other than that she needed for reasons of her own to avoid her own nature.
No longer: with that Please? she had said to him, I know that if you tell me to play with myself in front of the neighbors, I’ll have to do it, or get a spanking.
Doug thought the single word probably didn’t mean that Cathy would now instantly become the wife she knew she should be. If John did tell her to raise her skirt and put her hand in her panties here and now on the Landises’ couch, she probably wouldn’t do it, and the road immediately ahead for the couple might be very rocky.
But John seemed to sense the same pitfall. “No, sweetheart,” he said gently. “Not here. Later. At home.”
Cathy relaxed very visibly at that. She looked over at Doug, and he thought he could even see the tiniest hint of gratitude in her expression. He knew he needed to nudge matters along again, though, and he expected the gratitude would disappear for a bit when he did.
“Would you like to see Mindy masturbate, Cathy?”
“Oh, sir,” Mindy wailed softly. “Please, no.”
But even Cathy, it seemed, could hear in her new friend’s voice the ambiguity of that no. She looked up at Mindy with wide eyes, then over at John. On her face now the shame and arousal vied for control. Her hands, in their little fists, still trembled. “John?” she said very quietly, and Doug felt certain she had no idea what sort of question she wanted to ask.
Doug turned to the ex-Marine. “I don’t have to ask you, bro, do I?”
John turned his eyes from Cathy to Doug. His expression now seemed a little dazed, as if the obviousness of Cathy’s need and heat had stunned him. His eyes widened, then narrowed again. “Well,” he said slowly, “I think Cathy probably needs to see how a more experienced girl does it before she does it herself.” He turned to his wife. “Sweetheart, watch closely now.”
“Oh, God,” Cathy whispered.
“Mindy,” Doug said, “you may get your penis toy from the special drawer. Your panties will stay down.”
She gave him a look that almost had a wink in it, and shuffled off toward Doug’s den.
“There’s a drawer in there,” Doug explained to the wide-eyed Cathy and the crookedly smiling John, “that has some naughty things in it. Mindy isn’t allowed to open it without permission.”
Mindy had already reemerged, carrying the big flesh-colored dildo. Cathy gave a little gasp.
“Babe, why don’t you give it to Cathy for a moment so she can feel what it’s like? John, is that alright?”
“Sure,” John replied. Cathy looked pleadingly at him, and he said, “Go ahead, Cath. Don’t worry. I won’t make you use one.” He paused, then continued, “At least until you get used to showing me your pussy and playing with yourself just with your fingers.”
Cathy’s eyes closed for a moment, and when she opened them she looked over at Mindy, still with her panties down around her knees, who now held the dildo out to her. Doug watched the blonde’s little hands spasm as if they couldn’t keep themselves from opening to receive the naughty toy no matter what Cathy’s mind said.
Finally, John said, a little sternly, “Cathy, take the toy. Mindy wants you to understand what you’re about to watch.”
With a tiny sigh as if her husband’s will had managed at last to turn her mind in the proper direction, she turned her hands up and let Mindy lay the eight inches of latex rubber, with its bulging head and its prominent veins, on them. The touch of the dildo elicited a whimper from deep in her chest, and her attention stayed fixed on the thing for a long while, as Doug and Mindy and John watched her lip quiver.
“May I clear the coffee table, sir?” Mindy asked. She knew exactly what he would command, of course: she often had to play with herself on the coffee table.
“Yes, babe, you may,” Doug replied. “You may pull your panties up, now. You’ll come in them.”
While she cleared away the plates and coffee cups, Cathy began to turn the dildo in her hands, each revolution seeming to bring a fresh sound from her, as if she were completely unconscious of her body’s little noises in response to this terrible sight, this terrible touch. Doug wondered suddenly if she had ever even touched John’s cock.
She looked up when Mindy gently took the artificial phallus from her hands, her eyes wide.
“It’s alright,” Mindy murmured. “I want to show you.”
Doug and John turned the table so that Cathy wouldn’t have to move to see up between Mindy’s legs when she had laid herself down on her back and put her feet on the painted wood surface, knees bent and spread to reveal herself completely. With her eyes closed, Mindy began to demonstrate how a girl in lacy green panties could pull them aside to gain access to all her own intimate secrets. How she could put a big dildo inside herself that way. How she could put a finger in her anus, too, when her husband told her to. What her pretty cunt smelled like, when she got so very aroused. What she sounded like, as she quickly built to a shattering orgasm. How she begged Doug to allow her to come, and how he consented, and how she screamed—the same scream she had emitted that morning during her disciplinary anal.
Cathy’s brow was puckered, and her nostrils flared. She breathed hard, and now the fists of her hands were clearly necessary to keep herself from rubbing at the front of her skirt, though those little hands stayed firmly in her lap and seemed from time to time to exert a downward pressure.
When she had finished, Mindy’s eyes opened, and she lowered the knees she had held so high for so long, so that she could look at Cathy, over the lovely green-lace-clad length of her body.
“Thank you, Cathy,” she said softly.
“For what?” Cathy whispered, as if she and Mindy were alone in some place apart.
“For letting me show you. I’m sure it will make you feel good, when you do it for your husband. I’m so happy to help.”
Chapter Nine
John and Cathy held hands as they made their way back to their own house. The sight of Mindy Landis holding the gusset of her panties aside and thrusting the thick, flesh-colored dildo in and out of her adorable shaved pussy, crying out her submissive shame as her husband looked on approvingly, filled his mind’s eye. The little sex show he and Cathy had seen in
the living room of their new neighbors had turned his cock into an iron bar, and the thought of Cathy learning to pleasure herself now, under his tutelage, kept it that way. Her spanking—the firm first discipline his wife needed to have, for all her disrespect and disobedience—could wait until the morning; John wanted to help her feel tonight what they had just seen Mindy feel, on her back on her coffee table.
Nor did he have the slightest doubt that Cathy wanted it, too. He had watched her just as intently as he had watched Mindy, during the masturbation show. Cathy’s face had gone bright red, and stayed that way, but she hadn’t missed a single detail of Mindy’s shameful performance, as far as John could tell. Cathy’s chest had risen and fallen in a quick rhythm, her lips parted and her eyes seeming to shine. Now she walked with her head down, and her hand clasping his very tightly.
So she took him completely aback when she said, in a thick voice, as soon as their back door had closed behind them, “John, sweetheart, I’m so tired, and I’ve got a headache from the beer. I… I want to, you know, follow up on… you know, that stuff we just saw?”
The lights in the breakfast room, which they had just entered from the path were off, and only the dim light over the sink burned in the kitchen. John thought he could see the color come back in Cathy’s face as she spoke.
He didn’t lose his nerve, but he felt so completely transformed by what had happened at Doug and Mindy’s that he didn’t suspect what the consequences might be of giving in to what seemed like a reasonable request from Cathy, despite it only being 10:30 at night. They had gone through a great deal in the last few hours. Why not let her off the hook for tonight?
So he said, without a second thought, “That’s alright, Cath. We can follow up in the morning.” He watched the color go from her face, and then come back immediately, obviously at the thought of the ‘following up.’ He had used the very neutral words she had found for the next stage of their disciplinary and sexual journey, but even that seemed to have great power over her, and at that moment he felt utterly exhilarated to know how to make his wife blush, rather than turn angry eyes on him the way she had just that morning at the mention of sex.
He sent her to bed in her innocent white cotton nightgown, asking only the concession that she wear nothing under it, which made Cathy’s brow pucker. She gave a little nod, though, and he found her asleep that way, in bed with the covers thrust aside and her hand on her thigh as if she had been thinking as she fell asleep about her coming masturbation lesson, her fingertips just under the nightgown’s hem. John covered her up and crawled in beside her. He kissed her on her brow and said, “Love you, Cath,” but she didn’t stir.
In the morning, she was gone.
* * *
It took John eight hours to find her in the bar of a semi-sleazy hotel in a town very much like Yerba Linda, but fifty miles away. He had spent two of those hours in a near-frenzy, texting her every ten minutes, asking her, then telling her, in the first two or three to come home.
Then he had started to worry. Cathy had driven away in her red hatchback, and had clearly taken an overnight bag, which seemed from the hangers lying on the floor to contain some relatively nice clothes she generally wore to work as well as her makeup kit. She might also, though, have been kidnapped as soon as she left, or had an accident in her obviously distraught state of mind. John’s texts had changed to pleas just to let him know she was okay.
Yerba Linda and the surrounding communities weren’t high-crime or even medium-crime places, though, and Cathy was a good driver. In his gut John thought he knew exactly what had happened: she had woken up in the pre-dawn darkness and started to think about the previous day. She had decided she couldn’t stay, probably without a settled plan but with the idea, knowing her, that she had limited time to get away.
She had kept herself from thinking about what she was doing, and concentrated on packing stealthily, on driving away into the sunrise. Cathy loved sunrises: this one, which should have been spent in John’s arms, talking away her remaining doubts about what she had learned about herself at their neighbors’ house, she had spent on the road, probably persuading herself to thank God she had escaped.
At noon he had swallowed his pride and knocked on Doug and Mindy’s door, to ask if maybe Mindy had heard from Cathy. “Oh, bro,” Doug said, frowning. “I’m sorry. I’ve gotta say I don’t think you really have anything to worry about, from what I saw last night. I know it won’t help you to hear it from me, but she’ll come home. Give her a few hours, and let me know if she doesn’t get in touch, and we’ll look for her together.”
“No,” John had said distractedly. “It helps. Really. It’s just… well, you could probably tell this is new territory for us—what happened last night, I mean.”
Doug nodded. He seemed to consider for a moment, then spoke again. “Can I take your mind off Cathy for a couple? I’ve got something I want to show you that I think might interest you.”
A little mystified, John followed him inside to the den, checking his phone as he went and of course finding nothing from Cathy. He half-expected to see Mindy naked in the den, tied over an ottoman, but Doug proceeded to show him the plans for a strange-looking airplane, lying on his worktable by the window.
“I can’t tell you much,” Doug said, “but this is going to be a big deal, and I need a guy like you.”
“Like me?” John asked, thoroughly puzzled now.
Doug nodded. “Someone who looks and carries himself like Marine—ideally, someone who was a Marine.”
“To do what?”
“You could call it a combination of testing and marketing. Looking the part and doing the job will be equally important. It’s gonna pay very well for a few days’ worth of work. Like I said, I can’t tell you much—really no more than that, but do you think you might be interested?”
“Sure,” John said, becoming distracted again as he wondered what Cathy would think of him working for Doug in some way.
Doug apparently saw the wandering of John’s attention. “Can you look at her credit-card activity?” he asked abruptly, changing the subject. “I doubt she’s really trying to get away, so I bet she’ll use her usual card.”
“Oh,” John said, feeling a little stupid but also grateful for his neighbor’s help. “That’s a great idea. I bet I can see it on her laptop.”
That was how he found her: at four o’clock she bought a drink at the Saguaro Junction Hotel bar.
* * *
He walked into the bar expecting to find her drinking alone. He thought he would sit down with her and talk through everything, over a beer. He didn’t intend to back down on the issue of family discipline, because he had the same gut feeling Doug had also picked up—that Cathy needed help with boundaries, even if she couldn’t admit it to herself. Nor did he want to give up the idea that using a firm hand in their sex life would bring their marriage back to life.
As a Marine from New Jersey, though, brought up as a gentleman, he had to admit that what Doug and Mindy had shown them last night, as enticing as it might seem, could well not represent Cathy’s cup of tea. True, as Doug had also confirmed, it had looked like Cathy’s cup of tea last night, though perhaps in a rather ambiguous way. But, while sex held more importance for him than he had really liked to give it credit for early in their marriage, to bring Cathy home and show her how much he loved her was his only goal. They would have a drink together, and drive home, and he would wait to spank her until the time was right.
The time, unfortunately, was right at the precise moment he caught sight of her standing at the bar between two guys, with the hand of one of them on the ass of her red work skirt. Cathy had dressed the full hot-to-trot secretary, cherry-red lipstick to match lipstick-red skirt and all. She had tilted her head back, and was laughing in a horribly fake way at something the businessman with his hand on her ass had said.
Things happened very quickly at that point, because as she laughed, Cathy’s eyes scanned the room as if to see
whether any more businessmen might want a piece of her ass. She saw John, in his jeans and USMC t-shirt. She stopped laughing, and her eyes went very wide.
John had advanced far enough at that point to hear the second businessman say, “What’s wrong, baby?”
Cathy got only the word “My—” out her mouth before he had her upper arm in his hand.
“Hey,” said the handsy one. “Who—”
“I’m her husband,” John said. He knew he should count. He knew he would be able to get rid of the anger and be ready for action, if he counted. He didn’t count.
“John!” Cathy said. “You’re hurting my arm!”
“If you think your arm hurts, Cathy, just wait until I get you over my knee.” The red pulsing of his anger felt hot in his veins.
“Jesus,” said Handsy to John. “I didn’t…” John saw fear in his eyes. To Handsy’s credit, he found a little courage. He turned to Cathy. “Baby, do you need help?”
John looked into his wife’s eyes, and he found there a temperance for his wrath that he hadn’t imagined: he saw understanding and love, despite his solid grip on her arm and despite the fear she clearly felt at the knowledge that she would absolutely, positively get a very hard spanking of her own very soon. She looked at Handsy. “No, thanks,” she said quietly.
John looked at the two men, who were staring back at him in alarm. The raw edge of his fury softened as he realized how much respect they had instantly accorded him. He turned back to Cathy. “Apologize to these gentlemen for wasting their time, Cathy,” he said quietly but forcefully.
Guy number two said, “Hey, that’s alright.”
But Cathy said, with her eyes fixed on John’s hand where it gripped her above the elbow, “I’m sorry.”
Handsy said in an alarmed voice, “You’re not really going to spank her, are you?”