Welcome To Corbin's Bend

by Thianna D

  Her Hail Marys were done. She looked at her phone, which read 4:25. Her mother leaned over and said, "You'd better go." Something about the way her mother said it made some part of Sarah snap. She rose, but instead of walking straight out into the narthex and making her way to the hidden entrance to the discipline room, she stopped at John's pew. She saw her parents looking at her. There were perhaps thirty parishioners there, all of them praying, scattered through the church.

  John looked up at her. She saw, with a wrenching feeling in her chest, that there were tears in his eyes. She looked steadily at him, and said, quietly, "I have twelve lashes coming. You're my Head of Household. Take me the fuck out of here and give me what I deserve."

  Her mother stood up.

  "Oh, sweetheart," John said. "I wish..."

  Her mother and father had walked up the aisle now, to take a stand next to the pew where they sat. John looked at her, with anguish in his eyes, then at Maeve and Joe.

  "I have to go," he said.

  "Damn right you do," said Joe.

  "Joe!" said Maeve, at the same moment Sarah said, "Daddy!" and burst into tears.

  "You don't want me, do you?" said Sarah to John. She saw John's mouth open, but then he cast his eyes down to the pew, got up, and pushed by, as politely as anyone could, and left the church.

  Sarah, without a word to her parents, went to be chastised for her selfishness. She had no more tears left, she realized, as the anonymously-wielded strap landed on her panty-covered backside. Whoever that HoH was, she rewarded him only with defiant grunts.

  She spent the rest of Christmas vacation in her room. She didn’t really cry all the time, though she did a pretty good impression for the remainder of Christmas Eve and all of Christmas Day. She did, however, lie on her bed and do nothing all the time.

  She refused to come skiing with her parents and Jeff. She gave a reasonable performance as someone who was breaking out of her funk, and told them she needed to work on her thesis. They extracted a promise from her that she wouldn't try to see John. She was fairly sure that her father, a cybersecurity expert, had hacked her phone and email. He might even have a tracer on her car.

  Whatever. Trying to see John was the last thing she wanted, she kept telling herself. No, what she wanted was not to do anything, and so she didn't. At one point she tried to find the resolve to touch herself between her legs, where her old curls were now growing back. It didn't have the desired effect, unless the desired effect was to break through the dullness to the wracking sobs. She felt wrong down there–wrong in a way that it had never, ever felt to do any of the so-called depraved things John had made her do: the time he had introduced her to watersports, the first time she had gone ass-to-mouth, her first enema. All of that had, frankly, to borrow a phrase, seemed like God's plan for her.

  And the aftercare, oh, God, the aftercare. No one would ever hold her like that again. How could anyone? How could there be anyone like him? She would never see Rome, or London–how could she? How could she stand to?

  She gave in and thought about John, remembering what it was like to have him inside her, telling her softly how good a girl she was, how nice her bottom was to fuck, gentle at first, and then becoming more and more exacting, pounding her ass while she cried out in submission to him, and his quiet words became a quiet growl that always seemed to put her over the edge and, more frequently than not, gave her one of those squirting anal orgasms that never ceased to embarrass her, despite as far as she could tell being John's favorite thing in the whole world, and being generally a thing worth staying on the planet for, if she could have just one more of them.

  She managed to make herself forget that she had no prospect of ever having another one of those, for the five minutes or so it took to bring herself to a weak climax. But of course, afterward she felt so much worse than the dullness that she considered it a triumph when the next morning she felt the dullness had returned.

  When her family came back from the mountains, it quickly became clear that their agreed upon plan was not to let her remain inactive. It also became clear that the only way to make her life bearable, and to stop hearing the phrase "Come on, Sarah!" uttered by someone in her family every five minutes, was to pretend. Really, Sarah had sharply honed her already believable acting skills during her time with John, because she and John had improvised a new scene practically every night: anal Shakespeare, anal Livy, spanking Antigone–they had a repertoire so large by the end of November they had joked about opening a nightly show at the Community Center.

  So, she went to the movies with Jeff, and to Endelé with her parents, and to church with them, and to ski for a day with Jeff, and then it was time to go back to school. She knew her parents had a long talk with Marilyn the week before the spring term started, but, as usual, whatever. She could act like an actual person in front of Marilyn the same way she could in front of her family.

  Sarah had no idea whether any of her audiences believed her performances, and she didn't much care, as long as it kept them from saying, "Sarah, you have to get past this." So she didn't skip her classes physically, but, from a mental standpoint, they were some of the only times she had to descend into the relieving dullness. She didn't ask questions and she didn't take notes, unless the phrase "Fuck you" repeated over and over could be considered an ironic comment on the content of her courses.

  Chapter 14

  Spanking Through the Ages" is what the flyer said, posted around town, "with Dr. John Dunn, PhD" Although Dunn always winced when he saw both the "Dr." and the "PhD" in there, he had to admit to a little satisfaction at the thought that the Community Club had been impressed enough by his presence in their midst to invite him to teach a course, however populist a thing it was.

  He planned to teach three class sessions: classical, medieval, and early-modern. Lectures, with questions, and a separate discussion session the following week, presumably after they'd read what he recommended they read. Dunn didn't have high hopes for the discussions themselves, but he at least hoped it would restore some of his happiness about living in Corbin's Bend, which it appeared he had done everything possible to fuck up in the first four months of his residence there.

  Not that October and November hadn't been blissful. Not that, were the Almighty to ring the curtain down right then in February and demand that he name the happiest two months of his life, he wouldn't answer without hesitation, "October and November with Sarah Harshaw." But at this moment he wouldn't swear to that same deity that it wasn't worth it if he would feel so rent in sunder for the rest of his life.

  He was too old of course to think that he really would, but unfortunately he knew with certainty she felt rent in sunder that way, and she sincerely believed it would be a lifelong rending, and his fault for not taking her home on Christmas Eve. And, moreover, John knew it could very seriously harm her future. He caught sight of her in the quads of Sandy Ridge, and watched her catch sight of him, and saw her, at the end of January, turn towards him, and, by the second week of February, turn away.

  "You don't want me, do you?" rang in his ears every night until he had to get up and drink until he couldn't remember who Mommsen or Livy were, let alone Sarah Jane fucking Harshaw.

  The first Tuesday in March was the day for the first of the three "Spanking Through the Ages" lectures. How much more unpleasant a shock could he have received than to see Maeve Harshaw in the front row? He couldn't think of anything, but he was grimly determined nonetheless to get through this thing whether she decided to scream "Pervert!" from her seat or not.

  Brent Carmichael introduced him, which was kind. The man was unfailingly old-fashioned, and he could be very judgmental, but he also supported everyone who had been allowed to buy into Corbin's Bend with a ferocity born of his previous life as a cop. Dunn couldn't help liking him for that.

  "I don't know how many of you have had a chance to meet Professor Dunn," Brent said. "But by all accounts he's one of the finest history professors the state of Colorado h
as ever known. His first students at Sandy Ridge have been raving about him–one of them is actually from Corbin's Bend, and I asked her the other day how she'd liked his class."

  Dunn looked at Maeve Harshaw. This was horrible. Her lips were set in a thin line, but she showed no other sign that she heard anything out of the ordinary.

  "Sarah," continued Brent, "said that Professor Dunn cares more about his students' learning the lessons of history than any other teacher she's ever met. And that's high praise! Our Sarah is a straight-A student who plans to get a PhD herself!"

  Maeve gave a forced smile at that. She did not look at Dunn, and he tried only to glance at her. Dunn wondered when Brent had this conversation with Sarah. He hoped it had occurred at least relatively recently, because he had begun to worry that she might be skipping lectures and discussions. One of his colleagues had said something about "That Harshaw girl seeming to vanish this term."

  "So without further ado I give you Professor John Dunn, speaking on Spanking Through the Ages."

  "Thanks very much Brent," he began. "And thank you to all of you who have welcomed me so warmly to Corbin's Bend." He didn't want to, but he found himself looking at Maeve as he finished his sentence. Her expression was absolutely unreadable, which was, he supposed, better than daggers shooting out of her eyes.

  "The ancient evidence for spanking is very slight. In fact, if we define spanking, as most of us do, as a domestic affair, whether we're talking about our own homes, or the schools which in many ways function for our children as homes away from home, or the communities–like this wonderful place Brent has given us that are really groups of homes put together into one big domestic community–all the evidence for the practice is very scanty until the 1700s. If we further down-define ‘spanking’, as many of us do, to be the application of a flat implement to the deserving bottom of a miscreant in such a domestic setting–well, until the 1800s the evidence is almost nonexistent."

  The audience tittered slightly at "application of a flat implement to the deserving bottom." Dunn thought he had probably judged his audience correctly. They were looking for two things, he supposed: confirmation that what they liked to do to one another stood on a firm historical basis (one introduced to them by a real professor from a good college!), and titillation at the hearing of spanking stories from history. From one perspective, as he was now making clear, that was a very tall order, because no positive historical confirmation of the Corbin's Bend lifestyle existed. Dunn thought, however, that they would probably be happy with the solution he had adopted

  "This does not of course mean that people haven't been spanking one another for many thousands of years." Another, larger titter. This was going well. He looked at Maeve; he seemed unable not to, damn it. To his astonishment she seemed to have a genuine smile on her face, if a small one. "The availability of the hand and of the bottom, especially in days when clothing was a good deal easier to navigate than it is now–or, perhaps, more importantly, than it was in the days when spanking first truly enters the historical record–and the need for some members of society to let other members of society know that they won't get away, say, with buying quite so many new stolae (that's the Roman equivalent of a nice dress) in the future. . .Well it all tends to make one think that the argument that spanking is a modern thing can't be sound. Just because we don't hear about spanking until the early-modern period doesn't mean it wasn't happening all the time. The whole idea seems a quite ridiculous example of the argument ex silentio--–that is, from silence."

  At that point, he actually saw the woman next to Maeve lean over, and say something in Maeve's ear, and saw her nod and smile. He knew he would spend at least the next agonized month of his life trying to figure out what that woman had said. "I see why Sarah likes him"? Or "Really, he's not a pervert, is he?"

  "In fact, my own theory is that the reason spanking only enters the record when it does is that clothing had at that point become so difficult to navigate, and garments–above all, feminine garments–have become so complicated that the practice rose from the level of an everyday thing not worth mentioning, to a lengthy affair in which, if a Head of Household were to have a hope of making an impression, some of this clothing would have to be removed."

  Laughter. He hadn't had the slightest idea that this could ever go so well. He actually felt himself relaxing and becoming the version of himself he knew his students liked best: willing to trust his instincts, and follow up extemporaneous threads, confident that he had the skill to make them come out amusing and memorable.

  "In the face of this difficulty, I think there are two things I can do that might interest you this evening, and in the next lecture, which concerns the medieval period. First, I'll talk a bit about corporal punishment in general in the period. Then, because that sort of thing has a rather distasteful effect, since our evidence concerns rather horrible things people did to real criminals–rather, than, for example, the aforesaid filia who shops too often and goes to bed with a warm bottom because of it." The parenthesis was an improvisation, and his audience loved it. "I'll tell you how I imagine a real spanking might have taken place–that is, I'll tell you an ancient spanking story."

  Fred came to get Sarah at her dorm room that same Tuesday in March. Sarah heard the knock, and, standing in front of the door, in her nicest dress, waiting a moment before she opened it, she resolved to try. To try for real. To give him a shot.

  He stood there in his coat and tie, not looking terrible, but looking, well, his age. Twenty-two. Young. He was a handsome boy, Sarah couldn't deny it, but she cursed at herself inwardly that she just couldn't call him a “man”. Suddenly she wanted to cry. She felt like she was back at St. Michael's on Christmas Eve, hearing John say, "Oh, sweetheart, I wish..."

  He wished what? He wished she would forget about him? Or he wished she would go away? Or he wished she were older?

  Fred and Sarah went to the nicest restaurant in Sandy Ridge, a French place where they had decent steak frites and onion soup. Fred was a history major, too, and did a good job of keeping the conversation up, which was new since the last time they had been out together, way back in September, before...

  It felt forced at first, but she managed pretty well as long as she focused on conveying the impression that she was having a good time. Any time she wondered whether she were actually having a good time she tended to feel the dead weight of sorrow waiting just outside the circle of light cast by the little candle on the table.

  Did he know about John? she wondered. It was perhaps rather notable that Professor Dunn's name didn't come into Fred's discourse at all, given that Fred had two classes with him this semester, one of which Sarah had been set to take, before... That time she felt the tears well up, but she blinked them away.

  They walked back to her room. Marilyn, unusually, was out that night at a concert or a play or something. They stood in front of the door to the room, and Sarah said, "Thanks, Fred. That was really nice."

  "Can I come in for a little while?" Fred asked.

  She was taken aback. He'd never said anything like it before. Feeling like she wouldn't mind seeing what it felt like to kiss him again, after all these months (he had never really been a bad kisser), she said, "OK."

  As soon as he closed the door behind him, though, things became very difficult. Fred sat down on her bed, and said, "Get over my lap right now, Sarah. You've been a very bad girl."

  She looked into his eyes, and she could see the uncertainty there. She remembered the night John had taken her in hand, and what John's eyes had looked like. Thinking back, and knowing now that John had been far from as confident about her needs as he had seemed to be, she could, in her memory, see some uncertainty in John's eyes. But it had been of a completely different kind from the uncertainty she saw in Fred's.

  John's uncertainty had been whether Sarah actually did want to submit to him–whether she had been putting him on in some way. Fred's uncertainty was whether he–Fred–could find it in him to sp
ank her.

  It wasn't going to work. She didn't know whether, if Fred really had been a Dominant, and hadn't acted uncertain about spanking her, she might have responded to him submissively; she rather thought she might have. But she had never seen a lap she was less likely to place herself over.

  "I'm waiting, Sarah," he said. He tried so very hard.

  "Fred, that's so sweet," she said. "What did Marilyn tell you?"

  Now he turned sullen. "Nothing."

  "Dude. Maybe it wasn't Marilyn, but unless you've had a personality transplant, I don't see you suddenly trying to spank every girl you take out to dinner."

  "OK, fine. It was Marilyn."

  "What did she tell you?"

  "She said... she said you like spanking."

  Sarah sat down next to him on the bed and took his hand. "She's right," she said quietly. "But not from you."

  "From Professor Dunn."

  "Yes," Sarah whispered.

  "Why? Why from him, and not from me?"

  "Fred, do you really want to spank me?"

  "Yes!"

  Ugh. She just wasn't up for attempting a lengthy explanation.

  "Fine," Sarah said. She got up, and walked over to the foot of Marilyn's bed. She bent over it in what John called Submissive Posture Number Two. With her right cheek on the bedspread, she looked at Fred, whose mouth gaped open a little. "I have indeed been a very bad girl, and I do indeed need a spanking. Give it your best shot."

  He rose, rather woodenly. "Um, what do I do?"

  "Jesus Christ, Fred. Let's say for the sake of argument that you didn't just completely disqualify yourself as a Dominant, let alone the kind of Dominant I need. You pull my dress up, or you tell me to pull my dress up."

  That made him angry, at least.

  "Get that dress up, Sarah!" he said. He sounded almost convincing.

  Sarah complied. She was wearing briefs. She hadn't worn nice lingerie since December.