Holiday Heat: Heartwarming and Bottomwarming Stories for the Festive Season

by April Hill

  Okay, so after hanging around this long, I guess you probably want to know what happened. Voyeurs, all of you!

  Well, Sam isn’t going to divorce me. He’s says he not sure yet about hanging me by the thumbs in the cellar, but he’ll let me know after he gets the final bills. Meanwhile, we had quite a long discussion about what is and what is not funny, and Sam, unfortunately, came down on the Smedley side of the issue.

  In deference to the fact that I had recently been spanked rather vigorously just two days previously, Sam and I made an “appointment”, so to speak, to get together later in the week, at which time he will inspect my previous injuries, and decide if the time is right for what he is choosing to call “The Worst, Most Godawful Hiding You’ve Ever Had or Will Probably Ever Get in Your Whole Damned Life.”

  * * * *

  February 6th , 9:17 p.m.

  Let me tell you about my day.

  Sam did, indeed, do a bit of shopping on “Sculpture” day, as he so wittily refers to it. And about an hour ago, he finished trying out his purchase.

  For the occasion, I was permitted to make myself as comfortable as possible, since he was apparently expecting our evening to be a long one. I chose our bedroom, which we almost never use for this purpose, wishing to avoid negative connotations. But it still seemed the most comfortable spot for what Sam had it mind, so we retired there, immediately after dinner, of which I ate very little.

  After raising my simple cotton skirt and slip and lowering and removing my panties, Sam suggested, a bit rudely, that I kneel on the bed, with my head resting on the mattress, and my buttocks raised. Attractive, no? And then, he unbuttoned his cuffs, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. I hate when he does that! Why do men always have to do that?

  Having never been spanked with a strap before, I didn’t know precisely what to expect, but please, take this word of advice. If you find yourself in a similar circumstance, and get to vote, go for the belt, every time. The sturdy leather of the strap, I discovered, is much thicker, much wider, but shorter than a belt, and has a hand-grip (for the gentleman spanker’s comfort and ease of handling, I suppose.) Unlike a belt, which Sam has always had to be careful with, this little beauty goes precisely, and directly, where it’s aimed. In one afternoon, I became something of an expert, though probably not a real enthusiast, of the strap.

  So, when I was “comfortably” in position, Sam asked me, “Are you ready?” (Very considerate, right? Like there’s a good answer for that?) Then, with no further chitchat, he laid into my bare ass with the damned strap, and didn’t slow down until I was howling my head off. Every awful swat seemed to land right on target, smack in the middle of that really soft, full area I usually think of as the “sit spot”. When I couldn’t stay put any longer, and tried to wiggle away, he turned me over on my side, pulled my knees up to my waist and swatted my butt and thighs, then sat down on a chair, pulled me over his lap, and let me have it again. Sigh. I think he had a lovely time, actually.

  That’s it. It wasn’t as bad as I expected, and it was a hell of a lot worse than I expected. It was, as he had promised, the worst spanking he’s ever given me, and I can’t quite imagine what it would take to get a worse one, or what it would be like. I was sore for a good twenty-four hours, and just as all the stories say, I couldn’t sit down with comfort, and winced whenever I touched anything back there. I ended up with both cheeks a kind of deep, reddish-pink in color, for which Sam apologized, (not especially sincerely, in my opinion.) In the spring, he’s going to build a fence between the Smedley yard and ours, and he threatens to electrify it.

  Oh, by the way, Sam made me clean up the Smedley sculpture garden, all by myself. It took two days, and the Three Wicked Witches watched out their window and cackled at me the whole time. The remaining pieces of art are sitting in our back yard, waiting for a thaw, when they’ll just melt away, and be forgotten, I suppose. But I did manage to rescue Donny Osmond’s head, and a couple of his significant parts, and I put them in the freezer in the garage, like souvenirs, sort of. I’m already thinking about how to use them, sometime in the spring, maybe.

  You know me…I’m always thinking.

  THE END

  “In One Year And Out The Other”

  Did you know that in the late nineteenth century, a woman who wanted to lose weight could simply walk into her local drugstore and purchase a “sanitized,” ingestible tapeworm? I have no idea how one goes about sanitizing a tapeworm, and I’m only assuming the little fellow was ingested, of course. I certainly hope so, though. Any other method of delivery is too gross to contemplate. Lillian Russell, probably the most lusted-after beauty of her time, was said to have employed this unappealing technique to maintain her voluptuous curves at a svelte 198 pounds, a weight apparently considered attractive in her day. I don’t think the tapeworms always got the job done, though. In every photograph I’ve ever seen of the tightly corseted Miss Russell, she’s wearing a pained expression that suggests she’s waiting for everything to explode out the top at any moment.

  Okay, so by this time, you’re probably figured out that this story is about a person with a weight problem. When I was in high school, I was twelve pounds overweight. I remember this precise number, because I was shocked by it. I fought the twelve pounds with starvation, every diet pill I could beg, borrow, or steal, and by nurturing a smoking habit. And I lost. Not the weight, but the contest. Actually, I prefer to think that I was betrayed by my body. I had stopped growing at just over five feet, leaving me short, and statistically plump. Had I continued to shoot skyward (to maybe six foot, eight?) my weight would now be approximately ideal. At my current height, and where I appear destined to remain forever, I should weigh (according to the sadists and lunatics who decide these things) in the neighborhood of one hundred pounds—a neighborhood I left some time ago.

  Weight and the loss/gain of it are not subjects I especially enjoy discussing, but they are subjects that have hounded me for much of my adult life, as they have millions of other women like me. (Okay, I lied. Maybe it’s been just a little longer, in my case. Like before I could walk?) Which is why millions of women—also like me—make the same New Year’s resolution year after year. To go on a strict diet—preferably a miracle diet, since some unfeeling bureaucrat at the FDA has apparently nixed the tapeworm thing.

  These well-meant resolutions are almost always doomed to failure, of course. The age of miracles has passed, and the so-called miracle diets we all see advertised are transparently dishonest and often dangerous. Not that anyone cares. Let’s face it, folks. If someone came up with a diet rich in nuclear waste that made you glow in the dark but required no exercise, people would line up to buy it, and lobby Congress to get it legalized.

  Anyway, one morning last year, just after Christmas, I was in my kitchen, leaning over the sink and discussing these weighty issues with my sister-in-law, Emma. Emma and I have been on a quest for the perfect diet for thirteen years, since the very day I married her handsome younger brother, Sam and we began commiserating about how we looked in bridal attire. On this particular morning, though, we were bemoaning the extra pounds that each of us had managed to add since Thanksgiving, and wondering how such a horrible thing could have happened, since we had both been eating like birds. I used the expression, “eating like a bird” for years, until Sam pointed out to me that birds eat five times their body weight every day. Anyway, Emma had just begun to explain to me a fabulous new diet regimen, purportedly the current rage in Hollywood. A diet absolutely guaranteed to take off fifteen pounds in only eight days. She had heard about this incredible miracle at the beauty parlor, while having her hair made naturally blonde.

  At that moment, Sam walked by, apparently overheard the conversation, and dealt my protruding rear end a solid whack with what may have been the big, red rubber jar scraper. This implement has been used in a similar capacity before, and the whack had a familiar feel to it. It was only one swat, but Sam put a fair amount of muscle into it, and it hurt l
ike blazes. I jumped, and yelped into the phone.

  “Sam’s home, I see,” Emma remarked, matter-of-factly. “I’ll call back later, when the coast is clear.” Sometimes, I worry that my sister-in-law knows too much about my marriage—and its quirks.

  One of the “quirks,” if you can call it that, is that at certain times, and in certain situations, Sam employs certain less than traditional methods to… Okay, in the interest of brevity. I will get to the point and simply say it. Sometimes, my husband spanks me. It still sounds a little funny, when I say it out loud, which I don’t, too often. It’s something I agreed to, some years back, when I was going through my first premature mid-life crisis. Most of the time, I don’t regret agreeing to the idea of being spanked, but I do like to tell myself that I was probably under the influence of carnal lust and strong drink at the time. And sometimes, despite having agreed in principle to the idea, I’m not especially cooperative.

  Sam has never—and I repeat, never—spanked me against my will. That’s the deal we made. When I overstep the boundaries—as defined by Sam—I get spanked. But, if I truly believe he’s not being fair, and tell him so, we’ll sit down and talk about it. There have been times when he agreed that I was right, and backed off. On the other hand, if I whine too much, and struggle too vigorously, or try to get out of a spanking too often, by abusing the “Unfair Clause,” Sam has devised several ways to make me regret my attempts to manipulate the system.

  Which is not to say I’m ever happy about being spanked. It hurts, and it’s embarrassing, but all things considered, it’s worked pretty well for us. So whatever goes on before I end up over Sam’s knee or over the arm of the couch, is done to slow things down, or to distract him. Sam says I’m trying to tire him out, but that’s not really true. It’s just that it’s always been hard for me to submit to a really hard spanking without attempting some sort of diversion, however futile. Sam is more than a foot taller then me, and outweighs me by fifty or sixty pounds. If he wanted to spank me, with or without my consent, he could do it with no trouble at all, but he never has. Of course, he also has the ability to add a couple of extra really hard whacks, as a penalty for my lack of cooperation, so I generally keep my resistance to a minimum.

  After I hung up the phone that morning, I turned to glare at Sam, who was sitting at the table reading the morning paper and munching on one half of a bagel—without butter or cream cheese, or even the strawberry jam that was right there on the table. Sam has very peculiar eating habits, which could be why he weighs exactly what he did when we got married.

  “What was that for?” I complained, rubbing the stinging wet spot on my behind.

  “You were doing it again,” he said, flipping a few pages to the sports section.

  “Doing what?” I asked. I knew perfectly well what, but I wasn’t about to admit it.

  “The two of you are planning another New Year’s resolution, and another idiot diet.”

  “We were not!” I lied.

  Sam lowered the paper far enough to smile at me over the top.

  “Would you like to try that again?” he said pleasantly. “Taking into account that you’re naked under that robe, while I’m fully dressed—including a belt?”

  Okay, he had made his point. I slumped down in the chair across from him, and stole the other half of his bagel—on which I immediately slathered several tablespoons of cream cheese.

  “What’s wrong with going on a diet?” I grumbled.

  With a sigh, Sam laid the paper down on the table. “Nothing’s wrong with it. If you’d do it right for once—slowly, and intelligently.”

  Ah, yes. Those words, again. Two of Sam’s favorite diet words—slowly and intelligently. He’s also very fond of the word “healthy,” and though Sam is normally a very mild-mannered guy, he can get very testy on this issue. A couple of years ago, I saw on TV that the bizarre tapeworm cure was still available at this clinic in Tijuana—just four hours away. I told him about the show, and tried to convince him that maybe it could work, with proper medical supervision, of course. When I wouldn’t shut up about the obvious scientific merits of swallowing live tapeworms, Sam exercised his spanking option and dragged me across his knee for a dozen hard swats to my bare ass with the nearest thing at hand—which happened to be the TV remote.

  I was chastened, but undiscouraged, and before long, I came home with a new book that highly recommended rewarding every weight loss with something called a “shoegasm”—a shopping expedition for expensive designer shoes. The reward idea sounded reasonable enough, in principle. I’m not really into shoes, and usually just go barefoot or wear flip-flops in the summer. I didn’t care for the diet in the book, either, since it involved vegetables, so I substituted another diet, which called for eating gigantic quantities of the one thing you liked best—until you got sick enough to throw up. Revulsion therapy, the book called it.

  Chocolate custard éclairs are my favorite food in the whole world.

  So, I ate thirteen of them at one sitting.

  After sitting on the bathroom floor and barfing my guts out for forty-eight hours straight, I had lost a pound and a half. Not the stunning weight loss I had hoped for, I explained to Sam, but I had lost my passion for chocolate custard éclairs. But then, something went terribly wrong. I didn’t get rewarded with a “shoegasm.” I got bent over the bathtub and spanked to tears with an old rubber flip-flop—which packs a hell of a sting, in case you’re wondering, and leaves a sort of a pinkish waffle pattern on your butt.

  * * * *

  Just after Christmas, that year, we went to a party at Emma and Joe’s. There were seven or eight other couples there, and toward the end of the evening, the men retreated to the den to discuss whatever men discuss in the den, and the women congregated in the kitchen, to complain about the kind of men who retreat to the den. With the New Year approaching, the conversation soon turned to making—and breaking—resolutions. Which gave me the opportunity to regale the crowd with all my usual lame stories and jokes about losing weight. I started with the tapeworm story, segued into the tale of poor old Lillian Russell, and threw in something I had just read—about sperm whales.

  “Have you ever pondered the scientific fact that a baby sperm whale has to gain eighty pounds every single day of his life in order to reach healthy adulthood? My God! I’ve not only been born in the wrong era, but the wrong species!” Heartened by three margaritas and gales of appreciative laughter from all the ladies, I continued:

  “My mother used to tell people—including total strangers– that I was like ‘a fat, adorable little pink leech’ at birth. According to her, I popped out sucking my fist and looking around for a Wendy’s, then attached myself to her breast like a refrigerator magnet or that face-sucking creature in Alien and exhausted her with my indescribable gluttony for the next eight months. She’s shared that story with everyone from my first grade teacher to Walter Hemmings, my date for the senior prom. Apparently intoxicated by the word “breast” on the lips of an adult woman, Walter blushed right down to his argyles and developed a noticeable boner right there in our living room. Later that night, apparently believing that a lascivious nature ran in families, Walter tried to have his way with me in the front seat of his father’s station wagon. He would have succeeded if he hadn’t become tangled in my hair and sustained a terrible groin injury on the stick shift.”

  More laughter, and I was just getting started.

  “Have you ever seen a one hundred pound bag of cement? It’s maybe two feet long, and fifteen inches wide, and that is simply not fair. I’m a lot taller and wider than a bag of cement, and I probably have a higher IQ. And a more pleasant personality, too. Why should be expected to weigh the same as the damned bag?”

  I’ve made these same lame jokes, and told these same dreary stories for most of my adult life, and by now, they were getting shop-worn, but it’s what I’ve always done. Since I’m sure that everyone in the room is thinking to themselves that I’m fat, I do what I suspec
t a lot of other overweight people do. I get there first with the insults, and beat everyone to it. It’s an old habit, but a habit that Sam has always disliked, and I know better than to do it when he’s within earshot.

  What I didn’t know was that the male conclave in the den had broken up, and that Sam was listening to my sad little comedy routine from the doorway.

  As the women rejoined the men in the living room, Sam put a firm hand on my elbow, and nodded toward the hallway. It was very discreet. Everyone in the room was babbling away, so I doubt that anyone even noticed our absence as he led me down the hall, up the stairs, and into the master bedroom. Joe and Emma’s bedroom is about as far from the living room as you can get in their house, so I assumed, at first, that I was about to get lectured. But then, Sam turned and locked the door, which is just never a good sign.

  “Sam,” I began quickly, still hoping I was wrong. “Let me…”

  He shook his head. “I told you what would happen if you started in on this being fat crap, again, and you stood right there and did it. I won’t have you putting yourself down like that any longer. It’s gotten to be a habit, and it’s going to stop—now. Let’s just call it my New Year’s resolution.”

  “But, you don’t…”

  This apparently wasn’t my day to get a word in edgewise. Sam ignored my babbling and pointed to the king-sized bed, which, with my usual fabulous luck, was the kind called a sleigh-bed, with a wooden headboard and footboard. (Sam really likes footboards. When he can’t find a handy flogging post, anyway.) A few seconds later, I was up-ended over Emma’s lovely, curved cherry wood footboard, with my skirt over my head and my pantyhose and panties down around my ankles.

  When I suggested to Sam that it probably wasn’t the best etiquette to use someone else’s expensive, antique bedstead for what he had in mind, he simply adjusted me until I was a bit further over the footboard, with my face on the quilted bedspread.