A Shadow in the Water

by April Hill

  Matt was nowhere in sight, so I got in the shower. I was rinsing the shampoo from my hair when he came into the bathroom, yanked me out of the shower, and dumped me over the sink, sopping wet, with my hair dripping all over the floor.

  Have you ever heard that thing that says that getting spanked when you’re wet hurts more than dry? Well, it’s true. Only I didn’t get spanked—exactly. While I was out applying for a job at the local Kmart, Matt had gone for a nice, long walk in the woods. He had come back with several long, slender switches, and a nasty disposition.

  Among the few unpleasant things I’ve managed to miss in my life, one of them is never having sat down on a hornet’s nest. Thanks to Matt, though, I can now describe how that feels—or close to it. I have never been so grateful for privacy, either. Our cabin’s charming, isolated location allowed me to howl at the top of my lungs without fear of embarrassment. Not one of the features mentioned in the brochure, but welcome, nonetheless.

  Matt held me down and used the switch on every square inch of me, from mid-butt to mid thigh, while I whooped and wailed, and shrieked, and promised never to go near another Kmart, even for their giant year-end sale. By the time he had worn out switch number one and started on switch number two, I was swearing to earn an MFA and teach art skills among the lepers, or the homeless and destitute. Anything! He hauled me into the bedroom and finished off switch number two with me sprawled over his knee for a half-dozen swats that will go down in spanking history.

  “Now,” he said, tossing away the nubs of the last switch. “I’m going over to pay the bill so we can get out of here early tomorrow. You are going to stay here, and start thinking of something useful to do with your ability, and your talent.”

  “The minute you walk out that door,” I hissed. “I’m leaving, even if I have to hitch-hike all the way back to Los Angeles, and even if I get run over a by a truck, and…”

  Matt reached into the bedside table, pulled out a set of police handcuffs, and before I could wriggle away, he had handcuffed me by one wrist to the cabin’s antique four-poster bed.

  “Start thinking,” he ordered.

  Matt was gone longer than I expected, and the whole time, I worked on getting loose. By the time he got back, I had pretty well twisted myself and the bedding into a doughnut—more like a cruller, actually. The moment he came through the bedroom door, I started screaming for him to get me untangled. He walked over to the bed and began to undo the cuffs, then stopped, took a couple of steps back, and took another look at my situation. Instead of unlocking the damned cuffs, he just stood there, shaking his head and grinning.

  “Interesting.”

  “That’s it?” I wailed. “Interesting! That’s all you’ve got to say after leaving me like this for a goddamned hour?”

  Matt chuckled. “I’ve been handcuffing suspects for twenty years, and I’ve never had one do anything like this. I just wish to hell I’d brought a camera. Without pictures, nobody at the station’s going to believe it.”

  “Very funny, “ I growled. “Now, get me out of these stupid things and…”

  “Not so fast. It looks to me like you got yourself in that mess by trying to escape. Right?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in the fact that my shoulder is probably dislocated, would you?”

  “You’d be screaming bloody murder by now if it were dislocated. How’d you get your left leg like that?”

  I gave him the dirtiest look I could manage. “It wasn’t easy.”

  “I’ll bet. You know, you’re lucky my Mom brought me up to be a gentleman. There’s a lot of opportunities here that could be exploited by someone with no scruples.”

  “If you don’t undo these handcuffs and get me off this fucking bed in exactly thirty seconds, you pervert,” I snarled. “I am going to cut your balls off the first time I get the chance.”

  Matt just chuckled. “Let’s see what we’ve got here, so far. Resisting arrest, trying to escape, threatening bodily harm to an officer of the law in the pursuance of his duty…”

  “Your duty, my ass!” I shrieked. “You’re enjoying every second of this!”

  Matt smiled, and started to roll up his sleeves. “Not as much as I’m about to.” With that, he began unbuckling his belt. As he came back to the bed, I groaned. My rear end and thighs were still stinging like mad, and itching everywhere. But Matt had something different in mind. He took my right ankle and used the belt to secure it to the bedpost, about halfway up. Leaving me like that, he strolled off, into the adjoining room.

  “MATT!”

  He was back a minute later, with a dishtowel in one hand, and carrying something behind his back. Without a word, he lifted my head and tied the dishtowel around my eyes. I yanked my head from side to side and howled in protest, but fifteen seconds later, I was blindfolded.

  “This isn’t funny, damn it!”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you could see yourself from my angle.”

  “And what if I just start screaming my head off?” I crowed. Yes, I know. It was not one of my smarter moves. A moment later, he used a second dishtowel to gag me. Then, there was silence.

  “After I’m done here,” he said grimly. “You’re going to apologize for ruining this trip like you have. And if you don’t do it right, we’ll start all over again. Do you understand?”

  I writhed, and tried to kick at him with my right leg. A minute later, I felt my right ankle secured to the opposite bedpost, also halfway up. My legs are now forming the letter “V”.

  For vanquished, maybe? Violated? Maybe vengeful, or vulnerable?

  Okay, now, here’s the deal. I was crazy about this guy, right? Over the past few weeks, he’d done some pretty disagreeable things to my backside, but the truth is, he’d shown no inclination to gross sadism. So, I had no reason to believe that he was about to torture me. (After the last few days, of course, the idea had probably crossed his mind a couple of times.)

  So, what is he planning to do? I asked myself, taking in the facts at hand? One hell of a workout with the hairbrush wouldn’t have surprised me, but to my knowledge, that particular implement of torture hadn’t been packed. His belt, which would leave some serious welts across the backs of my thighs, was (thankfully) occupied elsewhere. Besides, my current position didn’t make either if those two things feasible. Without getting too graphic, let’s just say that I was on my back at the moment, with a good many parts of me that do not normally see the light of day exposed in the most explicit manner you can imagine. My rear end, however, was more or less unavailable. The good detective had something hidden behind his back when he entered the room, and if that something should turn out to be a bullwhip or a cat of nine tails, or something involving electrical voltage, I was in for a very unpleasant evening. I could feel my nipples contract, and the skin on my abdomen start to buzz and tingle.

  I could feel Matt moving closer of the end of the bed and then …

  When he began, I writhed and bucked and twisted, arching my back and lifting myself off the mattress, kicking frantically to free my bound legs. I attempted to scream, desperate for at least that pitiful relief, but nothing came from my tortured lips other than a few strangled sounds. It was hideous! Unbearable! And every muscle in my body strained to turn away, to escape the agony!

  The son of a bitch was TICKLING me–everywhere! And I do mean everywhere! With one of the damned sea gull feathers I had collected! And as though he’d been torturing women for years, he was doing it really well.

  He started with the soles of my feet, concentrating on the inner arches, until I was bouncing up and down and screeching inside the gag. Then, spreading my legs even wider, he worked the tip of the feather slowly upward along the sensitive inside of my calves and thighs, teasing the feather up one side all the way to my crotch, then back down. He sat down on the edge of the bed and worked over my breasts, dragging the thing with exquisite slowness across and around each nipple until I shook and quivered and m
oaned. Then, down my stomach, and again between my legs, to my labia, touching, flicking, teasing until I was about to lose my mind. And then, just when I was sure that the next thing I would feel was his tongue, or maybe his hand, just when I began to enjoy this as the most enjoyable torture I could imagine, he stopped.

  I was shaking like a leaf now, all my muscles too tired to contract any longer. Matt reached up and pulled the gag from my mouth.

  “Ready to apologize?”

  “Go to hell!” I hissed. I was so excited I was about to explode, I wanted him inside me so bad I was close to begging, but no one can call me a quitter. At this point, I’d die before I apologized!

  Suddenly, the feather brushed lower, touching that tiny puckered spot about which I am extremely sensitive. I groaned, and writhed.

  “In all that time you spent with your friend Gabe, did you ever hear much about the persuasive powers of the ginger root?” he asked. I hadn’t, but I had read and seen enough Internet pornography to know what he meant. Peeled, raw ginger, deposited in or well up one’s rear orifice, I am told, can be very unpleasant.

  “Matt,” I wailed. “You wouldn’t!”

  He dragged something dry and rough across my abdomen. “I went to the grocery store while I was out. This was in the Chinese cooking section. Three ninety-nine a pound. Looks kind of big and ugly to me, of course, to fit into such a small … But, hey, who am I to argue with all those Internet experts? I guess it can be done, with a little muscle. Those Internet folks speak very highly of ginger, and we did find a hell of a lot of it in Tannhauser’s fridge. There must be something to it. I guess we should put the gag, back, though, just in case. I don’t want to upset any hikers that happen by.” I felt something prodding between the cheeks of my ass.

  “All right,” I yelped. “Stop it! You win! I apologize!”

  Matt reached up and pulled off the blindfold. He dangled the piece of ginger in front of me. “You’ll be nice the rest of the trip?”

  I nodded.

  Matt looked a little crestfallen. “Too bad. This ginger thing looked interesting. Maybe later? Recreationally, so to speak?”

  “Recreationally, my ass!”

  Matt grinned. “Exactly.” He tossed the ginger in the wastebasket. “Okay, no ginger. Still, it’d be a real shame to waste…Well, the thing is, the position you’re in suggests a lot of possibilities, doesn’t it?”

  I glared at him. “You wouldn’t!”

  But he did, and he was right, it was very interesting. Not especially comfortable, but definitely interesting.

  We slept late the next day, and decided to stay one last day at the cabin. Matt went out for a while late in the afternoon then came back and dragged me off the bed. He stopped before that rack thing that always passes for a closet in hotels, rummaged for a moment through the wrinkled stuff that passes for my wardrobe, and threw me a heavy coat.

  “Get your coat on. We’re going for a ride.”

  “Uh, oh,” I said warily. “That doesn’t sound good. I’ve seen this scene this in old gangster movies, like maybe two hundred times. We’re not going to the public dump or anything, right? Like Jimmy Hoffa, maybe?”

  Matt sighed wearily. “Enough jokes. Just take the coat and come get in the car. Unless you’d rather ride in the trunk, which can be arranged.”

  “Jeez!” I cried. “What a grouch! But why do I need a coat? It’s not cold out.”

  “Where we’re going, toots, you’ll need the coat. Take it, don’t take it—whatever you want—but I don’t want to hear one damned whine when you start turning blue.”

  “And just when have you heard me whine?” I complained.

  Matt rolled his eyes. “Take the damned coat.”

  I took the coat, we went downstairs to the car, and off we went—somewhere.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll find out when we get there.”

  “How far is it?”

  “A ways. Through the city, and a ways beyond that.”

  “God! You’re as bad as my dad used to be. You know, I could start asking ‘are we there yet’ every five minutes, or singing ‘Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.’ How would you like that?”

  “How would you like it if I stopped the car, pulled down your pants and whaled the tar out of your bare butt in cross-town traffic?”

  “Oh, all right,” I conceded grumpily. “Since you’re going to be such a riveting conversationalist, I’m going to just go to sleep.”

  “Thank you,” Matt grinned. “I’ll wake you when we get there.”

  I woke up to the sound of the trunk slamming closed, and a quick glance at the dashboard clock informed me that I had slept for almost two hours. No surprise. I always sleep like a log in cars, trains, and buses—or anywhere else, for that matter. My natural state is asleep. The car was stopped on the shoulder of what looked like the Middle of Nowhere, and Matt quickly appeared at my door to open it.

  “Where are we?” I asked, rubbing my eyes as I stumbled out of the car.

  “Get your coat on,” he ordered, and held out my coat while I struggled into it. He was right. From the sound of the surf crashing on the rocks, we were very close to the water, and the wind was blowing so hard it pelted our faces with sand—hard. As Matt had promised, it was cold as hell.

  I could see that we were standing on a rocky cliff. Maybe sixty feet below, waves were breaking on the rocks so violently that even this high up, the salt spray stung my face. I walked to the edge of the cliff and cautiously peered over.

  “If you’re trying to get rid of me, this won’t work, you know,” I shouted over the wind. “Bodies thrown into the ocean from high places always keep coming back. Like driftwood, or empty plastic Coke bottles. I read that somewhere!”

  Matt tossed me a pair of yellow rubber boots and a yellow plastic poncho. “Put them on,” he ordered.

  Fully garbed, I looked a lot like that guy who does frozen fish commercials, or maybe Paddington Bear, but my curiosity had been whetted. It was almost as whetted now as my need to pee, so when Matt started off down the steep path that led to the rocks below, I trailed after him without complaint. The path was muddy—a minefield of rain-slick rocks—so naturally, I made most of the trip down the cliff on my butt, bumping from rock to rock like a deranged yellow rubber duck. Even my intrepid guide took a couple of falls before we arrived at the bottom.

  “Okay,” I whined, rubbing my rear end and looking up through the fog to where we’d started. “You were absolutely right. How could I have ever guessed? This has been a barrel of fun, so far. What’s next, Daniel Boone?”

  Matt took my hand and led me down the beach, and soon, we were crawling over a slippery pile of boulders the size of the Chrysler Building. I had to stop behind a rock for a minute, to tend to an urgent request from my famously tiny bladder, and then we were off again, scrambling up the mountain of rocks. The game was getting very old, by now, and I was finally getting just a bit cranky when Matt finally stopped, dragged me up to the highest peak next to him, and pointed through the mist.

  Across a stretch of churning water, on a steep, rocky promontory that thrust out into the Atlantic, a very tall, very old stone lighthouse loomed up out of the fog. Its sides were stained with age and weather, and at places around its foundation, chunks of white plaster had fallen away, exposing the hewn stone blocks underneath. The roof and upper catwalk had disappeared in the lowering fog, and its wonderful old Fresnel lens had long ago been replaced, but the light still worked. The beam swept across its own perilous stretch of ocean in the same steady, reassuring arc that it had for God only knows how many years. In the heavy fog, the beam shone a ghostly yellow, and every few seconds, the beacon flashed red. Now and then, the eerie, mournful sound of a foghorn forced us to cover our ears.

  Abutting the towering column of the light itself was a crude stone building with two small windows and a low door—the keeper’s cottage, deserted now in this automated age. As I stood in the mist
and watched in awe, I thought the light was the most beautiful man-made thing I had ever seen—and there wasn’t a rosebud or a wishing well in sight.

  We sat and watched for close to an hour, until the wind threatened to tumble us off the rocks. It began to rain on the way back—a cold, blinding rain that made seeing ahead, or walking upright almost impossible. I clung to Matt’s coattail as we made our way across the rocks, up the cliff, and back to the welcome warmth of the car.

  “Thank you,” I said softly, shivering under my damp coat and watching the rain slash at the windshield. “I get the message.”

  Matt smiled. “No message, really. I just thought it was time you saw the real thing, up close and personal.”

  “Carlotta wouldn’t be happy,” I observed. “I’m ruined, now. I see the end of a fabulous career.”

  “Maybe the beginning of a new one?” he suggested.

  “You must have a lot of faith in me, Lieutenant,” I said grimly. “More than I do.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I do.” And then, he kissed me.

  We didn’t go back to the cabin that night, but found a scruffy-looking motel and ate greasy hamburgers and cold beer at the truck stop right across the road. Say what you want about Matt, he really knows how to dazzle a girl. Afterward, we went back to the motel and checked the narrow, sagging bed for crawlies before we fell into it, cold and exhausted. Okay, so I guess we weren’t quite as tired as we thought, because Matt made love to me with a tenderness and intensity that made me cry. I always cry at important times in my life. Sometimes it’s the only way I know they’re really important, and somehow, we both knew that this night was important.

  The next morning, over a plate of greasy eggs, he asked me to marry him.

  * * * *

  Matt and I live in Encantada Cove, now, with Benjamin, of course, and next door to Barry. I’ve started painting things I want to paint, and I’ve begun to sell pretty well. Sometimes, I tire of driving around looking for things to paint, though, and I long to just invent a picturesque lighthouse or two to add to my inventory. Whenever I express this sentiment, however, Matt simply walks into the bedroom, finds the hairbrush, and lays it next to my easel with an evil little smile. It’s astonishing how this simple action on his part encourages a rush of creative activity on my part. I had two such moral lapses right after we were married, and paid for each of these crimes by being dumped over the back of our lovely new couch for a vigorous, blistering reminder with the same hairbrush.