She stared at me open-mouthed. "I beg your par- ... a taste of my own ... you can't be serious! Reverend, really! This is ... this is preposterous!"
"No, Deborah, I'm quite serious. What's preposterous is your juvenile behaviour, and your stubborn refusal to see that you're at fault."
I pulled an upright chair into the middle of the space before the hearth and sat down. Giving her a look that brooked no disagreement, I patted my thigh.
She continued to stare at me, her mouth opening and closing like a feeding fish. But then, perhaps due to the unaccustomed and faintly paternal familiarity of my use of her Christian name, her shoulders slumped in sudden resignation, and her face crumpled. Tears filled her eyes and her mouth began to twist in grief. Then, slowly, and without a murmur, she stepped to my side and lowered herself carefully over my lap.
Remembering the games with Elsa, I had decided that it would be merciful to deliver a warm-up spanking to Deborah's behind before turning to an implement as painful as the ruler promised to be.
"First," I pronounced, "I will spank you for behaving like a silly little girl, and then ... then I will punish you, like for like, with the ruler you were so quick to apply to Henderson's backside. Do you understand?" Looking down to my left, I saw her nod.
My heart swelled. Her weight across my thighs felt like a homecoming after a long and desolate journey.
I manoeuvred her grey skirt up so it was bunched at her lower back. She was wearing a white satin slip, beneath which, as I smoothed it out, I could make out a pair of dark knickers. Parting my knees slightly, and adjusting her position so that her toes were barely touching the floor to my right, I was tempted to run my hand over the delightful mounds now presented so vulnerably to my hungry gaze - tempted to squeeze and squash and possess them, as I would have Elsa's. But I continued, dutifully, to play my Reverend's role - or so I told myself!
Cupping and tensing my right hand, I brought it down firmly but modestly - just enough to sting a little - onto the centre of her right cheek. To my utter delight, the flesh beneath her undergarments responded with a perfect blend of firmness and surrender. After a brief pause, I repeated the intensity of this first spank on the other buttock. Observing no reaction from Deborah save the faintest sigh, I continued to spank her in this manner, though increasing the pace slightly, until I had covered the expanse of her bottom. Her breathing quickened, but otherwise she lay silent, prone and receptive, absorbed in that limbo (which Elsa had described so clearly to me) between acceptance of the glow so far, and apprehension about the fiercer heat to come.
"I shall bare your bottom now, Deborah," I announced. She turned her head and nodded, lifting her hips slightly as I eased the slip up onto her lower back and pulled her green knickers down to her thighs.
My breath caught in my throat as I looked down on the pink vision before me. I had spanked well - two ovals of a uniform roseate glow adorned her perfect buttocks.
Adjusting her position once more so that she was perched helplessly across my lap, I took firm hold of her right hip with my left hand and proceeded to spank her vigorously. My hand rose and fell at a rapid pace, each smack a solid blow that soon produced a deeper shade of red and had her gasping and squirming. When she emitted her first, small yelp of pain, I gave her three more and then stopped, resting my palm on the centre of her right buttock, feeling the delicious warmth. The tautness with which she'd held herself suddenly departed; she slumped, moaning quietly, her shoulders rising and falling with her quick, shallow breaths.
As I began to soothe the crimson skin of her cheeks with light, circular motions, I heard a barely whispered, "Thank you, Reverend."
Having allowed myself that particular delight for as long as I felt was decent, I said, "Right, Deborah, up you get."
As soon as she had risen, her hands went to her behind and rested there, rubbing gently. Her hair was dishevelled, her face flushed, and she half-turned away from me, avoiding my eyes. Her skirt covered her in the front, but was bunched up with her slip, and held in place by her forearms behind; her knickers rested at her ankles.
I got up, retrieved the ruler from the sofa and walked over to my desk. "Come over here, Deborah." I tapped the surface with the ruler.
She stood, hesitating, her face revealing her apprehension. I tapped the ruler again. She stepped out of her knickers and came sheepishly over to stand by the desk. She looked meekly up into my eyes, then away again quickly.
"How many strokes did you give Henderson?" I asked.
She mumbled something.
"Speak up, Deborah."
"Eight, sir," she croaked.
"Eight it is, then. A stroke for a stroke seems only fair, wouldn't you say, Deborah?"
She shivered, seemed to think a moment, then nodded.
"Bend over the desk."
She obeyed, reaching forward so that her magnificent, round rear stretched and curved delightfully.
"I suggest you hold on to the far edge with a firm grip. This will be painful, and I urge you to be brave, my dear, and try not to rise up, no matter how much it hurts."
With a quiet whimper, she nodded again, turning her face slightly towards me - watching my movements anxiously.
Taking a firm grip on its end, I measured the last fifteen inches or so of the ruler against the middle of her reddened cheeks (I could see the 20-inch mark lined up with the nearer side of her left buttock). I held the ruler in place there for a moment - imagining how Elsa would have sighed at its coolness against her skin - and then pulled it back and brought it down at speed to whip into the fleshy middle of her bottom.
"Eeesh!"
Her head flew back, her lips stretched wide as she gasped.
I leaned forward to inspect the aftermath of that first, testing stroke: an angry band of red an inch wide emerged, darkening at the edges as I watched. I felt the years fall away: I was back where I belonged, concentrating with careful purpose on that other kind of sacred work - the kind from which I had for so long abstained.
I took up position and thwacked her again, just above the first. She yelped in protest and her feet lifted from the floor; bravely, though, she held on tight, her knuckles white from the strain of her grip. With her face to the desk-top, she panted in her effort to endure the pain.
I dealt the third with equal firmness, below the first two, so that three thick bands of red now adorned her quivering cheeks. She yelped again, her brown hair flying as her head jolted back, and then her shoulders heaved with deep breaths; a quiet sob emerged like an orphaned prayer.
For the fourth, I bent slightly at the knees and aimed for the lowest, softest place, just above her thighs. The reaction was as I expected: she let out an agonised howl, her feet flew up again and she wriggled her bottom delightfully.
"Pleeease," I heard her whisper. "I can't ..." but then she stopped herself. I sensed she was remembering that this was no more than she had made young Henderson endure that afternoon. She laid her forehead on the desk and moaned.
As each of the next four strokes would inevitably land upon what was already so visibly sore a bottom, I decided on a modicum of lenience. But only a modicum. To her credit, she took them with great fortitude, never once releasing her hold on the far edge of the desk. Her cries, though, were quite pitiful - they filled me with that ineffable mixture of sympathy and sadistic pleasure that is the peculiar fate of my kind. Especially ardent and intense was the howl which greeted the eighth and last stroke, which I placed smack on top of the fourth one - low down on her fleshiest, most vulnerable spots. Yet even then - brave woman - she did not rise!
Throwing the ruler aside, and overcome with compassion and admiration, I lifted her and took her in my arms. She sobbed into my shoulder with cathartic abandon, while her hands went behind to clutch her stricken cheeks.
We stood thus for golden minutes, until eventually she lifted her head away. I gazed down at the loveliness of her moist, brown eyes, at her tear-stained cheeks, at the quivering surrender o
f her soft, full lips.
"Thank you," she whispered. I gently smoothed aside the damp strands of hair from her forehead, before kissing her in its centre.
What happened next was perhaps not seemly for a man of the cloth - but it was for us both, as I said before, a gift from God, a gift both wrapped and delivered by my Elsa, with whose blessing, I felt sure, it came.
Deborah and I were married that summer, and my joy was reborn.
Upon our return from the honeymoon, she asked for my photograph of Elsa - about whom I had by now shared everything - and had it framed in gold. It hangs above the mantelpiece over the hearth - the same mantelpiece where, to this day, lies the three-foot ruler that brought us together.
Her Sunday Dose
The rest of Britain may have been letting its hair down and celebrating the mini-skirt, but for those of us unfortunate enough to have been consigned by our parents to a five-year term at St Quentin's Boarding School for Boys, the year might as easily have been 1866 as 1966.
Headmaster Archibald Stow believed himself a bulwark of stolid Victorian rectitude against the tide of permissiveness flooding the nation outside our sheltered walls. He ruled, if not literally with a rod of iron then certainly with a rod of ... whatever it was his yellow, swishy canes were made of. I doubt a single boy survived his time at St Quentin's without receiving at least one very painful caning on the seat of his pin-striped trousers.
A smile on the face of Headmaster Stow was as rare as an enlightened conservative, while his homilies in Sunday services dwelt invariably on the sanctity of entrenched tradition and the evils of change. Although we thought him a relic as ancient as the Parthenon, he was probably no more than forty years old at the time. He gave the impression, however, that those must have been forty exceedingly long years.
I was not an especially rebellious boy, but at eighteen, after five years at St Quentin's, I'd lost count of the occasions I'd emerged from the Headmaster's gloomy, oak-panelled study with a backside throbbing with fiery lines. And it was certainly a somewhat mixed blessing that I had as my best friend throughout those years a boy whose mischievousness was outweighed only by his fearlessness.
His name was John Truman, but of course only surnames were used, so it is simply as Truman that I remember him best. It was he who, echoing the feelings of us all, re-christened the school 'San Quentin' (after the American high-security prison); and he it was who, one chilly November day in 1966, happened upon something that was to change my life. An object of banal, everyday ordinariness it may have been, but its chance discovery led to an event that haunts me to this day...
---oOo---
"Hey, Hutton, old chap, look what I've found!"
I looked up from my Latin text, faintly annoyed at the disturbance. With a broad grin splitting his impish freckled face, Truman held up, proudly poised between thumb and forefinger, a key. It was a plain skeleton key with a round handle, its bronze faded a dark brown with age, but from the delight in Truman's eyes you'd think he'd found the Philosopher's Stone.
"So?" I asked. "It's a key. Big deal."
"Oh ye of little faith," he crowed, waving the key in my face. "I shall discover the door to which this key belongs, and I promise you delights, my dear Hutton, of which you never dreamed!"
His promise, of course, was pure hyperbole; even so, experience had taught me that, as well as creating unusual and ultimately bottom-searing adventures, Truman also had an uncanny ability to predict the future. It was, therefore, with a slight shiver down my spine that I turned back to my labours over Lucretius muttering, "Nonsense."
---oOo---
Those of us in the upper school had been very excited by the appointment earlier that year of a young French assistante by the name of Mademoiselle Soumise. She was tasked with conducting conversation classes for those of us taking French A-level, and she made an immediate and profound impression on all but the most drearily unimaginative among us.
She'd insisted from the start that we use first names (hers was Suzanne), which of course induced in us a squirming embarrassment that took weeks to overcome. She also urged us to speak freely, albeit in halting French, about our feelings and desires, which also came as naturally to us as joy does to a Puritan.
To say that she was a breath of fresh air would be to grossly understate; she was a veritable hurricane of pure, life-giving oxygen, and we were quite blown away by her charm and vivacity. There is, in the eyes of a wearily oppressed young Englishman, something overwhelmingly beguiling about a French female in the first, full flush of her enchanting youth.
---oOo---
A week after interrupting my attempts to decipher De Rerum Natura with his hardly astounding discovery of a key, Truman burst into the cubby-hole of a study we shared. His eyes glowed.
"The door! I've found the door!" he exclaimed.
I sighed. "What door?"
"The door to our new adventure, Hutters," he purred. "The door of perception; the door to delights you never dreamed of; the door to which this..." He held up the key, "...belongs."
He'd been searching all week, and now, it seemed, he'd finally found the elusive keyhole.
"OK, so where is it?" I asked.
"Come with me."
It was a Sunday afternoon, a quiet time in the house, but even so I felt my heart quicken as we approached the corridor leading to the Headmaster's study. "This isn't going to get me another thrashing, is it?" I whispered.
He shook his head dismissively, as if canings were a minor detail, and beckoned me to follow. We tip-toed towards the Head's door and then turned right down a passage I'd noticed, but never really wondered about. It led nowhere - just a panelled wall at the end - but two doors led off it, one on each side.
Deftly, Truman inserted the key and opened the door on the left - to a room that, by its position, I could see must adjoin the Headmaster's study. Truman stepped in, holding a finger to his lips.
The room was dimly lit by daylight peeping round heavy velvet curtains. It smelt of leather and dust and seemed to be a storeroom: there were broken chairs, an old sofa and paintings in heavy gilt frames leaning against a trunk. On the left was a door, and it was to this that Truman tiptoed, before kneeling carefully by the keyhole. A gleeful grin split his face.
I knelt beside him and leaned forward. The keyhole afforded a surprisingly generous view of the Headmaster's study: the front half of his desk, the large rug before it, and the coat-stand and bookcases beyond it on the right. The main door itself was just out of view to the left, but the fireplace beyond was visible. Picturing the perspective from the inside of the study, I realised that immediately to my right, inches away but out of view, was the large cupboard where the Headmaster kept his canes. The man himself, however, appeared not to be in residence, unless he was sitting very silent behind his desk.
Truman tapped me on the shoulder. "You keep an eye out," he whispered. "I'll fetch us some refreshments - won't be long." He tiptoed away, closing the door silently behind him.
A minute or so after his departure, I heard the door of the study open, and then close again. I put my eye to the keyhole: the Headmaster was hanging up his overcoat. Then he turned and went to the fireplace where he removed something from the mantelpiece - it was a pipe, which he began to stuff with tobacco he produced from the pocket of his tweed jacket.
I was just wondering if Truman would return too noisily and land us in hot water again, when I heard a knocking. Match poised over the bowl of his pipe, the Headmaster called out, "Enter," in that ominously sonorous voice that had so often been the last thing I'd heard when facing another bout of doom.
I heard the door open and close, and then a familiar voice - a voice, and an accent, which set my heart aflutter:
"Good afternoon, sir."
Mademoiselle Soumise came into view. She was dressed, as enchantingly as ever, in a white silk blouse and a charcoal-grey pencil skirt that hugged the perfect curves of her hips and buttocks.
"Good aftern
oon, Mademoiselle," replied the Head, replacing his pipe, unlit, on the mantelpiece. He looked at his watch. He had a strange half-smile on his face. "A little late, I see."
Mlle Soumise nodded and bowed her head.
The Headmaster then strode across the room, disappearing behind his desk. "Over here, my girl," he said brusquely. Mlle Soumise looked up eagerly, and moved forward out of my vision. I heard the sound of a chair scraping the wooden floorboards, and a grunt.
What was going on? What had that smile of his meant? And why had Mademoiselle seemed so meek, and then so keen to go to him? What had she done? I looked around quickly, as if to ask Truman these questions, and why he wasn't there, witnessing this with me.
Suddenly, there was a loud smack and a tiny, high-pitched squeal. My stomach lurched. What the...?
Another smack rang loud through the door, and then a whole flurry of them. I heard the French assistante mewl and squeak.
"Learning your lesson, Mademoiselle?" the Headmaster called out over the noise of the volley of spanks now raining down on what I assumed was Mlle Soumise's bottom.
"Oui, Monsieur," she cried.
This was greeted by three, even louder cracks. "English, Suzanne," he commanded. "In English, please."
"Yes, sir, sorry, sir," she screeched.
The spanking continued for another half minute or so, before I heard, "Right, up you get, my dear. Warm-up over."
There was a rustling sound, then Mlle Soumise appeared, her brown hair dishevelled, and her face flushed red and wincing as she rubbed her bottom through the back of her skirt. The Headmaster must have risen and moved silently, for the next thing I heard was the door to the cupboard - the cupboard not two feet from where I knelt - being opened.
Spanking Cheat: ... and other short stories Page 7