by Ava Sinclair
I know what she’s referring to. When I got my first job as a publishing assistant for a small literary journal, I sent her a shot of the cute storefront that housed the offices. But I was fired from that job, and the next. I just never told her.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” I lie.
“What happened?”
“Oh, downsizing. You know. The economy. I, um… I got laid off.”
“Well, you know if I had money to send you, I’d send it to you…”
“I’m not asking for money, Mom. But I…” I force myself to say the words. “I might need to come back home for a while…”
Even with the volume turned down, I can hear the television. She’s not saying anything. She just takes another inhale of the cigarette.
“I thought you were living with that girl? Why would you need to come here?”
“Mom, I can’t afford my share of the rent.”
And there, as I sit with the wind burning my nose and face, I listen to my mother tell me that as much as she’d love to help me, she can’t. She’s recently gotten a roommate, she says, a guy named Fred who works over at the 7-Eleven. He’s a night manager, and every Wednesday he takes her over to the casino in Summerville to play slots. On his nights off, they like to kick back, she says.
I know what kick back means. It’s her euphemism for drinking, and now that she’s found a man to booze it up with, she doesn’t want the disruption of the daughter who has always begged her to quit.
I wonder if it would help if I told her I’m kicking back myself these days. I almost do, but I don’t. It hurts too much. As much as Becky’s rejection stung, at least she had reasons. But this is my mother, and I can’t bear to even stay on the line long enough to say goodbye. I hang up on her, and wait to see if she feels bad enough to call back. She doesn’t.
I’m truly alone, save for one shining option, one hundred eight stories up across the lake.
What happens if I come back?
There will be consequences, Jill. And forgiveness.
I never had either growing up.
“It’s too late,” I say to myself, a warm tear trailing down my cold cheek as I rise from the bench and head to the bar across the road. It’s warm inside, and nearly empty on a weeknight. I reach in the pocket of my jacket and pull out a crumpled ten-dollar bill.
“Shot, please,” I say, putting the money on the counter.
The bartender puts the amber liquid in front of me and gives me my change. I wrap my hand around the glass and bring it to my lips. As I do, I catch a glimpse of a man at the end of the bar. He’s staring, his piggish little eyes fixed on me. He’s just been given his own shot, and downs it before lifting the empty glass to me with a wink. He folds his hands on the bar and stares like he’s waiting for something. For what?
I know what. He’s waiting for the girl at the end of the bar to do her shot. And then maybe another. He’d probably even buy it for her if that would speed the process.
The next guy you leave the bar with might be the one who kills you.
I have never been one to believe in premonitions, but I suddenly get a terrible feeling that if I take this shot, something bad will happen to me. I put it down, stand, and leave the bar as quickly as I can. Once I’m outside I start to run, looking back twice to see if the man at the bar is following me. I’m halfway home before I realize what’s happening. I’m having a panic attack, and it continues even after I get back into the apartment.
Becky isn’t home, and that’s good because I wouldn’t want her to hear me do what I’m about to do. I wouldn’t want her to know that I’m so desperate and alone I’m prepared to accept a stranger’s vague offer of help.
Max Iver answers on the second ring.
“Jill,” he says. “Have you made a decision?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes.” I pause. “I don’t have anywhere else to go. That’s the only reason I’m doing this.”
“I know,” he says. “I’ll be waiting for you. I expect you here in half an hour.”
Chapter Six
When I arrive, he’s waiting by the private elevator in the parking deck. The last time Max Iver saw me, I was wearing heels. This time I show up in a t-shirt, hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans, and Keds. I didn’t think to ask what I should bring. It seemed presumptuous to bring an overnight bag, so I threw a few things into a backpack I’ve slung across one shoulder.
“It’s good to see you, Jill,” he says as the elevator door opens.
I don’t reply. What can I say?
We walk down the hallway in silence. This time when he opens the door to 1A, the view through the huge windows is a twinkling nighttime cityscape. He motions to the sofa again, and I sit as he pushes a button that sends opaque shades descending between the panes of glass, obscuring the view inside and out. We’re closed off from the world now. It’s just the two of us, alone.
“Why did you decide to come back?” he asks.
“Do you want the answer that will feed your ego, or the truth?”
“I have less of an ego than you may imagine. And while you’re in my charge, I’ll accept nothing less than the truth.”
In my charge. The words send a shiver through me.
I tell him I don’t have a choice, that my roommate is kicking me out for losing my job and that my mother won’t take me back.
“Consider that a blessing,” he says. “You don’t need to be around anyone with a drinking problem.” He grows quiet. “But now that you’re back, what do you think is going to happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did I tell you would happen?”
“I don’t know.”
He sits down beside me. “What did I tell you would happen?”
I could pretend that I don’t remember, but the truth is, I do. I just don’t want to say it.
“You said there’d be… consequences.”
He nods.
“Tell me, Jill. What kind of consequences did you have when you lived with your mother? When you did something you weren’t supposed to do?”
“It depends.” I answer slowly, wondering where he’s going with this. “If it was a note from school, she’d yell and tell me I’d never amount to anything. If it was something really important to her, like forgetting to pick up her cigarettes, she’d slap me across the face.”
“So you were punished, but never disciplined.”
“What’s the difference?” I ask.
He smiles patiently. He’s crossed his long legs and is drumming the fingers of his huge hand on his knee in silence. Finally, he answers.
“Punishment is more about the punisher venting their anger. Discipline is about teaching. Did you have any friends who were disciplined?”
He’s luring me in again. And of course I did. I grew up in a small, conservative town.
“Yeah,” I said. “Some of my schoolmates were lucky. They had good parents.”
“And when they disappointed them?”
My throat goes dry. I don’t want to say what happened to them. But I don’t have to. He says it for me.
“Did they get a spanking?”
I feel my tongue dart out to nervously wet my lips. I drop my eyes. “Yeah,” I say. “That was kind of standard.”
“And how did their relationship with their parents, who disciplined them, differ from your punishing mother?”
“They…” I look up at him. His expression is relaxed, kindly. I feel encouraged to answer. “They still loved them. I guess because they felt like it was for their own good…”
“That’s exactly right,” he says. “And that’s exactly why I’m going to spank you.”
“Wait… what?” I say, and find myself laughing at the impossible suggestion. But then I realize he’s not laughing, and this isn’t a joke. My laughter fades into awkward silence when I look up at him. His expression is stern.
“I told you there would be consequences, Jill, and I’m going to do what any good daddy would do if his little
girl put herself in danger. I’m going to take you across my lap, pull down your blue jeans, take down your panties, and spank your bare bottom until you’re sobbing and sorry.”
I open my mouth to reply, and at first nothing comes out. I find my voice as I rise. “No,” I say. “You’re not going to do that.”
He takes my arm. “I am,” he says. “And you’re going to put yourself over my knee and accept it.”
“Why? This is bullshit.”
“Because you agreed to come back, and if you try to leave I’m going to make your life incredibly difficult. You need this, Jill. You need this to get to the next step, which is forgiveness.”
“You’re threatening me?” I ask, images of the tape fresh in my mind.
“I’m helping you,” he says. “Now bend over my lap.”
I’ve never been spanked in my life. Spankings were something other kids got—kids whose well-intentioned parents chose moral instruction over drinking before noon. I know he can easily overpower me. I’m one hundred seventeen pounds; he’s at least two hundred forty, and still built like the linebacker he used to be. He’s not forcing me, at least not physically, but we both know he doesn’t have to. What he could do with those tapes is a lot worse than a few smacks on my backside.
It feels awkward, crawling over his lap. I look back and he glances at me. His face is still scary-stern, and I could easily be a naughty adolescent lying across her daddy’s lap for our size difference. I swallow nervously as my pelvis makes contact with his muscular thighs. My bottom is sticking up in the air, and there’s a fluttering in my lower belly, and then lower still as I feel the weight of his huge hand on my upturned buttocks. I gasp at the sensation.
“Why are you about to be spanked, Jill?”
This is ridiculous, I think, but my position is both awkward and vulnerable. Arguing is not an option, not with my bottom offered up for the first spanking of my life. My heart is hammering in my chest; my butt cheeks clenching under the weight of his hand. I’m scared, but also strangely curious. Surely he’s not going to really hurt me. Surely this will only be a symbolic punishment. Surely it won’t be as severe as he warned.
How wrong I am. How terribly wrong. I feel him shift, see his arm rise in my peripheral vision, only to descend a split second later in a burning blow that drives me forward.
“Fuck!” I cry out. “That hurts!” I immediately try to rise, but his muscular arm goes around my waist, pinning me against the ridged muscles of his midsection.
“Spankings are supposed to hurt,” he says, and the room resounds with the crack of his huge hand landing once more across the lower middle of my bottom. I cry out again. And again. And again. Each blow increases the burning sting that seems to burrow into my skin through the fabric of my blue jeans. Hot tears sting my eyes. I bite my lip, determined not to give in to the wail I feel building in my chest.
“Let me go, you sick motherfucker!” I say. “I’m done with this. I want to go home. Fuck you. Fuck the tape. I don’t care what you do!”
My angry words are ignored. I feel his hand go under me, feel him unsnap and unzip my jeans. This is certainly not symbolic. He is making good on his promise to bare my bottom, and I begin to thrash and kick. If I were hanging over his lap rather than having my upper body supported by the huge sofa, I could bite or scratch his leg. But I can’t turn back. All I can do is flail and curse and threaten to call the police, threaten to have him arrested for assault although we both know I’d be too humiliated to report this on the heels of all that’s happened.
And didn’t I bring this on myself? Draping myself over a stranger’s lap is one more bad decision in a string of bad decisions. But blame doesn’t lessen the panic and humiliation of having a strong hand grip the waistband of my jeans and drag them down. Max Iver does this deliberately. He’s been methodical in landing solid blows that have the entire lower portion of my bottom throbbing with fiery hurt. He’s methodical now as he arranges the top of my jeans just below my knees.
“Don’t! Don’t!” My plea is plaintive as he reaches now for the waistband of my panties. I’m mortified as I realize I grabbed the first ones I could find after my shower today—the ones with the Wonder Woman logo on them. Is it my imagination, or do I hear him chuckle a bit as he tugs them down to join my jeans?
“Jill, stop fighting,” he says, his booming voice rising above the sound of my cries. The sound of it freezes me in place. I’m whimpering.
“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t spank me on my…”
“Say it,” he says.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
“Please pull my pants up.”
“No.” He rests his hand on the bare skin of my buttocks and there’s a jolt of pain as he gives my injured skin a little squeeze. But there’s another jolt, more jarring, between my legs—a sweet stab of arousal deep in my pussy that sends a flutter through the core of my lower abdomen. I groan, in shame this time. I can feel myself getting wet, and I’m mortified. I squeeze my legs together as tightly as I can.
“Oh, no,” he says. “Spread your legs, Jill. I want them open for the last half of your spanking.”
“Pervert!” I cry, but he ignores the insult.
“Open your legs.”
“Fuck you!”
Four blows land in rapid succession on my thighs, and I see stars.
“Open your legs.”
I thrash on his lap, ignoring the command, and am rewarded with four more blows. I know this will go on until I comply, so with a moan of abject embarrassment, I part my legs.
“Wider,” he says. “Wider.”
I begin to sob as I part my legs to the limits my restricting lowered jeans will allow. I can feel the cool air of the room on my pussy, which feels wet and warm.
“I’m going to give you ten on your bare ass,” he says. “And afterwards, we’re going to have a little conversation about your behavior, and forgiveness. And if you are the least bit defiant, you’ll find yourself back over my knee for more, understand?”
I nod, crying softly. I can feel the dam of tears about to break. I don’t think I can get through this without losing it, and I’m right.
The open-handed smacks on my already tender, now bare bottom are so much worse. He’s positioned me now so that I’m raised up by a knee he’s strategically placed between my thighs, keeping them open. The blows are searing. By the fifth one, my bottom feels ablaze with pain, and I know he can see my now soaking wet pussy between my bright red cheeks.
And just as I feared, I lose it, my sobs becoming infantile bawls. They are the cries of a helpless little girl, a bad little girl finally getting the spanking she had coming for so many years. They are also the cry of a woman who’s hit rock bottom, a woman who knows she can’t fix what’s wrong on her own.
When it’s over, I feel the blood rush to my head as I am raised to standing.
“This way,” he says, and I trip behind him, hobbled as I am by my jeans and panties, to a corner of the room. “Stand here. Keep your nose in this corner.”
Is he serious? Why do I even ask? Of course he is. He just spanked me like an errant child, so it really should be no shock that he’d double down on the experience by standing me in a corner.
In a small way, I’m grateful. The solitude gives me a chance to collect myself. My bottom is pulsing with heat that I can feel when I sneak my hand back to rub my punished nates. I don’t look back. I don’t know where Max Iver is. Is he watching me? God, what an image I must present, especially if my bottom looks half as red as it feels. I think of the video.
“Are you taping me?” I blurt out, suddenly worried.
“No,” he says. “Come here, Jill.”
I turn, and he is on the sofa, watching, but he’s not holding his phone. I reach for my pants so I can pull them up before walking over.
“Don’t,” he says. “That’s my job.”
I shuffle back over, cupping my hands over my pussy as I walk. When I reach the sofa, I can’t look at
him.
“Turn around, honey,” he says, and when I comply I feel him carefully slide my panties back up, then my jeans. The pressure of them against my skin causes me to wince.
He takes my hand then and lowers me to the couch.
“It’ll hurt worse to sit tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll give you a pillow.” He pauses. “Look. I know I’m a stranger to you. I know this may feel confusing and weird. I know you may even think I’m a pervert. But I think over the next few days you’re going to get a clearer picture of me. And of yourself.” He shakes his head. “You made quite the impression on me in the few minutes I saw you at Brinkman Advertising last week. I thought you looked smart, and pretty. And I guess I made an impression on you since you showed up at Serrano’s on Saturday night and recognized me through your drunken fog.”
“Do I even want to know what I said? I only remember telling you that you were hot.” I sniffle pitifully.
“You were definitely turning on the charm, but I laughed it off by pretending to know you, by telling my friends we knew each other and that you were quite the joker. Then I took off with you under the guise of catching up…”
“…and you took me to the hotel,” I finish for him.
“Yes. I took you to the hotel. I’ve never seen someone so drunk, or so lost. All I could think of was protecting you, of getting you somewhere safe. And I wanted to know why you’d done this to yourself.”
“So you interviewed me.”
“That was all,” he says. “I didn’t touch you.”
“You violated me just the same,” I say tearfully. “You took something from me. You took my… my thoughts… my secrets… can’t you see that?”
“Yes.” His admission surprises me. “But are you going to sit here and tell me a part of you wasn’t looking for somewhere safe to put them?”
I think of the night Becky pulled me from a bar after I tried to crawl onto a stranger’s lap. I have only a vague recollection of the event, but I remember more of how it felt, that longing to be held, to be protected from myself as I was losing control.
“Maybe,” I acknowledge. “But if you wanted to help me, why did you get me fired?”