Corbin's Bend Homecoming

by Ruth Staunton

  It hit RJ that this was Brent Carmichael, whom he hadn’t seen since he moved in. Then a little alarm went off in his head telling him—reminding him—Kelly’s last name was Carmichael. Oh god, is Brent her father?

  “Um… Hi, Brent. I didn’t realize it was you that was going to be one of the dinner guests.”

  “Yeah, Kelly felt like she had to do something to show her appreciation since we helped her move so she made us a fantastic Italian dinner. Come on in, we shouldn’t be talking here in the doorway. I don’t believe you’ve met my wife or my daughter. My son is here too, but he’s a little young yet to meet new people, I can guarantee you he won’t remember you by tomorrow.”

  RJ looked a little confused for a minute and then Brent cleared it up by saying, “Don’t worry about it, the kid’s an infant.”

  RJ followed him to the living room which was sort of like a great room with the kitchen and living room flowing together. There was another man who looked like he must be related to Brent sitting on the sofa with his arm around the third man’s shoulder. Kelly walked over from the kitchen and said, “Hey RJ, glad you could make it. I see you met my Uncle Brent. This is my dad, Jack, and his partner Josh. And this is Char, Brent’s wife.”

  Both men stood up to shake RJ’s hand and he was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. Almost like Kelly set him up for a family inspection or something.

  “Boy, I didn’t realize I was going to be intruding on a family dinner. Maybe Kelly and I should meet up some other time.”

  “Nonsense,” Char said. “We’re just having a little dinner, no big deal. Just making sure Kelly gets settled into her new place and she felt she should cook us a meal.”

  “Would you like a beer?” Kelly asked.

  “Yeah, thanks. That’d be great.” RJ figured if things started to get too uncomfortable, he could always plead exhaustion from his recent shift and leave.

  Brent gave up his chair to RJ and went to pull out one of the straight-backed chairs from the kitchen table for himself. Then he asked RJ, “We’ve hardly seen anything of you since you moved in; is everything working out all right for you here? Your mentor says you haven’t called him even once.”

  RJ thought how perfectly Kelly would fit over the back of that chair with her bottom presented for a good hard spanking or a whipping with his belt. He shook his head and crossed his legs to hide the growing hard-on in his trousers. He needed to get his mind on a different track and answer Brent.

  “I’m sorry about that. But my schedule is pretty crazy. My shifts run anywhere from three to eight days and then I get only one or two days off. I’m just not home all that much.”

  “That is a rough schedule. You work for the Forest Service, right?”

  “I do, yes. I work mostly in the wilderness area just north of our community.”

  “So what do you do out there in the wild for three to eight days?” Kelly called out the question from the kitchen.

  “I do just about everything. Right now I’m supervising ranger interns. They’re volunteers who help us repair trails or cut new trails,” RJ gave a brief explanation of some of his duties. “I’ll be up in the Fire Lookout Tower for the next few days when I go on shift tomorrow. I keep up with the folks that have permits to camp and make sure they leave the area clean and pack out everything they brought in with them. Sometimes I give little nature talks to the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts and other youth groups.”

  “Wow,” Kelly said. “You’re like the jack of all forest rangers.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Budget cuts have made it necessary for us to be able to do a little bit of everything.”

  “We have to get together on some activities for the kids here in Corbin’s Bend,” Brent said. “You know I take the youth group out camping several times a year. We’ve never done the wilderness area.”

  “Yeah, I’d like to help. We’ll have to work something out,” RJ said. “You’ll need to apply for permits for camping, so just let me know when you want to do it and I’ll get you everything you need. Groups have to be limited to fifteen in most wilderness areas, but there are some places we can go as high as what they call twenty-five heartbeats. That means a total of twenty-five people and livestock combined if you want to bring in horses or pack-mules.”

  “Our groups are generally around a dozen kids and two or three adults, so we’re probably good at the limit of fifteen.”

  RJ tried to keep up his end of the conversation as it turned to other subjects, but he was more interested in watching Kelly as she handled things in the kitchen. He liked how gracefully she moved considering her height. Most taller women he’d known were a little bit awkward, though he knew that could be a result of trying to minimize their stature.

  He noticed both Brent and Jack seemed to be giving him the once over as if trying to decide for themselves what his intentions with Kelly might be. Jack was awfully young to have a daughter Kelly’s age, he must have still been a teenager when she was born. He couldn’t help but wonder what the story was behind that.

  “Excuse me,” he said, standing up. “I’m going to go see if Kelly needs any help in the kitchen.”

  He felt their eyes on his back as he walked the short distance to the kitchen area.

  “Oh, great,” Kelly said when she saw him coming toward her. “You can take this big dish of paella and put it on the table for me. Tell everyone to come sit down at the table while I grab the salad from the fridge.”

  “Sure, but how ‘bout we meet in the morning for breakfast?” JR spoke softly so he wouldn’t be overheard in the living room. “I don’t have to leave for my shift till about ten and you sorta threw me to the wolves here inviting me to dinner with your dad and uncle.”

  Kelly gave him a sheepish grin and said, “Sorry about that. I didn’t even think that it might be awkward for you. Yes, I’d like to have breakfast with you.”

  He winked and said, “Then let’s get this dinner on the table.”

  Chapter 3

  RJ looked out the watchtower window and slowly went over the panoramic scene in front of him. He let his eyes roam from right to left in front of the watchtower, then slowly worked his way further out along the landscape, scanning a wide arc of the view. When he saw nothing out of order, he made a quarter turn and repeated his scan of the adjacent section. Following this routine until he had made a complete three hundred sixty degree turn, he then repeated the process, only this time he used his binoculars so that he could see even further out. Once he was satisfied that everything appeared normal, he would jot it down in his log and note the time. When he was finished, his routine was do a little paperwork, check the weather, or check the sign-up sheet that was emailed to him from the ranger station in Golden. He looked over the list of people that had signed up to use the wilderness area. It was good to know how many people were in the area and whether they would be hunting, or just hiking and camping. This was the second day of his three-day shift. He’d get a day off and then probably have another seven or eight days with the ranger interns.

  He worked this odd schedule with two part-time rangers who took care of the days that he was off. Cutbacks in the forest service budget contributed to these unusual shifts. He was just thankful that he was still able to work full-time and knew that all the hours he had put in to become a wilderness expert, get qualified for law enforcement, and be what amounted to a tour guide was what made it possible for him to keep his job on a full-time basis. Ever since he was seven or eight years old, he had wanted to be a forest ranger.

  RJ loved the outdoors—he loved camping, hiking, and telling people all about this beautiful wilderness. He liked helping people when they were in trouble. Often people would come unprepared to the area and go hunting or hiking and get lost. Sometimes they would get injured and need help getting out. Inexperienced hikers didn’t always take enough water with them and didn’t think about bringing purifying tablets with them. RJ kept an eye on his little domain and when further assistance was requi
red, he could always reach someone at the ranger station on his radio.

  In the center of the tower room was a table with an Osborne Fire Finder fastened to the top. This device held a topographical map in a circular rim that was graduated in degrees and was used to determine where the fire was so firefighters could be sent out. There were more modern methods using satellites to determine the exact location of a fire, but RJ liked using this older technology.

  The watchtower had only the bare necessities; a narrow cot for sleeping, a cooler for his bottled water and his supply of food for his shift. It stayed cool enough with the reusable ice packs he brought in every shift. He usually brought ready-made meals at the Army-Navy surplus store in Denver and heated them up on the camp stove that ran on white gas. Sometimes he made grilled cheese sandwiches in a cast iron skillet that only needed to be wiped clean.

  The biggest problem he’d have with week-long shifts in the tower would be washing up. The watchtower didn’t have running water. It didn’t even have a bathroom. If he needed to use the facilities, he had to climb down the sixteen flights of stairs and use the port-a-potty that was about a hundred feet from the watchtower. Usually he would walk the mile to the stream every other day, strip down, and wade into the chilly water with some eco-friendly soap to do a quick wash up.

  RJ looked down in the general direction towards Corbin’s Bend and thought about the physical therapist he had met two days earlier. When he asked her out for a drink, he thought she wanted to accept. But when she had hesitated, he’d offered her an out. Instead, she’d invited him to join her and the guys who helped her move for dinner. He’d been thrown for a loop to discover ‘the guys’ were her dad and his partner, Josh; and her uncle and his family.

  He chuckled to himself as he thought about how there’s nothing like meeting two big alpha males the first time you have dinner with a new chick. And then to discover they’re her father and uncle… well, that just had to be a first.

  And man, she was tall. She must be at least six feet tall, maybe even six-one. He kept coming back to her height and knew he liked it. It made him feel like she fitted him. He didn’t think he’d ever met a woman as tall as Kelly Carmichael. They hadn’t talked much as far as personal things went with her family being there. He got the feeling her father and uncle had been sizing him up. Oh, they were friendly and didn’t try and pick him apart, but it was almost like they were sitting back and wondering if he could handle Kelly.

  Her father, Jack, had sat back in his chair and looked so smug—as though he was saying, mess with my little girl and you’ll have me to contend with… once she’s squashed you like a bug.

  It was something he wasn’t concerned about. At least not yet. First, he had to discover if she was submissive enough to be in a Domestic Discipline relationship. Living in Corbin’s Bend, she probably was. But he sensed a certain bossiness in her and he wasn’t sure how he would deal with that. He had detected more than a little of a dominant trait in her during the dinner at her home. And why wouldn’t she be? With two strong men for role models, some of that had to rub off on her.

  If she was dominant, their relationship was over before it began because there was no way he could be a submissive. Maybe she’s a switch, he thought to himself. But that wouldn’t work either. In his experience, a switch—at one point or another—generally wanted to switch and play the other role. Which was why they were called switches. And he wasn’t going to be submissive to anybody at any time, so maybe he better first find out what team she was on.

  The breakfast they had shared before work hadn’t yielded a lot of information. She’d given him a brief rundown on her childhood and how she’d moved to Chicago so she could get to know her father better. He had told her of his perfectly normal childhood with no major traumas. He let her know that his parents had a domestic discipline relationship so he had come by it naturally, watching his father lead his family.

  “Did you know that your father spanked your mother when you were growing up?”

  “No, not until I was in my late teens. I always knew he had the final word on major decisions, and I knew or had seen that whenever my mother protested about some decision, he’d give her a stern look and she almost always backed down. The few times she didn’t back down, he would calmly tell her to please go to their bedroom and he would be in there in a few minutes so they could discuss it privately.”

  “Then how did you find out that he spanked her?”

  “When I was about seventeen, my father had sent my mom to their bedroom and about ten minutes later he went into their room just as I was coming out of the hallway bath to go to my bedroom. As I passed their door, I saw a glimpse of my mother standing in the corner. That’s when the door closed behind my father and I just couldn’t help myself—I quietly listened at the door and heard everything.”

  “Everything? Like what?”

  “The first thing I heard was my dad asking her to tell him why she was sent to the corner. She answered because she had questioned his decision in front of me and my brother which undermined his position. And then there was a little attitude in her voice when she complained that she didn’t think it was fair that she never had a say in his decisions. To make a long story short, he explained that she did have a say and he always listened to what she had to say, but felt the decision he made was the right one for the family. Then he told her to come out of the corner and get over his lap for her spanking. Apparently she followed his instructions, because the next thing I heard was the sound of what I assumed was his hand smacking her bottom. I didn’t want to hear anymore, and I just slipped to my own room.”

  “Did you ever talk to your father about what you heard that night?”

  “Only indirectly and it took me about a year to get up the nerve to talk to him about it. My current girlfriend at the time had a nasty habit of speaking very sarcastically and disrespectfully to me and I had an urge to throw her over my knee and spank her. Knowing that could get me in trouble for assault, I went and talked to my father.”

  “Did you tell him that you heard him spank your mother?”

  “No, I never told him that I heard anything that night. I just told him I wasn’t happy with the way this young lady spoke to me and asked him if he had any suggestions on how to deal with that. I told him I had the urge to spank some sense into her.

  “He told me that would certainly get her attention and could go a long way in improving her attitude. Then he explained about domestic discipline but said that such a relationship had to be consensual. My dad gave me different ways to bring it up to her and talk to her about her attitude and how I thought I could help her with it. His suggestion was if she wouldn’t agree to let me lead her, I should consider moving on and finding someone else to date.”

  “So he never really told you that’s what he and your mom practiced?”

  “I thought it was the perfect opportunity to ask him if that’s what he and my mom did but he wouldn’t come right out and say so. He told me he was the head of the household which meant that while they talked about things and she gave her opinion, he didn’t always do what she wanted. Though he always listened and considered my mother’s opinion, in the end, as the head of the household, it was up to him to make the decision that he felt was best for the family. Then I asked him outright if he ever spanked my mother and he said what they did in private was their business and not something he was ready to discuss with me.”

  “Which pretty much told you what you already knew. So did you ever spank your sarcastic girlfriend?”

  “Nope, I never did. I didn’t know how to bring it up so the next time she was overly sarcastic I told her I didn’t really like it and if she didn’t stop speaking to me that way she was going to find herself over my lap getting her bottom spanked. She told me to fuck off and that was the last time we went out.”

  Kelly laughed at that and there followed a lull in the conversation while they finished their breakfast and then RJ asked her, “Have you
been in a domestic discipline relationship?”

  “No, but I did have a boyfriend who liked to spank me for fun. I have to tell you when the family learned about Uncle Brent’s love of spanking, we all teased him something fierce. Funny thing is, my dad had never been one to spank or punish his partners, but once he hooked up with Josh and fell in love with him, he realized it wasn’t gonna work if he couldn’t give Josh the kind of leadership he needed and craved. Char told me Uncle Brent gave my dad spanking lessons with some kind of mannequin he has. I laughed when she told me that. I can’t even picture my dad spanking anyone. And I don’t really want to. I know he’s what’s considered an alpha male, but I just never thought about him spanking his partner.”

  RJ looked at his watch and saw he had to get going. “I want to see you again, Kelly Carmichael. I’m on shift for four days this time, but can I take you to dinner when I get back?”

  Kelly stood up, took a last sip of her coffee before saying, “I’d like that. But first you have to tell me what RJ stands for.”

  “They’re the initials of my first and middle names.”

  “Well, duh. Obviously I know that! I’m asking what your first and middle names are.”

  “You shouldn’t be sarcastic, Kelly. Didn’t I just tell you what I wanted to do to my last sarcastic girlfriend?”

  “Then you shouldn’t have been so flip in your answer. Of course they’re the initials of your names, so it was a ‘duh’ answer.”

  “It doesn’t matter, I don’t use them. I go by RJ,” he replied as he leaned over and gave her a quick kiss before saying, “Got to go, I’ll call you when I get back.”

  Making up his mind to get to know her better when he got back to Corbin’s Bend the following day, he took one last look out the windows of the watch tower before he grabbed his backpack, locked up, and went to check out a few campsites and see how the campers and hikers were doing. Sixteen flights down, he locked the little gate that kept people from running up the stairs when no one was in the tower. Dropping his pack on the ground next to the port-a-potty, he quickly used the facility and headed for the most popular campsites, still thinking about Kelly Carmichael. And how well she’d fit over his knee.