by Lisabet Sarai, Trina Lane, Elizabeth Coldwell, Charlotte Stein, Jane Davitt, Justine Elyot
“Good. Now dry those tears and come here.”
He patted his thigh and I stopped crying straight away, my thighs clenching with dread. Oh no, that’s not dread, is it, when you feel wet between them? That’s something else.
I really had no alternative, and the feeling thrilled me. I had to obey him.
I felt that same childish embarrassment in the act of placing myself to be spanked as I did on the first occasion—I felt so meek and submissive, letting him straighten the hem of my skirt so that it was tighter over my bottom. I had dressed especially for him, though I hoped he didn’t realise it—short, tight skirt, stockings, light cotton chemise that almost showed my bra. In my bent over position, the skirt hem edged just high enough up my thigh to reveal the bottom of the stocking lace, with its plastic suspender snap holding it up. His thumb stroked along the line. He liked it. I could tell by the uncomfortable lump digging into my stomach.
“You’re incorrigible, Lara,” he said, his voice soft, almost caressing, so unlike the voice of somebody who was about to…
“Oy!”
“Yes, it’s going to hurt more than the first time. It’s a punishment, not an experiment. I take honesty seriously, and I intend to demonstrate that to you.”
And he did. He demonstrated it with a thoroughness and efficiency that took my breath away and brought stinging tears—matching my stinging behind—to my eyes.
“You do need this, Lara, don’t you?”
“Ohhhh.” There was hardly any time for pauses between ouches and ooohs now, so they poured forth in an unbroken stream as the blows fell, hard, fast and relentless, burning my bottom ten times hotter than last time.
“Well? Don’t you? You know you do.”
“Yesssssssss.” It hissed out of me like steam. I did need this. I needed it and wanted it, and I needed Dexter and I wanted him, and it was all mixed up in a jam of needing and wanting, loving and desiring, fearing and hurting.
“You’re taking it well, if not very quietly,” he told me, stopping for a moment to rub his self-satisfied hands over the seat of my skirt. “I think I need to check the damage though. I don’t want to go too far. I’ll need to look under this. Do you mind?”
He wanted to raise my skirt. He wanted to look at my bare arse! Did I mind?
“Be…my guest…” I shuddered out.
He took his time, pulling the skirt gently upward, inch by inch, until my bottom in its thong was revealed, and oh, the touch of his fingers against that warm, tightening skin, oh. It was almost unbearable, an erotic tickle that made me jolt over his lap and muffle a giggle.
“You’re very warm,” he said, his voice thick with admiration. The pads of his fingertips stroked firmly downwards, then upwards. I wanted them to travel. I wanted them down, up, in, a long way in, and I did a wriggly movement with my hips in the hope that he would understand this.
“I think you’re trying to distract me, Lara,” he tutted. “Are you?”
“No,” I lied.
Oops, so much for honesty. I will know, he’d said. And he did. His hand smacked down on my bare bum with such force that I yowled, forgetting the open window and the interesting sound effects for the passers-by outside.
“Don’t!” he said, with another ringing slap. “Lie!”
“Argh!”
“To!”
“Owwww.”
“Me!”
“Ohhhhh noooooo.”
“Message received and understood?”
The rain fell hard, red and stinging.
“Yes, yes, yes, understood.”
“Good. That’s the first part of your punishment over with.”
Chapter Three
“The first part?”
“I can’t help noticing,” he said, placing a palm against a very damp inner thigh, “that you can’t seem to control your response to discipline.”
“I…don’t mean to…”
“I know. You mean well, don’t you? But your body betrays you. Let’s have a little lesson in the art of self-control. A little practice. Shall we?”
“May I ask what sort of practice, Sir?” I asked, the sub-speak coming easily to me in this over-the-knee, hot-bottomed position.
“Yes, you may ask. I’m going to touch you, Lara, in a way that will give you pleasure. But you are not permitted to come. As soon as you feel that orgasm is inevitable, you are to do your very best to head it off.”
“I…won’t be able to do that!” I squeaked.
“Maybe not straight away. But you will learn. You don’t come now without my permission, my dear, and I think we should extend that even to times when I’m not here. No sneaky masturbating in the shower. I’ll ask you at each meeting, and don’t forget, I know when you are lying. I think this will teach you to achieve a level of focus that has been sadly lacking thus far.”
I gasped. A level of focus? This was going to be torture. Ever since Dexter had come into my life, my fingers had seemed connected to my pussy as if by a force of gigantic magnetism. I had to wrench them away sometimes. He knew it! He must!
“Spread your legs for me now,” he commanded quietly.
Pouting, although he couldn’t see it, I let them scissor apart, feeling him jolt my pelvis up with a knee, so that my bottom and sex were high, wide and open to him. The side of his hand brushed my lips and clit. I almost combusted on the spot. I was dripping, hot, sweaty, squirmy, and milliseconds from coming.
“You need a good seeing-to,” was his assessment. “Perhaps one day I can give you that. Perhaps.”
In the fug of lust and humiliation, my heart found space to leap. He was thinking of a future, however vaguely.
“Of all the greedy little quims I’ve ever known,” he said, gently, hypnotically, rubbing the sweet spot into a fat bloom of need, “I think this must be the greediest. What kind of girl gets wet from being punished? Eh? The kind of girl that needs more punishment, I think. The kind of girl that needs to be taken in hand.”
He pushed a finger up inside me and rotated it. It was useless to deny it, I was going to come soon, and hard.
I screwed my eyes shut and tried hysterically to think of boring and disgusting things. Nothing occurred. My consciousness was as full as my pussy, now with three probing fingers inside, full of him and his diabolical workings on my sex. I jiggled my bum frantically, trying to push him away, but there was no chance of that. He had me in a strong and capable grasp, one hand on the small of my back, massaging me into helpless compliance while the other finger-fucked me with exquisite finesse.
Mustn’t come, mustn’t come, mustn’t come.
“If you come, I’ll have to use my belt on you, you know.”
I came.
He used his belt on me. It left a sharp, sweet, hot sting and neat, red lines on my backside, lines that I would touch and gaze at in my bedroom mirror for a long time that night. But I wouldn’t follow my urges and masturbate over it. Oh no. I wouldn’t dare.
“You’re doing well, Lara,” he said gravely, once I had sat my aching behind down on the chair next to his, hands folded demurely in lap, flaming face pointing down. “Don’t think that you aren’t. I’m delighted to see how much you’ve achieved in this relatively brief space of time. But there is always room for improvement—and sustaining this level of improvement is very hard. I will expect a few falls from grace along the road. Just remember to be honest with me about them, or it will certainly go worse with you. Let’s say that I know of things that are a lot worse than the palm of my hand, or even my belt.”
I yipped and looked up at his face, so placid in its sternness, so relaxed in its authority. He meant it.
“Were you always like this?”
“I’m sorry?”
“So…self-contained. And self-controlled. And bloody efficient! You’re almost…” I tailed off, realising that it would be rather hurtful to liken him to a robot.
“Almost what?”
“Nothing. Sorry. Just unusual. An unusual person.”
“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” he said, one eyebrow raised, inspecting his palm for damage. It was almost as red as my backside. There was a slightly awkward silence, then he spoke again. “But actually the answer to your question is ‘no.’ No, I wasn’t always like this.”
“You…taught yourself?”
“Trained myself. Yes. It was a case of having to. When you hit rock bottom, there’s only one way up. But there’s also the possibility of floundering on at rock bottom. I did that for a few years and then realised I didn’t have to.”
I was utterly intrigued. I imagined Dexter sleeping under cardboard in a railway arch or lying in some crackhouse with a needle in his arm. Surely he couldn’t have ever…
“I can’t imagine you being sloppy and disorganised,” I told him, overlaying my tragic imaginings with some light chat before they disturbed me too much.
“I was. More the result of circumstances than natural inclination. All the same, it couldn’t go on.”
“How did you change? You didn’t have someone to spank you, did you?” The idea amused me and I giggled girlishly.
“No, Lara, I did not.” He rolled his eyes, almost affectionately, then, just as suddenly as it had opened, the door to Dexter slammed shut. “My shady past isn’t relevant to the here and now. What matters is that you benefit from my experiences. And my refusal to accept anything but your best efforts. Are we clear?”
“Yes, Sir,” I grouched.
“I’m not sure I cared for your tone, Lara. Are we clear?”
I sighed. “Yes. Crystal. So what are my targets for next week?”
* * * *
As the spankings mounted up, my infatuation with the spanker intensified. I didn’t make the elementary mistake of deliberately messing up, and I was as honest as I could be, but I just wasn’t very good at the whole being-in-control-of-my-life thing, and most meetings ended with me rubbing my bottom and promising myself that I would do better whilst orgasmic stars circled my head. And after he left, I watched him from my window, striding down the street, so full of purpose and sureness, not an inch of doubt to be seen, and I longed for him.
I tried to find things out about him—sly questions, stealthy peeks into his bag—but he was as tight clamped as a clam, a real man of mystery. Who are you, Dexter? I asked my pillow before resisting the urge to let my fingers relieve some of my sexual and emotional tension and flick furiously to a rerun of the last spanking, with a slightly different ending of my own tacked on.
“Do you spank your girlfriend?” I asked him, a bit desperately, on our seventh day of reckoning, once I had been allowed off his knee. It was a serious omission so he’d used a paddle this time, and I felt roasted, my bottom raging hard against the wooden kitchen seat.
“Get on your knees,” he commanded non sequiturially, unbuttoning to demonstrate that he expected me to show my gratitude for his discipline in our newly established way.
“I think you need to get on the phone to the Electricity Company straight away, young lady, never mind idle chit-chat,” he growled.
I lowered my mouth obediently over his substantial erection.
“I will see you again next week,” he continued, “and there will be no Final Reminders in your correspondence this time, will there?”
I couldn’t respond with my mouth full of cock, so I concentrated on sealing my lips and moving them up and down his shaft at the speed we had negotiated earlier. His hand clutched at my hair, pulling the roots in time with the rhythm. I felt his tip hit the back of my throat and then there was bitter salt flooding my mouth. Like a good little sub, I swallowed it all up.
“No, Dexter. Goodbye. And thank you.”
I waited for the door to click shut, then I got up—with some relief—and went to listen at the door. The click of his footsteps against the linoleum stairs echoed up through the stairwell and, once it was faint enough to indicate that he’d reached the lobby, I slipped out of the apartment and made my way, on light-soled ballet flats, down after him. I didn’t care what I might find, I was going to learn more about the man who spanked me and ruled my life and my orgasms. Didn’t I have a right to know?
Outside the building, I saw him walking on past the shops to the corner of the street where the tube station was located. Luckily, I lived close enough to the centre of the city to ensure a safe barrier of other people between us, although I was anxious about losing sight of him. His height was good, his head an effortless few inches above most of the throng, so I followed it like a beacon, admiring the close cut hair at the nape of his neck, turning into the tube station and preparing to get my travelcard from my handbag but…he wasn’t in the station. He’d walked past, and I was almost too late to catch him, staring around wildly until I noticed him on a crossing halfway up the next block.
Outside the station, a religious zealot stood handing out leaflets about how we were all doomed, but I waved him away, zigzagging through traffic until I had Dexter in my sights again. He was casually looking at the window display in the music shop—oh, was he a musician? He crouched a little, peering at a score, or a book of some kind, but he didn’t go in. Instead he headed away from the busy streets, out towards the quieter part of town. I wondered, with a shock of excitement, if he was going home, and followed him for half a mile more before he disappeared into a door set alongside a takeaway. Did he really live above a grotty fried chicken shop? I was somehow disappointed, but when I got closer, I noticed golden lettering on the door and realised, deflatingly, that this was simply the main office of the Life Coach operation. He’d returned to work. No clues to be had.
Unless…oh, I knew it was bad. One shouldn’t stalk people, but I couldn’t bear the idea of slinking back home, no wiser than I was when I was determined to pursue Dexter to a place of knowledge and enlightenment. Across the road stood a café, an old-fashioned affair that served tea and scones and suchlike, and I liked the idea of spending some time in a place that wasn’t a corporate coffee chain. So I bought a newspaper from the stand in the street and settled myself into the window seat for an hour of undercover observation. After all, it was nearly five o’clock in the afternoon—it was very likely that he’d only gone to the office to collect something, or neaten up some paperwork, or pass on a message before heading home.
I felt like a private detective, sitting behind my newspaper drinking two large mugs of tea—not green—in succession and succumbing to the temptation of home-baked scones with jam and clotted cream—“from Devon” apparently—though I did manage to get most of the jam on my fingers, then the paper, which made for a sticky experience.
By half past five, the volume of tea consumed in a short space of time was having the obvious consequences for my bladder, but I didn’t feel I could leave my seat. If I went to the loo, he would surely emerge at that very moment and I would lose him. But if I didn’t go to the loo…well, my uncomfortable shifting demeanour, even more uncomfortable thanks to that damn paddle, was a dire warning of how this scenario might end. I couldn’t relieve myself all over that poor woman’s lovely rustic-style chairs with the embroidered cushion covers, could I? I nipped to the bathroom, mindful of the owner’s very loud and obvious cashing-up and tidying-away manoeuvres. She wanted to close anyway. I would have to give up.
When I returned, the cups and plates were absent from my table, but the newspaper was still there. And so was Dexter.
I stopped dead in the middle of the café.
“Oh. Hello.”
“If you want a drink, I’m shutting up now,” interrupted the owner. “But there’s a Costa down the road. Stays open ‘til eight.”
“Thank you,” said Dexter, aiming a courteous smile at the woman, which he switched off when his attention returned to me. “Shall we?”
Outside on the pavement, I was at a loss for words. When I found some, they were, “It’s not illegal to have tea and scones in a café, is it?”
“Not illegal, but it’s not considered polite to spy on pe
ople, is it, Miss Marple?”
“What? I wasn’t…”
He stopped walking—God knows where we were going, but he’d been leading me up towards the canal – and shook his head at me.
“So much for honesty,” he said.
He picked up the pace again so I had to trot along behind him, all the way down to the canal, where he sat down on a bench and watched a group of teenage boys larking about with fishing rods, his face disconsolate behind the spectacles.
“Okay,” I said, sitting down—wince—beside him. “I followed you to the office. Is it so bad that I want to know more about you? You never answer any questions and I…like you. I’m interested in you.”
“These relationships can’t get personal,” he muttered.
“Why not? If you don’t fancy me, that’s fair enough but…”
“It’s not that,” he said, rather savagely, then, noting the fear in my eyes, repeated it more gently. “It’s not that.”
“What is it then? You don’t want to be unprofessional? You’re married?”
“No. I don’t have to tell you, so I’m not going to. And perhaps it’s best you find another life coach. I’m not sure this is working out.”
“Dexter!”
“I wish you well,” he mumbled, then he got up abruptly and stalked swiftly off down the towpath, leaving me to call after him and stare in dismay, while the teenage boys whistled and catcalled.
I was not leaving it there. I couldn’t leave it there.
* * * *
The next day I called the office, but I got an answerphone the first six times, and a flustered-sounding woman the seventh. She told me that Dexter was taking a few day’s leave—if I wanted to book him, I had to leave details. There was no point doing that, so I apologised and told her it was personal and, as a last desperate gambit, asked her for his mobile number or email. Of course, she didn’t give it.
The apartment fell into dusty disarray, the gym visits went by the board. I reverted to a diet of convenience food and alcohol while my deadlines danced out of sync and merged in my head. Nothing was real to me but Dexter, and his whereabouts, and his problem with me. I walked the streets all day, just looking for a glimpse of him that never came. I thought and thought and thought back to everything he’d ever said, everything I’d ever seen, in a mammoth effort to comb my brain for clues. On the fourth day, I remembered seeing him with a Sainsburys bag. There wasn’t a Sainsburys near here, but there was one, five miles away, out by the new housing estates. Perhaps he shopped there. Perhaps…but my thoughts were barely seconds old before I had moved to the door, grabbed my handbag and made a mental map of how best to get there.