A Spanking Good New Year: Short Story Collection

by Rayanna Jamison

  She was unsure of what she needed to do first. There were built-in closets in the bedroom, but she couldn’t open them because the mattress had the doors wedged shut. So, no putting clothes away yet. While her hair dried, she slurped more delicious coffee.

  The darling house was very small. The front door opened into a “great room” which was sort of like using the term “jumbo” to describe shrimp. It did offer built-in bookshelves that ran the length of the room. The far end housed the kitchen. There was an island that would serve as their dining table and workspace. Shelves ran around the room a few feet below the ceiling. Lucy would have preferred storage that wasn’t quite so visible.

  She shook herself, she felt surprisingly brisk considering how little sleep she had gotten the night before. She would focus on getting cute dishes and platters and simply make a point of staying on top of the housework, easy peasy. Her hair was reasonably dry, so she zipped herself into her warm down coat and headed outside.

  It was freezing. She turned around and grabbed a hat and gloves. It was too cold to care about what you looked like. Within the first block she was rethinking the wisdom of walking the eight blocks to Ikea.

  She noticed several signs that seemed to be advertising fireworks, which seemed at odds with all of the Christmas decorations that were still very much in evidence. Eventually, she found a bilingual sign. “Nya år fyrverkerier till salu” the sign said, thankfully then repeating in English: “New Year’s Fireworks for Sale”.

  Signs aside, the city was still decorated for Christmas. Swags of greenery festooned buildings, candles filled most windows. There were also, almost everywhere she looked, goats. Goats the size of horses made of straw, smaller goats of wood painted candy apple red, window displays made of stuffed goats, and even the sawhorses that blocked off traffic were decorated to look like goats. She ducked into a cafe with “Kanelbullar” on the sign. She found a spot by the window and opened her laptop. As soon as she had a signal, she googled “Sweden Christmas goats.” There was a veritable cyber gold mine of information.

  Her search yielded pages upon pages. In Sweden goats pull Santa’s sleigh, she learned, and most towns have enormous straw goat displays, that she was sobered to learn, are inclined to catch on fire. The actuary within her did a quick calculation of danger posed to towns by giant straw goats. Not good. She wouldn’t approve an insurance policy for any such thing. Luckily, or not, she supposed, depending upon your point of view, Scandinavia hadn’t embraced defensive risk management. They seemed to embrace the flaming mammals of potential death in their town squares. She redirected her focus to the subject at hand – goats. In a land that was home to vast numbers of actual real life reindeer, what did they use to symbolize Christmas/Jul? Goats. Well, that was a new one, she thought. She paused to watch the passersby.

  She glanced around to make sure that no one could see her laptop screen over her shoulder. She went to the blog she had spent much of her time on over the last six months, The Well-Spanked Feminist.

  Lucy reread one of her favorite posts, “Why would a strong woman want this?”

  Because we are wired this way. Because being held accountable makes us feel loved. After a spanking we feel our own feminine power in a profound way. Because we want to become our best possible selves. Because we feel that submitting to our partners makes them be their best selves too.

  She knew every word of it by heart. She had stumbled upon the website a few years back when she was spending every waking moment in the university library finishing up her PhD in actuarial science. She had never dared mention these desires to anyone, and if she had, she was sure they would have laughed out loud at her.

  She was doing incredibly well in a field almost entirely dominated by men. She had completed math degree after math degree and could now command hundreds of dollars an hour. She had a waiting list of clients begging for her services. She was a liberal democrat. She was definitely a feminist, so how the hell did what she want fit into who she was? The question had haunted her for years.

  Lately, she had decided that it didn’t need to make sense. She had reached out to Nicole, the writer of the Well Spanked Feminist with trepidation. The warm response she had received from the blogger had allayed many of her concerns.

  Nicole was not a browbeaten subjugated woman. She had answered many of Lucy’s questions and always reminded her that she and Nick would have to find their own path. Lucy had committed to at least discussing this with Nick, although Nicole had encouraged her to play it by ear and not try to bite off more than she could realistically take on at once.

  It needed to be done the right way, her new mentor had insisted. Lots of compassion, tact, and openness was the only way that this could turn out well.

  Lucy’s reverie was interrupted by the ponytailed waiter approaching her table. She turned towards the bakery case and pointed at a cinnamon bun. “And kaffe?” she said, pleased with her attempt at pronouncing Swedish.

  The handsome waiter said, “We all speak English, you know.”

  “Right. Okay, cinnamon bun and coffee.”

  She had closed her laptop when he approached, and she didn’t open it for a few minutes, as she watched the pedestrians moving through the snow-dappled streets. Apparently, there was no one in Sweden who could not professionally model outerwear. The pedestrians in fedoras looked elegant and retro. The women in knitted hats looked whimsical and sporty. Lucy was fairly certain that when they pulled their berets and hipster toboggan caps off of their heads, their hair wouldn’t be all staticy. That was Viking hair, dammit. It wouldn’t dare be uncontrolled. That hair could fight its way out of a flaming war zone and, with axes for hands, chop away any atoms of electricity that dared to even think about making its strands misbehave… Her thoughts were running together oddly. Perhaps it was the time change.

  She nibbled at her cinnamon bun, which was delicious and nowhere near the size of one that she could buy at home. This might be why she was the fattest person in Uppsala. The staff was attentive and every time her cup got low, it was quickly refilled with steaming delicious energy in liquid form. “Tack” she said trying to sound off the cuff at her attempts to speak Swedish. Take that, she thought to herself. So what if you all speak English, I might secretly rock at speaking Swedish, might do it like a native, for all you know. This was a ridiculous notion, but it did make her smile.

  She read further on the blog. As always she headed to the section labeled “punishments.” Nicole, the author of the blog was a university professor who lived in a domestic discipline relationship. She wrote about the contradictions inherent in her life, and her writing left Lucy breathless.

  When she had stumbled upon the blog, she had never heard of DD, but the descriptions made her quiver. The idea of Nick laying down the law, of saying, “We agreed you wouldn’t do that, get over my knee,” literally made her catch her breath.

  She had always fantasized about being spanked. In grade school, she had once missed a math test because she had lingered too long at the school library looking up words like spank, paddle, and switch in the dictionary. She had never seriously misbehaved at school, but once a rumor flew around that an eighth grader had been paddled and Lucy had been unable to pay attention for the rest of the school day. Her mind kept imagining what it would be like to be ordered to bend over for a paddling.

  She’d started a career and fallen in love with Nick. Lucy had never discussed her desires with anyone until the fateful day she had emailed Nicole. She had decided that all of the wonderful qualities Nick possessed, his kindness, his strength, his cleverness and ambition more than made up for him not guessing her secret desire. It was a worthwhile trade, she knew in her heart of hearts, and yet sometimes she yearned for a very different kind of marriage. Lucy set her now empty mug down and eagerly read Nicole’s newest posting.

  Chapter 2

  Blog Post The Well-Spanked Feminist

  I always forget just how much the hairbrush hurts. You would think after
all of this time that I would know better. I do not know better. When I got the speeding ticket, I meant to quietly pay it without saying anything. Strike one. I forgot. Strike two. M. collected the mail today. Strike three. He strode into the kitchen with the notice of an unpaid ticket in his hand. “Oh fuck!” I said. (Even I know enough about baseball to know that there is no strike four – but if there were such a thing, I’d totally have just swung it.)

  He stood there furiously reading it. “Wait! This is months old.”

  “I forgot,” I said.

  “We’ll get to that,” he said. “First, you were going thirty miles over. Thirty!”

  “I don’t think I was going that fast,” I lamely answered.

  “Well, let’s see, whom shall I believe? The police officer, or the girl who didn’t tell me about it in the first damn place?”

  It was not the sort of question that calls for an answer.

  “You know what?” he said. “Let’s not waste any time with this. You were going dangerously fast, you didn’t tell me about it when it happened, you didn’t pay the ticket and now you’ve got an added $25 fine added to the ticket.”

  “I do? That sucks!”

  He slapped the ticket onto the counter with a flourish. “Upstairs, hairbrush, jeans down. Now.”

  There is a time in every submissive’s life when she considers arguing. It happens to me every time. For a split second I consider saying, “Absolutely not. You are not the boss of me.”

  But I am the happiest in the knowledge that he is sometimes the boss of us. He steers the ship and I revel in it, even when the captain is about to vigorously apply his paddle to, well, me. I headed upstairs and he followed me, landing a sharp slap on my bottom on every step. They hurt; he was not playing around.

  When we first started this, he struggled with giving me real punishments, because most of the time it wouldn’t fit into who we are. We are intellectual equals, we love to debate. But there are some times, and a bottom warming is one of them, when I need him to be willing to hold me accountable.

  “I cannot believe you, young lady. I am furious.” We were at the top of the stairs by now and he grabbed my elbow and tucked me under his left arm. His right hand began to apply scorching slaps to my ass. I twisted and stamped and couldn’t maneuver an inch away. He laid on close to fifty ferocious swats before letting go of me. He grabbed my wrist and strode on into our bedroom.

  He sat on the bed and grabbed my hips to pull me closer to him. I was hesitant, to no avail. He unbuckled my jeans, and without a second’s hesitation, yanked them and my panties down to my ankles. A quick jerk pulled me over one of his knees. His other leg scissored over the backs of my knees. My bottom was already tender and he visited a volley of smoking spanks alternating from cheek to cheek. I was crying in no time. He didn’t even slow down. I was whimpering that I was sorry and his only response was a growled, “Girl, you don’t even know sorry yet.” He paused for a second and I did my best to catch my breath.

  “You,” he started and then seemed to change his mind. “Forget it.” He helped me to stand. I’d totally kicked off one leg of my jeans. While I stood between his knees, feet entangled in denim, he looked me in the eye and delivered one nuclear slap to the crest of my bottom. I cried out sharply. “Bring me your hairbrush. I haven’t even gotten started yet.”

  I didn’t dare argue while in hauling back over the knee distance, but as I shuffled towards the dresser, I said, “Honey, you’ve already spanked me really hard.”

  “Don’t you dare move so slowly. You drove too damn fast, you lied, you did not pay your ticket, you lied, you got a late fine, you LIED.” The last “lied” was the first time he’d raised his voice and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  “I didn’t mean to lie,” I whispered as I opened the drawer and withdrew the hairbrush.

  He didn’t even dignify that with an answer, just crooked a finger at me. “Let’s go, young lady.”

  I paused and planted my free foot onto the leg of the trailing jeans and pulled my other foot out of them. He hadn’t told me that I could, but this shuffling was getting ridiculous.

  He held out an impatient hand. Wondering why I ever, ever thought this was a good idea, I handed over the brush with a quivering hand.

  He scooted himself back a bit onto the bed and gestured me to lie across his lap. “You earned this and you’re not going to fight me. Get over my lap.”

  I swallowed hard and put myself over.

  He pulled me close, (I have to interject here, that this might be my favorite part of a disciplinary spanking – there is something about him wrapping his arm around my waist that makes me swoon.) with his left arm firmly around me, he lit into me with the brush. If I thought the spanking had hurt up until then, I was heartily mistaken. Over and over, cheek to cheek, crest of bottom and then upper thigh, he repeated the pattern until I was bawling my eyes out. Not merely crying, mind you, bawling. Sobbing, gasping, howling.

  He paused then, resting the brush on my throbbing scarlet ass. “I do not know what I would do if you were hurt in a car accident,” he said. He sat there rubbing the brush in circles on my bottom while I sobbed out how sorry I was, that I would be more careful, that I loved him too. His breathing relaxed a bit. His left hand moved up and stroked my hair. “I love you, baby girl,” he whispered. “I love you so much.”

  The brush lifted off of my skin. “And that is why I will be damned if you are going to lie to me.” The brush briskly reconnected to my skin – about fifty more times. He said the same thing over and over. “I love you. You will not lie to me.”

  I intended to say that I loved him more than anything, that I promised not to keep things from him again. But the sobs were beyond words.

  He gently rubbed my back. “Shhh. There, you took your punishment, it’s all okay, that’s my good girl.”

  I know that glowing under being called his good girl, should not appeal to me. And yet it does. The idea that this smart man, who knows all of my foibles and flaws and fucks ups, finds me fundamentally good, floods my soul with light. I can’t explain it and I am done trying to excuse it. It makes us happy.

  He held me while I cried myself out. I burrowed my tear streaked face into his neck and allowed him to comfort me as I had allowed him to correct me seconds before. Nothing could have prepared me for the connectedness of this kind of relationship. Nothing.

  Lucy’s eyes grew misty at the thought of that kind of love. Her heart yearned for that kind of union. Parts more southern than her heart were positively drenched with longing. Her hands shook as she scrolled down the blog. Her knees felt twitchy. The paradox of sitting in the most egalitarian country in the world while reading about how to make her husband take the reins and spank her to tears, made her giggle. She thought about the ludicrousness of her sitting in a coffee shop with a molten pool between her legs and a halo of staticy hair around her head, while Nordic supermodel types sauntered in and out of her view, and began to laugh harder.

  Her peripheral vision had white spots in it. She imagined the faces of her colleagues if she ever came out and told them that every single time she had touched herself she had imagined she was being spanked. Hilarious!

  The thought of the mattress that covered the entire floor of the bedroom made her laugh even more hysterically. The room was beginning to spin.

  The ponytailed waiter pointedly removed her coffee cup from the table.

  She was startled. “Hey!” she said.

  He handed her a glass of water. “No more Swedish coffee for you.”

  She looked around at the packed coffee house. “You guys drink it all day all the time.”

  “Yes, but we are not stubby little Americans. Have some water.”

  So much for egalitarian, she thought. Looking at her shaking fingers did give her pause. Her heart was pounding like a jackhammer. God only knows how much of the coffee she had drunk. She paid her bill with her credit card. The exchange rate was something crazy like a krone bei
ng worth fourteen cents. Even an advanced mathematician didn’t want to tangle with it. She was going to avoid the entire issue. For a year, I will put everything on my credit card, she thought smugly.

  She bundled back up and returned to her quest to get to Ikea. The cold bit into her even through her heavy coat. The only thing colder than the air was the lack of eye contact. Apparently Swedes only said hi, or even looked in the eyes of people they knew. This might be a long ass winter she thought to herself for the second time in three hours.

  She made it to the store, avoiding catching her own windblown, watery-eyed reflection all the way.

  The seven foot tall Nordic goddess who was working on the floor of the furniture store had apparently dealt with Americans before. She appeared bored by Lucy’s explanation that the mattress covered every inch of the floor. “Yes,” Swedish girl said. “Too big, you need a reasonably sized bed.”

  It occurred to Lucy that reasonable was perhaps up for debate. However, she was so grateful that the store was prepared to not only deliver the new bed and mattress, but also haul away the too big one, that instead she nodded mutely.

  Swedish shop girl printed out a receipt and handed it to Lucy.

  It occurred to Lucy that perhaps there was one king sized mattress in Sweden that got purchased by Americans and returned over and over. She remembered her father joking that there was only one fruitcake in the world, perhaps it was like that, she reasoned. She was still aware of the caffeine pulsating through her veins and she was trying to behave herself.

  She thanked Swedish shop girl, who gave the merest nod, really a token that said, My hearing is perfect like the rest of me, but you are not worthy of my time or attention.

  It was already getting gloomy. She wished she had paid more attention to Nick when he had described the hours of daylight in the winter this far north. Thank goodness for her phone’s GPS. Without it she never would have found her way through the maze of street names that were all made up of impossible combinations of consonants and oddly shaped vowels.