“Get on your knees,” Nick growled. She turned away from him and offered herself. He slammed into her, clasping her hips. They ground into each other. She grasped at the sheets as she gave herself over to her heart-stopping climax. He followed her soon after. They stretched out on the mattress, catching their breath.
“Oh my god,” he whispered. “That was fucking amazing. How did you even think of that?”
“Asking to be spanked?”
He nuzzled into her hair. “Yeah, that was the hottest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Really?” she whispered, not daring to hope that she might get what she had always longed for.
She remembered what Nicole had said in one of her blog posts. Do not overwhelm your partner, you have always dreamed of this, but it is probably new to them. Pace yourself. Be gracious when they try to meet your needs.
“It was really, really sexy,” she agreed. She was trying to decide what the best thing to say next was, when Nick pulled the blankets over their shoulders.
“Okay, you sexy lush, let’s get some sleep.” He accompanied this with a rap of his knuckles against her bottom, and she sighed with pleasure. In no time, the tiny apartment was filled with the sound of two happily sleeping people.
They were both very hung over the next morning. Lucy was struck by how absurdly bright everything was. She held a hand up to her eyes. “Oh my god, we need to get some light filtering blinds.”
Nick started to laugh and then apparently decided that it hurt his head too much to do so. “We have to been absolutely obliterated last night. There is no sun in Sweden this time of year. Not until like two in the afternoon.”
Lucy fumbled for her phone. “It’s three PM.”
“Oh my god, no more red wine for us – like EVER,” he whispered, for which she was grateful.
“Wait here,” she said. She padded into the kitchen side of the not at all great room and grabbed a cold coke, then she dug through her purse and found some Tylenol. She returned to the bedroom with her bounty and shared it with her beloved. After a few minutes she asked, “Did you accept an invitation to the beach for New Year’s Eve?”
He took a thoughtful sip of the coke they were sharing. “I believe we did. A sauna was involved, as I recall.”
“Sauna good for you stupid, fat American girls,” Lucy said in her best Astrid imitation.
He was smiling, but he said firmly, “Stop.”
“I might stop. Or maybe not.”
He propped himself up on his arm and used a finger to swoop her bangs out of her eyes. “I am hung over beyond all reasoning, there is no way I drank enough to deserve feeling this terrible.”
“That’s what they all say,” she said, in what would have been a flip tone, except it’s not possible to sound flippant when you are whispering because it seems like your skull is about to come apart at the seams.
“Do they all remember spanking this pretty ass?” He reached behind her and gave an appreciative squeeze.
She was too embarrassed to even look at him.
“Baby?” he said with concern in his voice. “Okay?”
“I’m fine.” She still didn’t look at him.
“Are you mad at me for doing that?” He sounded genuinely nervous.
“No, I actually…” She buried his face in his chest.
“You actually what?”
She kept her face buried, but answered him. “I’ve actually always wanted you to do that.”
He wrapped his arms around her. “I’m one lucky bastard.”
She was grateful. She had been very afraid that he would be horrified, or worse, laugh at her.
“I say we nap and then talk about this some more later,” Nick murmured.
He was open to talking about it. Lucy fell into a deep and happy sleep.
Nick went out to pick up a few things while Lucy bustled about getting them packed for the seashore. This wasn’t so much “packing” as it was taking things from one large suitcase and transferring them to a smaller suitcase.
She took advantage of Nick’s absence to email Nicole.
Email from [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Dear Nicole,
Well, I sort of got spanked for the first time last night. Actually, it’s not a “sorta” kind of situation. I did. He did. We did!
It was just for play, but he asked what I was fantasizing about and I told him and he spanked me. It wasn’t stern, and it could have been a lot harder. But, it’s a huge milestone. He mentioned the next morning how hot it was. Yay!
Just when I want to really sit down and hash this all out, make a list of rules, etc… we have to go to the fucking beach for two days. Yes, you read that correctly, in Sweden people go to beachfront cottages for New Year’s Eve… to have a bonfire… in the suburbs of the North Pole. So all of the stuff I want to do has to wait. If we don’t get turned into human popsicles and eaten by orcas I will be in touch in a few days. I could never have done this without you!
Love, Lucy
She received a reply almost immediately.
Email from [email protected]
To: [email protected]
First things first – congratulations! It’s a huge step to admit what you want. I am so glad that Nick was receptive. Sounds like you two are off to a great start.
Now, WHOA! Thank God, you guys have plans. You have been at loose ends and it would be great for you make some friends. ESPECIALLY since you need to give the man a little breathing room. Please, please, please do not go all crazy intense on him. Do your damnedest to let it unfurl naturally. You probably need a bit more spankings of any kind before you go renegotiating your entire marriage. That’s a lot to foist on your partner. I know it’s hard when you have dreamed of something for a long time, but it’s a little too early to be sure precisely what you want. Give both of you the gift of some space. I know it’s hard – I really do – but as Archie Bunker (Are you even old enough to know who that is? I doubt it. Oh well, google him.) would say to Edith “stifle yourself.” Bundle up, try to relax and keep me posted. So excited for you.
Nicole
Lucy had every intention of taking Nicole’s advice. It was reasonable advice. She should do exactly what Nicole had suggested. She busied herself with packing every layer of clothing that they owned. They had brought warm boots and snow pants, anticipating hiking later in the year. It had never occurred to Lucy that they might visit an ice floe to bring in the New Year. She was interrupted by the sound of the door shutting.
Nick stood in the doorway grinning. “There’s that naughty school girl I married.”
Lucy grinned back. “Oh yeah? Hmm, I am not convinced you are in charge. Guess you better prove it.”
She dashed out of the bedroom and ran as if to hide behind the couch. He caught her easily, as she had hoped he would, and landed a smart smack onto the seat of her yoga pants. She caught her breath, she wanted to make sure she did everything she could to encourage him. She wanted him to like spanking her as much as she liked him spanking her. She gave a yelp as he landed a harder swat. She couldn’t help herself.
“Oh my god, I love that!” she squealed.
“Do you?” he asked. He swung a leg over the arm of the futon and pulled her closer to him. “Over you go, my gorgeous girl.” He propelled her forward and she buried her face in her arms with her ass skyward.
He took his time, slowly and not very ferociously spanking her.
She had to fight her inclination to tell him to do it harder and hold her still and tell her off while he did it. Hmm, maybe she wasn’t actually all that submissive. She forced herself to heed Nicole’s advice and stopped trying to manage the situation. She tried to focus on the sensation of Nick’s hand on the small of her back while his other hand slapped her bottom.
His left hand moved up her back and nestled in her hair. He raised his knee and that caused her head to head north while her ass headed south. “Let’s get these pants down,”
he said. He had to tug at one side and then the other to wrestle her snug yoga pants down to her knees. “I can stop if you want me to,” he said.
“I don’t want you to stop,” she said. Thinking, I don’t want to be able to stop you.
The first slap on her bare bottom made her yelp. It appeared that her feminist husband liked it too. He repeated it on the other cheek. Back and forth he briskly spanked her. “Are you going to be my good girl?” he asked.
All the years of dreaming of being asked that came crashing down on her. She began to cry.
“Baby? Honey.” He had her up and cradled in her arms before a tear had even worked its way down her nose. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
She hiccupped. This was not going as she had planned. She held up a hand. “I don’t want you to feel bad.”
He looked wary; he began to apologize again and she stopped him. “I have wanted you to spank me since the day I met you.”
“For real?” He was smiling.
She thought it best not to say that she had dreamed of someone/anyone spanking her for as long as she had been touching herself between the thighs. She shook her head. “It makes no sense, I know. I am smart, very smart. But I love the idea of you thinking of me as your good girl.” She could not look at his face.
Gently, he stroked her cheek. “You are my good girl. And yes, you are very, very smart. I don’t always know how to manage a woman who is so much smarter than I am.”
“I am not smarter than you. Maybe at applying mathematical and statistical analysis to situations involving risk, but ONLY at that.” They laughed easily.
“So you have always wanted me to spank you?”
“Always,” she confided. “Let me show you something.” She padded over to her laptop and opened up the bookmarked Well Spanked Feminist Blog.
“Don’t be overwhelmed,” she said, aware that she was essentially asking someone to swallow a whale whilst saying, ‘Don’t choke.’
Nick read a few lines. “But this isn’t spanking just for sexiness.”
She took a deep breath, steadying herself and murmuring the prayer, Please don’t laugh at me, deep within her soul.
“Is this what you want?”
“I think so,” she said. “I am pretty sure.”
He nodded, deep in thought and reached to hold her hand.
The horn from Astrid’s car startled them both. “Oh fucking Jesus,” he said, leaping up. “We need to get ready to go.”
Lucy had much of the packing done, so they hastily grabbed the rest of their things and bustled to the door. As he reached for the doorknob, he turned and brushed her hairline with his lips. “Hey, baby doll,” he whispered.
“Yes?” she breathed back.
“I think it’s amazing that you trust me that much.”
For the second time that day her eyes filled with tears.
Chapter 5
The drive was longer than Lucy would have anticipated. The bridges were all thronged with cars. Astrid turned the radio on to talk radio in a language that Lucy could almost identify. Maybe she was better at languages than she had given himself credit for. “Is that Swedish?”
Astrid shook her head. “No, it’s French.”
Lucy was very glad she’d kept mum at the dinner party. She leaned her head against the back of the seat and, enjoying the sun on her face, closed her eyes.
She dozed fitfully, waking to hear Astrid ask Nick if he was reading a text from colleague and him non-committedly mumble, “Mmm hmm.”
“I asked you about the Berget fran Bergelsen texts,” the driver said impatiently.
“Yeah, sorry, I was reading something,” he said.
Lucy tried not to chortle to herself as she imagined the Muppet Swedish chef, only with very large muscles, singing “Berget fran Bergelsen hordy, hordy, hordy hor,” while his chef hands tossed things in the air.
They got their belongings settled into the cottages. Lucy had not been at all sure what to expect. It was even smaller than their micro-house in the city. It had a wood stove and a bed piled high with comforters and pillows. There was a closet sized sort of bathroom – it contained a toilet and a sink. “What the hell is it with these people and their hatred of bathtubs?” wondered Lucy.
They bundled into every item of clothing they had brought to Europe with them. They would be walking to Karin’s home for dinner. Then apparently, they would be lighting a bonfire on a frozen body of water, which to Lucy’s mind was a very poor idea overall.
She pinned her hair up while sitting on the bed. Nick was standing to step into his jeans and the room was too tiny for both of them to take up floor space. She imagined how she would describe this to Nicole. These people are giants, but they all want to live in fucking dollhouses.
After dressing in their warm clothes, which they intermittently interrupted to make out like teenagers, they moved along a shoveled path to the “big” house – which was in no way big. It was warm and filled with candles. “Now this is what I call hygge,” Lucy said, proud of the way she had seamlessly adapted to their culture.
Her hosts looked at each other with bemused glances. “No.”
Dammit Astrid, thought Lucy.
The Nordic woman continued, “You are practically strangers, and a New Year’s party is not hygge. I think you meant hygge, but you pronounced it very oddly.”
“Well, fine. I’ll just quit trying,” Lucy said a bit more sharply than she had intended.
“No, no, no, you are doing well,” murmured Karin. The older woman pressed a cheek against Lucy’s and gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “We are so glad you came.”
Lucy gratefully accepted a tall flute of cold champagne. A sumptuous buffet of glamorous seafood filled the central table. There were oysters, lobsters with mayonnaise and giant shrimps roasted on skewers that smelled of ginger and turmeric. There were also teeny, briny, little shrimps drizzled with mayonnaise and topped with feathery sprigs of dill. There was, of course, a rainbow of bowls full of herrings pickled in various ways. “What did the poor herring ever do to you guys?” she wondered aloud.
Someone responded, “They’ve fed us for centuries.”
Someone else said loudly, “Don’t blame us if they are so delicious!”
Well, thought Lucy, delicious is in the taste buds of the beholder… Give me some nice crispy fish and chips any day. Avoiding the herring – some of it appeared to have been pickled with beets and the result was luridly mauve tiny bone-in fish – was not impossible. She could always fill up on the hearty rye bread that was also on the buffet. They helped themselves to small plates and wandered around chatting amiably.
An alarm went off and Karin dashed to the old fashioned oven. She removed a tray of tiny steaming cheese puffs. The hot, salty pastry was a revelation with the cold bubbly wine. Karin held her wine glass overhead. “Friends, dear friends and colleagues, as is our tradition, I thought we would discuss our goals before we go outside.”
Lucy had not had nearly enough wine to want to play confession with this group of people.
Apparently Nick had known that it was customary for Swedes to discuss their last year and their goals for the new one prior to lighting the bonfire.
A heads up would have been nice, thought his irked wife.
He leaned close and gave her round bottom a gentle squeeze; thankfully her back was to the wall. “You just better hope I don’t tell everyone what I have planned for you in the new year.”
Her heart was pounding. She pressed her hip closer against him. “I love you.”
He kissed the tip of her nose. “You too. I love you too.”
People went around the room pledging to spend more time with their families, to be more efficient at work and even, the expatriate American actuary noticed with some satisfaction, “To be nicer,” was the stated goal of a certain Astrid.
More food was brought out of the oven. Good lord, thought Lucy, it was like Hermione’s bag in Harry Potter – that oven could apparently hol
d way more food then you could guess by its external dimensions. A roasting pan of monkfish left Lucy somewhat apprehensive. It looked like a tightly plaited braid of white flesh. It was served atop a pile of mashed potatoes that were latticed with anchovies.
Lucy tried to take delicate bites of potato whilst avoiding the anchovies. The anchovies reminded her of when she had been at camp. Concerned that their mathlete daughter was not going to be well rounded, her parents had sent her to Libra camp. Libra camp was an attempt to give the least athletic children on earth the chance to experience activities favored by their less intellectual peers. Mornings were spent attending college lectures on a variety of subjects. Afternoons consisted of pale skinned adolescents with enormous vocabularies sucking at things like boating. Her tennis shoe laces had sort of melded to each other after their frequent housing in lake water. She had been unable to untie them and had tried to use her teeth. The result had been a mouth full of salty little hairs. Once was enough, thank you very much.
“You don’t like anchovies?” one of the other guests asked.
Dammit, so much for being subtle. “No, I think they taste like stuck together old shoe laces,” she frankly admitted.
This led to an outburst of laughter around the table. She was fast getting a reputation as something of a loose cannon. She found that she rather liked it.
“You didn’t say what your goals are for this year,” Astrid mentioned.
Lucy took a sip of champagne. “I am going to be as honest as I can with the people I love,” she said.
Nick nuzzled against her ear, and whispered, “That might affect your ability to sit down, you know.”
She wasn’t sure which felt warmer, her heart or her pussy. They were both swelling with delight.
It was time to put on outerwear and head to the bonfire with everyone else. As she laced up her boots, she couldn’t help herself. “So how often do people plunge through the ice and die instantly? Statistically speaking, of course.”
She was assured that no one had ever died at a New Year’s Eve bonfire.
A Spanking Good New Year: Short Story Collection Page 33