by Laura Hart
“Come by any time,” urged both Shanna and David as they said goodbye. “Maybe we can meet for dinner some time when you’re staying in town.”
“I really like your father and his wife,” said Max as they drove back to his apartment. “You can have a real conversation with them, not just compare notes on TV programs.”
“Well, you know, they are both professors, so they have something in their heads other than cotton candy.” She emphasized the word ‘both,’ and looked sideways at him.
“Do you know a lot of people whose heads are filled with cotton candy?”
“That’s not my point.”
“So what is your point?”
“That they’re both professors, but you only called my dad that. Why didn’t you call Shanna ‘Professor’ too?”
“She asked me to call her Shanna.”
“Yes, and my dad asked you to call him David. What’s the difference?”
Max suddenly realized where the conversation was heading. “Sadie, don’t make a big deal out of something that wasn’t a big deal.”
“People always say that prejudice isn’t a big deal. Why did you call my dad ‘Professor’ and not Shanna?”
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t give it any thought. Your father is a highly accomplished man who’s considered an expert in his field. He’s received many honors and has authored a long string of books, and it just seemed natural to accord him the title of Professor. Shanna may be a professor, too, but she’s a lot younger with a much shorter resume. How old is she anyway?”
“Why does that matter?”
“Just answer the question. She didn’t seem much older than I am.”
“She’s four years older.”
“Well, that’s probably why I did what I did. She may be a professor, and she’s obviously very bright and well educated, but she simply doesn’t have the gravitas that your father does.”
Sadie was silent. There was a certain truth to what he said, and she remembered Shanna’s words in the kitchen. She obviously hadn’t been bothered by the discrepancy nor even considered it one.
“Sadie? Does this really bother you?”
“Kind of, but I kind of understand what you’re saying, too.”
“So let’s not fight about it, okay?” He put his hand out towards her, and she slowly took it. After a minute she asked with a devilish smile, “So, do you think Shanna’s hot?”
“What kind of question is that? She’s your stepmother, for god’s sake!”
“But she’s also very good looking, and you obviously noticed that she’s not much older than you.” She giggled and looked at Max to see if she was getting a reaction. “I’ll bet you have the hots for her.”
When Max didn’t answer, she continued, “Caught you, didn’t I? Should I warn Dad?” She giggled and pointed a finger at him.
“Knock it off, Sadie.”
“Too close for comfort, eh?”
“Are you looking for a spanking? Is that what you’re doing?”
Sadie snatched her hand back. “Just drive,” she said as she turned and looked out the window.
* * *
Sadie poked Max playfully in the ribs and said, “I’m tired. Let’s go to bed.” They were snuggled close on his sofa watching television but mostly getting each other aroused.
“All right.” He turned everything off, but instead of heading to the bedroom, he walked to a nearby chair and sat down again.
“What are you doing?” she asked with a small frown.
“Come here.”
“Why?”
“Because I asked.”
Sadie shook her head in mock frustration but went over to him. He put out an arm and pulled her so she was standing between his legs. “You were trying to stir things up in the car, and not in a good way. I have the answer for you now.”
With that, he turned her over his left leg with her body hanging down like a ragdoll.
“Stop! What are you doing?” She tried to get back up, but he held her there.
“I’m giving you a small lesson in what happens to women who try to stir the pot.” He turned back the oversized lounging shirt she was wearing, exposing her bottom, which was centered on his long thigh.
“Let me up,” she demanded, feeling incredibly vulnerable. “I was just kidding. Don’t get all in a twist over a joke.”
“Telling me not to get in a twist is probably not going to help your cause.” He looked at her backside, mostly exposed even though she still had on her panties. They would be precious little protection, but as a matter of principle, he wanted them off, so he tugged them free and then slid them down to her knees. Now, there’s a bottom just waiting to be spanked, he thought with satisfaction as he viewed her totally bare cheeks.
“Don’t! Let me up!” she demanded again, more strongly this time, but Max ignored her.
“I warned you I was a spanker, and I’ve been very easy with you. In fact, I’ve only spanked you once, and that was more of a demonstration that was hardly a spanking at all. It’s time to turn up the heat, literally speaking.”
With that, he landed a solid smack on Sadie’s bottom.
“Ow! That hurts!”
Without answering, he delivered a series of stinging slaps to both cheeks and her sit spot. Sadie was shocked and tried to fight back.
“Let me up! That really hurts!” she cried as she tried to get away. When that didn’t work, she tried to put her hand back, but Max grabbed it and held it out of the way.
“What did I tell you about putting your hand in the way? You just earned yourself some extra smacks.” He went on calmly spanking her poor exposed bottom.
Sadie was beside herself. Her upper body was hanging down limply, her hair tumbling over her head and her left hand trying to steady herself. Her backside was stinging horribly, and yet Max kept on slapping it. She tried the sugar approach. “I’m sorry, I really am,” but she was upside down and it didn’t come out that clearly.
“What happens to women who try to stir things up?” he asked, still slapping her throbbing cheeks.
“Ow-w!” she whimpered in response.
He gave her a harder than normal smack. “I asked you a question.”
“They get spanked,” she replied unevenly. She was going to go crazy if he didn’t stop.
“And what happens when you don’t keep your hand out of the way?”
“I get spanked extra.”
“Yes, you do. If you’d accepted the spanking without fighting it, it would be finished now. You didn’t, so here are ten extra.”
He knew he needed to be careful, because she wasn’t used to being spanked and she was sounding very distraught, so he gave her the ten extra slaps only moderately hard and then stopped.
“You won’t be needing these tonight,” he said as he pulled her panties the rest of the way down so he could take them off. Then he said, “You can get up now,” and helped her stand up again, watching as her lounging shirt fell back down and covered her bright red cheeks.
She immediately grabbed her backside, and when she turned to him, he was surprised to see tears on her face. He needed to remember that she wasn’t yet used to being spanked. Maybe he should have gone a bit easier on her. Ah well, what was done was done, and it wasn’t like he’d spanked her terribly hard, at least by his standards. Maybe for her it had seemed like it, though.
“Come sit on my leg,” he said as he pulled her towards him again.
Sadie was torn. Part of her wanted to tell Max to go away, but it was his apartment, so that wouldn’t work. In any case, there was another part of her that found what had just happened sexy as hell. Three minutes ago, it wasn’t sexy, it was horribly painful, but now that it was over, it made Max somehow seem even more attractive than before. Her poor bottom was stinging like mad, but right now all she wanted to do was be with him. Was she crazy?
She allowed him to pull her down on his lap and wrap his arms around her.
“Shh,” he whispered as
he held her. “It’s all right now. A lesson’s been learned and no harm done.”
“No harm done?” she replied indignantly. “My poor bottom’s on fire.”
He gave her the most incredible smile and then picked her up and carried her towards the bedroom.
“Then I guess I’ll have to make it all better, won’t I?”
I Intend to Collect on Every Single Bit of It
“I need to spend an hour or so in the shop and then we can go,” said Max the next morning. They were planning to drive to Galveston for the rest of the weekend.
“Why don’t I go ahead?” asked Sadie. “That way we’ll have both cars there.”
“That’s fine. Drive carefully. I’ll see you when I get there.”
“Do you want me to fix something?”
“If you want, or we can go out. I wouldn’t mind some catfish for lunch.”
Sadie laughed. Since they’d been together, she had introduced him to the lowly catfish, something he’d never eaten before, and he’d become a fan.
“All right. Gaido’s it is.” She came over and wrapped her arms around him, and he reciprocated by holding her tightly and kissing her.
While she drove down I-45, her mind wandered back to last night. She’d been taken off guard by the spanking and wasn’t quite sure how she felt about it after the fact. The idea that a man would think he was entitled to spank a woman because he didn’t like her behavior went against her beliefs, but on the other hand, hadn’t she been secretly fantasizing about that exact thing for years?
The thing she wasn’t sure how to reconcile was that in her fantasy she always knew that the spanking would hurt, and she imagined crying out, but it was only a scene in her head. In real life she’d had to actually feel that hurt, and it had stung like crazy. She didn’t remember anything ever hurting her that much, and yet Max had acted like it was no big deal. What was it he’d said so casually? ‘Lesson learned and no harm done.’
Later, after they’d made love a couple times, he’d told her that it had only been a mild spanking, but it had probably seemed worse to her because she had a virgin bottom. She remembered how he’d held her and rested his large hand on her still-warm pink cheeks while looking into her eyes and assuring her that in time her bottom would toughen up. Just replaying the scene in her mind this morning gave her an uncomfortable butterflies-and-tingles feeling—part apprehension and part titillation. Max represented everything she’d sworn she would never have in her life, and yet the idea of not being with him was becoming unthinkable.
When Sadie reached Galveston a little more than an hour later, she decided to stop by Harmony’s.
“What a nice surprise,” exclaimed her mother when she saw her. “I haven’t seen much of you lately. Where’s Max this morning?”
“He’ll be coming in an hour or so. He had some things to do at the office.”
Harmony nodded. She liked what she’d seen of Max so far and hoped that things would stay good between Sadie and him. “What have you two been doing?”
Sadie poured herself a glass of tea and added a sprig of mint before answering. “All kinds of stuff. We’re going to Gaido’s when he gets here.”
“Does he know to come here?”
“I’m not going to stay that long. If it gets late, I’ll send him a message.” She watched Harmony stir some homemade oils she was making for aroma therapy and then suddenly blurted out, “I think I really like him.”
“Well, I hope so. You’re spending a lot of time together if you don’t.”
“No, Harmony, I mean really like him.”
“Ah.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“Why do you have to do anything? Why not just enjoy being with him?”
“I do enjoy being with him, but what if it gets really serious?”
“Then you follow your heart, darling. If you try to live life with a bunch of formulas, you’ll almost certainly regret it. Making your heart happy is much less likely to lead to regrets.”
Sadie stirred her tea distractedly and waited a minute before saying, “I don’t know if I want to be serious about someone.”
“Listen to your heart, Sadie. If it’s the right person, you will be serious about him without having to think about it.”
There was another pause, and then Harmony continued, “How would you feel if Max moved back to Russia?”
“I’d cry.”
“Okay, but afterwards how would you feel? Do you think that after a month, after the initial goodbye sadness wore off, that you’d still miss him, or would you remember him as a fun time or good sex or whatever and then move on?”
“Harmony!” Sadie had never gotten used to Harmony’s openness in speaking about sex with her.
“Don’t be so squeamish. It’s the twenty-first century, and I assume you two have not been celibate.”
Sadie rolled her eyes. She was relieved that Max wasn’t there right then.
“Call it whatever you want, but you need to think about that question. How would you feel after a month?”
“How can anyone know what they’d feel after a month?”
“All right, let’s go the other direction. Can you imagine being married to him?”
“We haven’t talked about that.”
“I know, but can you imagine it? If you close your eyes and imagine Max and you married, does it make you happy?”
“Yes,” admitted Sadie almost reluctantly, “but don’t you ever tell anyone that!”
Harmony smiled. “I do believe you’ve found your man, darling. Don’t think it to death. Just enjoy it and see what happens.”
Just then Sadie’s phone beeped, and she saw that it was Max. “Where are you?” she asked.
“About halfway down forty-five.”
“Umm. Are you talking and driving?”
Max laughed. “You forget that I have hands-free capability.”
“Of course you do. Nothing’s too good for your two-syllable Porsche.”
Max chuckled. “You’d best be nice, or I won’t give you the gift I have for you.”
Sadie perked up. “What kind of gift?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“Do you have it with you?”
“I do.”
Sadie’s eyes sparkled with anticipation, but of course he couldn’t see that. “I’m at Harmony’s, but I guess I’ll go home now and wait for the arrival of Santa.”
“No, mishka, you have that wrong. Santa only comes to good little girls. I include the questionable ones, so it’s me you’d best wait for.”
“Well, it’s still better than you. No one comes for the list you’re on!”
“Have you so soon forgotten the lesson of last evening?”
“Hardly.”
Suddenly Max swore and then immediately apologized. “I’m sorry, mishka. Some idiot almost hit me.”
“I hope it didn’t damage my present,” Sadie replied with a devilish little laugh.
“Keep it up and there’ll be no present.”
Sadie laughed. “I need to go home so I’ll be there when the gift caravan arrives.”
“You do that. See you in about fifteen minutes.”
“He has a gift for me,” Sadie told Harmony, her face glowing.
“Then I guess you’d better go get it. Tell me later what it is.”
* * *
Sadie’s eyes danced with anticipation as she studied the beautiful box Max handed her. It was about 10 x 12 in red watered silk, tied with a silver satin ribbon. She hesitated, not wanting to disturb it, but curiosity got the better of her, so she carefully removed the ribbon and then put the box on the table so she could use both hands to remove the lid.
Max watched with enjoyment. He liked giving the unexpected, and he felt confident that this would fall into that category. Sadie lifted the lid and peered inside, and her face broke into a big grin. “Are you kidding me? I can’t believe this!”
Inside, the box was lined in ric
h ivory satin and divided into two sides, with the satin in each gently rippled to showcase in the best way possible the precious contents: two dozen chocolate Tootsie Pops. The confections were presented with the same care as sterling Christofle seafood forks might be, carefully aligned in two rows and in alternating directions.
“I don’t believe this!” repeated Sadie as she lifted out a pop and studied it. “Thank you so much. How did you even know where to find these?”
“Oh, I’m a resourceful chap when need be.” He smiled that wonderful smile of his before continuing, “I got the idea after our first weekend in Dallas, when you tormented me with one in the car, but I got distracted by your going silent, and then I put them in my drawer and briefly forgot about it. Let’s just say it took the long road, but here it is now.”
Sadie moved over and put her arms around his chest, and he leaned down and kissed her. “I’m guessing I’ll be tasting chocolate Tootsie Pop for a while when I kiss you.”
“Yes, you will.” She put the one she was holding back into its place with care. “I want to take a picture before I eat any of them.” She pulled out her phone and snapped a photo. “Did you make the inside of this box yourself?”
“I had some help,” he admitted. “Shops like ours have lots of practice in presenting beautiful items.”
Sadie snuggled up against him again. “This is one of the best gifts I’ve ever gotten. It’s just so creative, and the red silk box is gorgeous. Is it Russian?”
“It is.” He covered her mouth with his own and kissed her seriously, leaving both of them breathless, so he stepped back. “We need to stop or we won’t make it to lunch, and I’m starved. We can continue this later.”
“I’ll bet the people in the shop thought it was crazy.”
“Au contraire, Alina thought it was very romantic, albeit in a rather unusual way.” Alina was the older woman who had served them tea on Sadie’s first visit to the shop. That first day she had seemed formidable in her black silk dress and erect, serious manner, but since then she’d warmed up to Sadie and sometimes kept aside tiny tea treats for her.
Max gave Sadie a small pat on her bottom. “Go get ready to go. I’m starved.”