by Emily Tilton
“No, that’s just it,” said Dr. Thayer. Luke waited deferentially until the director had turned back to him again, confident in the power of his expertise. “Dr. Fredrickson? I think you can probably put it better than I can.”
Luke nodded again. “Several different kinds of girls end up needing matches under disciplinary circumstances. Sometimes the algorithm does actually miss something, and for example, a girl who belongs in an egalitarian marriage is matched with a gamma man who needs—strange as this might seem to you, Commander—feminine domination. In that situation, the disciplinary circumstances are quite different, and though very occasionally we have to overcome some reluctance, using the paddle on women and the cane on men as necessary, we solve the problem without all that much real disciplinary effort.
“But most of the girls we see are like Lily—submissives who can’t acknowledge their submission enough to accept the sort of firm-handed treatment they need. She rejected her first two matches because those men—without, I would imagine, having actually done anything along a dominant or disciplinary line—projected in their confidence and their frankness about their attraction to her the sort of masterful masculinity that she refuses to admit she needs, although as I think I just demonstrated her body responds to it very strongly indeed. If you marry her, you’re going to have to discipline her with great consistency, and probably sometimes with great severity, until she learns to accept her desires. Along with that, we’ll recommend that you have very frequent intercourse with her, according to your own sexual needs, disciplining her just as thoroughly and consistently, for any rebelliousness she shows in satisfying you as you choose, as you would for foul language or gossip.”
Burton smiled at that, but he spoke cautiously. “I can see how that would be a pleasant state of affairs for me, Doctor. But I’m not a guy who makes deep plans. I like to assess things on the fly and respond accordingly, whether it’s a date with a girl or a shootout with drug runners. Are you sure I’m the kind of guy you want for this job?”
Luke grinned. He probably shouldn’t show that kind of boyish enthusiasm in front of Dr. Thayer, but he couldn’t help it: he loved his job.
“That makes you exactly the kind of guy I’d hope for, for Lily James,” he confirmed. “She needs a husband whose natural inclinations will guide him to take her in hand. To be honest, as much as I’d like to be that kind of man, I’m not, Commander. I overthink. I plan, and plan, and plan. I’m a dominant just like you, but I’d be terrible as a husband for Lily because there wouldn’t be the kind of… well, fireworks, if a metaphor might serve, to turn her around. She would take my thoughtfulness as weakness, and think she could just outlast me.”
Burton chuckled. “I can tell you she won’t think that about me.”
Dr. Thayer’s eyebrows went up. “You’ll take her, then, Commander?”
“Will she take me? She’s got the option to go off world, right?”
“She does,” Luke agreed. “She won’t take it, though. And that’s a good thing. It comes from her strong self-respect and self-worth.”
“Should I worry about harming that?” Burton asked. Despite what Luke had just said, he could see a kind of thoughtfulness in the man that offset his instinctive dominance very nicely.
“No.” Luke shook his head. “Your instincts are going to serve you well there, too. You’re not the kind of man who needs to make a girl feel worthless.”
“Of course not,” Burton replied, taken aback.
“When she learns to please you, are you going to praise her? Tell her she pleased you?”
He nodded. “Of course. When Serena was a good girl for me, I always told her so, and I’ll do the same for Miss James. But doesn’t a girl like her want to feel like she doesn’t need that kind of praise from me?”
“Very perceptive,” Dr. Thayer said, “but for a girl like Lily James, the two things actually go very closely together, even if she doesn’t know it yet.”
Luke said, “You’re naturally equipped for this, Commander, simply because you understand that. When Lily achieves in her field—as she certainly will, especially when she’s come under appropriate discipline—you’ll congratulate her, and make it clear to her that she deserves the credit she’s getting. Who knows? The two of you may even fall in love.”
* * *
When Luke reentered the examination room, with Commander Burton right behind him, Lily glared at both of them from red-rimmed eyes. Then she fixed her gaze at the commander.
“Like what you see, sir?” she demanded before Luke could even introduce Burton.
“I do, I must confess, Miss James,” the commander replied amiably.
That made Lily frown, and being called Miss James made her eyes go wide.
“Is that chivalry, sir?” Again she seemed to spit out the honorific, rather than speaking it. “I’d laugh, if it weren’t just so pathetic.”
Luke suppressed a smile as he looked at Burton, whose eyes seemed to flash though his tone continued to convey calm and even a certain degree of docility.
“Thank you for calling me sir, Miss James,” he said simply. “I actually happen to be an officer of the colonial peacekeeping force, though you’re obviously not enlisted in that outfit, and I appreciate the deference.”
Lily’s eyes went even wider, and Luke thought he might have detected the beginnings of an involuntary submissive response in the pink that suddenly colored her cheeks. The personality of Commander Burton made him an ideal match for Lily, but his military qualifications put a marvelous icing on the cake. The girl would have to be a very unusual submissive not to respond to the idea of having an officer—a warrior of high rank—in charge of her.
“B-but…” Lily stammered, clearly caught entirely off guard. Her face softened for a moment, but then went hard again, and the surprising gentleness of her tone disappeared into more harsh reproach. “But I suppose you’re going to make me call you sir, anyway, aren’t you, sir?”
Luke contemplated interrupting the little contretemps but decided against it for the moment, since Burton seemed to have the situation well under control.
“Well, Miss James, I don’t know. Should you call me sir?”
Lily’s jaw dropped and a puzzled crease appeared in her brow. “No?” she said doubtfully. Then, again, she recovered her confidence. “No, of course not. Why should a wife call her husband sir?”
Again Luke thought about intervening, but Commander Burton handled it quickly and deftly. “We can talk about that, honey, if you decide to marry me.”
“And why would I do that?” Lily demanded, the pink returning to her face.
The commander smiled. “I can’t say I know too much about that, frankly. But hush up for a little while, honey, and let Dr. Fredrickson here do the talking, alright?”
It seemed that the honeys stung her like wasps, from the way Lily reacted. She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips, clearly unwilling to accede verbally to her presumptive fiancé’s request, but also clearly cognizant that the paddle remained only a short distance away from her already sore bottom.
For a moment, Luke gave in to his envy of Burton’s natural dominance, in order to feel it fully before he put it away. The man had silenced Lily James simply with the physical presence behind his order to her, which he had framed as a question. Luke knew himself to be a good deal more intelligent, book-learning wise, than the tall, handsome warrior, and the way he exercised his authority over his own wife, mentally, worked beautifully to both their contentment, but he couldn’t deny that he would love to know what it felt like to take a girl in hand through sheer instinct and embodied confidence.
“Thank you, Commander Burton,” he said. “As you can see, Lily is an attractive, but very rebellious, young lady. You’ve observed the state of her bottom, I imagine. That’s the result of her needing to be disciplined before she would submit to this examination. It would make a good deal of sense if you would tell her a little about your own feelings on the subject of mar
ital discipline. Before you do that, though, I just want to point out how well suited Lily’s body is for a husband’s enjoyment. Her vagina is particularly pleasing to the eye, I think, with its inner labia rather retiring, as I like to call it, and barely visible. Her bottom-cheeks, also, are among the firmest I’ve seen recently, and I can attest from the examination that her anus will remain quite tight for a long while even with regular intercourse there. Anything you can tell Lily about your sexual expectations will also be very helpful to her.”
Chapter Six
“Well,” Eric said. “I guess the main thing to say, Miss James, is that you should expect to go over my knee regularly, with your panties down, until you can behave yourself. Now I might as well tell you that they let me watch most of your examination here with Dr. Fredrickson, and I heard you use some language that’s just not appropriate for a wife of mine, as far as I’m concerned.”
He looked down into Lily’s face, making what felt like a titanic effort not to take a closer look at the sweet sights the doctor had pointed out to him. Lily’s eyes had narrowed when Eric told her about going over his knee with a bare bottom, and he could tell that threats weren’t going to be of immediate use. Then, when he informed her that he had seen her examination remotely, those eyes had seemed to flash with hellfire.
But when he brought up her language, her demeanor changed and her eyes went wide. Eric could tell that he had struck a nerve of shame and conscience. He saw he had guessed correctly that this actual offense, to which she had already shown him quite a strong tendency, represented a kind of behavior Lily already knew from her upbringing she should avoid.
“I don’t like to make anything like a threat without giving a good example, Miss James, and though I don’t have the expertise Dr. Fredrickson here has, I agree that I think it’s a very good idea for you to know what you’re getting into.”
He paused, following a gut instinct that told him he should give Lily a moment, and force her to express herself on the subject if he could. Again he struggled not to look down at the sweet little black-curled pussy he would certainly have her trim neatly for him. Serena had come to him with the cute slit between her thighs already shaved, telling him she just felt she belonged to Eric more that way. He didn’t know if it wouldn’t be more fun to require it of a reluctant Lily James, perhaps letting her keep a neat little bush just at the top, if she behaved herself.
Now, as he waited for Lily’s response, his gut told him he should give in—that it would help Lily, in the end, to watch him take in her young naked body with his eyes. He let his gaze roam downward to the perfect, medium-sized breasts with the acorn nipples, the flat tummy, the beginnings of the wiry pubic tresses with which she would have to part, and then the hint of the cleft and the pink secrets inside it. The crinkly little anus that Dr. Fredrickson had correctly predicted Eric would look forward to enjoying with great frequency.
He looked back into her eyes and saw that her face had gone very red. He decided to help, a little.
“Don’t you agree, too, Miss James?”
Lily looked from Eric to Dr. Fredrickson and back. She compressed her lips into a tight line, as if trying to keep herself from responding.
Dr. Fredrickson said, “Lily, I can paddle you again if you decide to be uncooperative.”
She opened her mouth, and Eric intuited instantly that the next thing she meant to say would almost certainly have the word asshole in it. She had formed her lips to pronounce the letter Y—Eric imagined that would serve as the beginning of you asshole or you assholes. But then she stopped herself and took a breath.
“Yes,” she finally said in a flat, neutral voice.
“You agree with me and Dr. Fredrickson?” Eric asked, still in his pleasantest tone.
“Yes,” she repeated, her tone now returning to defiance. “I agree, sir.”
Serena had called Eric sir, just because she loved to address him that way. He tried not to show Lily that it irritated him a good deal to have the honorific dishonored with her sarcasm. He supposed that if she decided to accept the punishment match, there would have to be a reckoning about that, with panties down, at some point in the near future.
At the thought of having her upended over his lap with that cute backside bare, his cock gave a little leap. Eric realized he was having fun for the first time in a very long while. He could use all the confidence and enforced calm that he had learned in the colonies, which had served him so well in so many tight spots, without having to worry about getting his head blown off—no, even better, with the prospect not of a cold beer with his men but of a punishment ride in an eighteen-year-old bottom.
He spoke without showing the tiniest bit of his irritation, and it required no effort at all, given the pleasures to come. “That’s fine, Miss James. Thank you.”
Eric glanced at Dr. Fredrickson, curious to see how the man thought Eric had done so far. The doctor had a broad smile on his face, and his left eye now crinkled a bit in a covert wink, which Eric returned with his own right eye. When he turned back to Lily he saw that her color had heightened again—probably at the wink, which didn’t displease Eric. Lily needed to know what it meant to have a man like him take her in hand.
“So like I was saying, Miss James, your language will need to change, if you do decide to accept my proposal. I know that will be difficult, so I don’t think we can pretend that you won’t slip up. If you do, I’ll tell you to come to my study, and you’ll lay yourself over my knee. I’ll raise your skirt and take your panties down.”
“Skirt?” Lily asked in a horrified whisper, as if she couldn’t help herself.
Eric felt his brow crease in puzzlement, and then he understood and chuckled. “Yes, Miss James. You won’t be wearing jeans, or any other kind of pants. Proper, traditional wives of the kind I’m interested in wear skirts and dresses.”
“But…” She seemed much more worried about the skirt than about the spanking. Eric hadn’t the slightest doubt he could change that.
“Now if you’re a good girl for me, we can talk about it. I can see letting you wear pants at home sometimes, after you’ve learned that those pants will come off when I decide they should, whether to get your butt whipped or for sex.”
Her mouth hung slightly open, and her breasts heaved a little with her quickened breath. Eric gave her a moment to ponder his last words, then continued.
“After your panties are down, I’ll warm your bottom with my hand to teach you your lesson. Naughty girls get spanked: that’s my fundamental rule. If you respond well to your punishment, it won’t have to go any further than that. If you don’t…”
He looked into Lily’s eyes, which went wide. “What?” she asked.
“You’ll get the belt. Lying naked on your tummy, on the bed. You won’t sit comfortably for a while afterward, if I have to give you the belt.”
He had Lily’s undivided attention, he could see. She swallowed visibly.
“If you still won’t learn after that… well, Miss James, I can promise that I’ll find a way to teach you to respect yourself and your husband enough to curb that tongue of yours.”
He looked at Dr. Fredrickson, and remembered the second part of what the physician had asked him to discuss.
“And about the bedroom, well, I guess I want what most real men seem to want. You’ll be a good girl for me, or I’ll have to punish you for that the same way I would if you used a naughty-girl word.”
“What does being a good girl mean to you, Commander?” Dr. Fredrickson asked. “Lily should hear that.”
Eric found himself answering Dr. Fredrickson as if Lily weren’t there, bound naked with her legs apart in the exam chair. Out of the corner of his eye, though, he saw her becoming a little agitated as she listened.
“Well, Doctor, I guess it means that when I tell my wife to put on the lingerie I’ve given her and wait in bed, she does, and then when I ask her to take me in her mouth, she does that, too. A good girl has sex when and how her husband d
ecides, and she doesn’t make a fuss if he gives it to her long and hard. She learns to do what pleases him, and she knows that he will give her her own pleasure, too, when she earns it.”
He turned to Lily, whose cheeks had again taken on a sweet, rosy hue. The paradox he could see in this girl, between her outward defiance and what seemed her clear—and apparently unshakable—inner modesty, attracted him enormously, so much that he felt the tug at his heartstrings as an almost physical thing. You might even fall in love, Dr. Fredrickson had said. Eric had thought it unlikely, then—only a few minutes ago. It didn’t seem at all unlikely now.
“I hope that all makes sense, Miss James. I feel like I’ve laid it out there for you, pretty much, without going into the kind of coarse detail that’s not fit for company.”
Her eyes seemed to soften from their defiant narrowing, and a tiny furrow developed between her eyes, as if Lily suddenly felt a need to understand him that she hadn’t felt before.
He supposed that the time had come, if it ever would, to deliver the actual proposal. He assumed he didn’t have to make it, really, since the Socionomic Bureau had already done so, through the capable Dr. Fredrickson, but Eric tended to stand on ceremony, at least where it concerned important occasions.
“So, Miss James, I’ll put the question to you. Will you be my wife?”
Now her eyes went round; she obviously had not been expecting anything like a traditional proposal of marriage. Not that anything traditional really lay in a man asking her to marry him when she was naked and restrained in a gynecological exam chair, her knees spread wide by the stirrups so that her prospective bridegroom could see exactly what he was getting and make certain interesting decisions about her future with him.
Dr. Fredrickson said, “As I told you, Lily, by law you have twelve hours to make up your mind. You are already provisionally in Commander Burton’s custody, since the bureau—which technically has custody of you at the moment—delegates these matters to the matched husband, so I’m going to ask him his preference for how you’ll be clothed in the interim.”