Buying His Mate (17 page)

“I-I-I…” Gretchen stammered. “M-Ms. F—”

“Heather Feld did this to you?” Martin demanded, the wrath and the arousal and the guilt all rising higher together, in an enormous conflagration. “Heather Feld caned you? Where? Why?”

“At the… at the M-Maenad C-Club…”

Martin felt his brow furrow, but he could not think of anything to say. Had Heather coerced her into the club, somehow?

“I… I w-went there… with my friend Beth.”

“You
went
there? You were invited, and you
went?
” He knew the savagery was coming out, and he couldn’t stop it. Suddenly, for reasons he couldn’t grasp, he didn’t want to stop it, either.

“Y-yes, sir,” Gretchen whispered. She swallowed. “I wanted to see.”

“See what, Gretchen? See what elites do when they let themselves be cruel to relict girls like you?”

She nodded mutely.

The rage built in Martin, even the urge to twist the wrist he still held in his hand, but he let go of it instead and said, “And did you like what you saw, Gretchen?”

A look passed across her face that seemed to transform it from an aspect of fear and misery to one of determination: her mouth narrowed and pursed, and her nostrils flared. Martin stared in disbelief.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

Martin couldn’t contain himself, then. “Turn around and put your hands on the counter, Gretchen,” he said.

The fear returned.
Good
. “Wh—why?” The girl trembled like a leaf. Just as she should.

“I’m going to spank you, right now, so you know just how unacceptable I find this disobedience and disrespect. Then you’ll make dinner. After dinner, we’re going to go the living room, and I’m going to make it clear to you that from now on you’ll get your punishments here at home.”

“Wh-what will you do?” She breathed very quickly now, her shoulders rising and falling.

“I’m not going to cane you again tonight, on top of what you’ve got. I want you to know that I’ll be caning you, though, as soon as those marks fade. You’re going to have stripes of mine to look at in the mirror for a good long while.”

Gretchen bit her lips. “Yes, sir,” she whispered. In her voice, then, he heard the very last thing he expected to hear: gratitude.

Suddenly Martin remembered the moan from the Hall of Taking: that long, low moan that seemed to call out to him and tell him that this girl’s submission matched his
having
urge to master her. Why had he forgotten it? Because of the marriage business? Shouldn’t the marriage have brought them closer together?

Then he saw it: he saw what Heather had tried to tell him in the lobby of the orientation center, and what she now tried to tell him by sending his wife back to him with six cane stripes across her pretty bottom. Cohabitation, marriage, companionship: for Martin Lourcy, they must always co-exist with his dominance. Gretchen must be cherished as his wife, but she must also be disciplined and enjoyed masterfully, because that was who Martin was. The moan had called to him that this girl must be his wife, but it had called also that deeper, animal part of him, that declared that any wife of Martin’s must honor him, obey him, and learn the stern lessons he would teach her, when necessary.

He set his jaw and continued.

“In the living room tonight, though, I will whip you, and I will plug your bottom. Then I’m going to fuck you the way I should have been fucking you all along.”

“Yes, sir,” she whispered again.

“Now do as I’ve said.”

Gretchen turned to the counter, where the cutting board sat, still covered with vegetables. She laid her palms on the counter.

Martin placed his left hand on the small of her back and pressed down slightly. “Arch this back for me,” he said, his anger suddenly seeming to melt away into the idea that not only would justice be achieved in this spanking, but also a new understanding between him and his wife. His voice sounded gentle in his ears, even as he contemplated letting the savage part of his nature emerge, in delivering Gretchen’s just reward to her already sore bottom.

With a little whimper, Gretchen obeyed, pushing her prettily striped backside out. With his right hand, Martin rubbed her there, no longer feeling any need to push down the need to have her, to possess her.

“You were a naughty girl today, weren’t you?” he asked softly.

“Yes, sir.” Her voice sounded so small that he wanted to kiss her. The delicious feeling of her bottom in his hand, too, had made his cock very hard, and he also had to resist the urge to drop his pants and fuck her over the counter instead of spanking her, or perhaps before spanking her. But though fucking certainly lay in her future, and even coming, if she showed herself to be obedient and repentant, his desire to make clear to her that she would not lack for discipline any more supervened.

He raised his right hand high and brought it down hard, just in the middle of her bottom. Gretchen cried out loud; the welts from the cane were clearly very sore. He spanked her again, and she wailed, crossing and uncrossing her knees in pain. At the third hard smack, she lost control, bending her knees and trying to get away from him, but Martin took her firmly around her waist and kept spanking her faster and faster.

“Sir… sir… it hurts…” she cried. “Please… I’m so sorry…” Gretchen was sobbing now, with great heaving, whimpering cries. Martin had turned her bottom very red, but he kept spanking, knowing he must deliver his disciplinary message with as much clarity as he possibly could, and relishing the feeling of holding her and controlling the wayward motions of her lovely bottom.

Chapter Twenty

“Will you disobey me again, Gretchen?” Martin’s voice seemed to cut through the pain of the spanking he kept giving her. The caning from Ms. Feld had hurt, but now her husband seemed to have set her backside on fire with his punishing hand, striking so much harder than he had either back on Earth or in the orientation center. Those spankings had seemed somehow gentle, and intended merely to let her know that he held her accountable for her behavior.

This one, though, told her that he had decided she must feel real discipline, and learn a real lesson. To go to the club, when she knew it was off limits, and to tell Ms. Feld about the marriage—something Gretchen knew she must soon confess to Martin—these were things that showed both her and him that his true, firm guidance was required.

In the club, under Ms. Feld’s cane, she had understood at last that Martin had, without realizing it, set a trap for himself: the possessive, animal way he had used her on their wedding night had made him feel so guilty that he could not do it again until Gretchen could tell him that she needed that from him, the same way, that very first moment they met on Earth, her silly attempt to get out of the Taking had told him she needed a spanking.

Now that he had decided on the brave, perhaps even the recklessly brave, path of marriage, though, a little foolish thing like that—or like forgetting dinner—would not be enough to bring him back to understanding that he must be the stern, sometimes savage, husband as well as the tender one. Only Gretchen could show him that, and she needed the help of something stark and unmistakable, like the six cane welts across her bottom that now burned like fire.

“Please… please…” Gretchen sobbed. The pain in her bottom-cheeks was so great that she could not manage anything else.

“Answer me! Will—you—disobey—me—again?” With every word, a tremendous spank, and all of them on places where the marks of the cane made her husband’s justice blaze up so terribly Gretchen thought she might never be able to sit down again.

“No! No! Oh, sir…” He held her so tightly around her waist. Why did it feel so right to be immobilized that way? She remembered when he had taken her anally, the way he had told her to hold still, and enforced the command with his gripping hands.

His hands: my husband’s firm hands.

Martin stopped, and at the sudden cessation of the agony, Gretchen collapsed onto the counter, into the moist red and orange and green vegetables of the stir-fry she had been making. She had a red pepper stuck into her cheek, she was fairly certain, but the coolness was welcome, for her whole body seemed to have shared in the heat Martin’s hand had produced in her backside.

“Thank you, sir,” she whispered to the vegetables.

He began to rub her bottom, then, and she moaned.

“My dear,” he said, “you took that very well. You are welcome.” His fingers on her punished cheeks, like the vegetables on her face, felt cool and delicious.

But then another part, of course, began to become hot. Another moan came from her throat.

His voice came again, gently now, “Are you getting wet, Gretchen?”

She whimpered as he named the shameful thing. How could her body respond that way after such a stern punishment, and with the knowledge that there would be more to come, in the living room?

“Yes, sir,” she whispered.

“You are a very naughty girl, aren’t you?” His two middle fingers cherished the soft place where her bottom began to join with her thighs; the place where it felt now like her pussy began.

“Yes, sir,” she answered in a soft groan. A piece of carrot came into her mouth as she opened her lips to respond to Martin’s question, and the absurdity of it suddenly made her heart feel light, and she almost giggled. The ache in her pussy, though, made it hard to find anything humorous in the situation; she had never felt the need for her husband’s cock the way she did then.

“From now on, you will be treated like one, when it’s necessary. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”
Oh, yes.

“In fact, I want you to stay there. We need to get a plug in this bottom right away.”

Oh, no.
Not while she was cooking dinner? Eating dinner? How could she sit down? She couldn’t of course—Gretchen supposed that was already true, given how sore her backside had gotten under Martin’s firm, spanking hand.

His hands left her, and she heard his footsteps receding toward the bedroom, where she had once snuck a peek at the things he had there that were clearly meant to be used upon her, but which he had never yet used: the paddle, the strap, the cane, and the plug. Gretchen shivered.

Before the warmth and wetness between her legs could fly away, though, she heard him coming back. Did she imagine it, or did something sound more decisive in his step, as if Ms. Feld’s cane strokes had finally caused the two parts of his nature to come together in the way he would now take care of Gretchen—the fashion in which he would now
treat her right?

She shivered again at the thought, and then that shiver went on, deepened, as without a word Martin opened her bottom wide, standing behind her, as if perhaps he would give her the precious gift of his cock, but instead he brought the two middle fingers of his right hand, covered in cool, slippery lube, against her anus, and pushed them in peremptorily so that Gretchen gasped, and then gave a whimpering wail to signify that her husband had mastered her there.

Then Martin spoke. “Wife, I have not fucked you here since our wedding night. Was I mistaken not to do so?”

Gretchen felt her eyes widen and her brow furrow. “Yes, sir?” she said.

“I thought so. I must thank my friend Heather, I think.”

Then the tip of the plug she had looked at in the closet and blushed so furiously at the thought of having it inside her—big, and black, and very, very disciplinary in appearance, with its ridges that would make a girl’s bottom have to stretch wider—went in, ridge by ridge.

Martin pushed, and Gretchen cried out.

“You will learn to open to me whenever I require it,” he said. “That is how I wish my wife’s bottom to conduct itself.”

“Oh, s-sir…” she stammered, and then cried out as another ridge passed through her tiny ring.
I will always open to you, sir, my husband.

“I have been mistaken,” he said, “not in my aims, but in my methods. I love you, wife.”

He pushed again. Gretchen cried out, “I love you, too, sir!”

“I thought,” he said, twisting the plug a little to make her poor, sore bottom squirm, “that because the Taking gave me power to have you the way men once had their wives, that if I wanted to have you, I must conceal that desire to claim and to possess with tenderness. I know now that for you, Gretchen, and for me, hiding who we are will never serve. If we have a chance at finding happiness, I think it must lie, as Heather Feld saw, in the way you and I embrace the Taking as the very foundation…”

He pushed, and Gretchen gasped and let out a long wail, for her husband now pushed the final, largest ridge into her already stretched bottom-hole. He claimed her with that plug; he gave her the lesson she must learn, that she belonged to him not so much because of the Enclosure Act and the Taking but because they had found a love that matched his mastery with her submission so perfectly that to part was impossible.

The laws of Athena and the ways of its elites might remain implacably opposed, forever, but that hardly mattered. Whether anyone else recognized the marriage, Martin and Gretchen would be husband and wife, even after she had borne him four children and become an elite herself.

“There,” her husband was saying, rubbing her bottom-cheeks gently, so that the terrible fullness and the even more terrible openness of her backside felt both wonderful and awful. Gretchen gave a little sob at the feeling, which seemed simply too much. “You may spend a few moments getting used to it, but then please make dinner and let me know when it’s done. You’ll eat standing up, of course.”

“Yes, sir,” Gretchen whispered, and she heard his footsteps going away again, and again with what sounded like firm decision. She felt a piece of carrot against her lips, again, and this time she did giggle, though the giggle made her whimper because of how the movement of her muscles seemed to make the fullness of her bottom that much more alarming.

* * *

As she served Martin dinner, Gretchen walked with tiny steps. Every time she bent over to put something on the table for him, he reached around and tapped the base of the plug, and Gretchen whimpered.