Finely Disciplined Thoughts (10 page)

“I guess I haven’t run into anything that painful yet,” I sniffed, trying not to think about my mother’s agony and how soon it might become mine.

“I know. I’m going to help you with that.”

My attention was fully engaged.

He continued, still rubbing my back. “We’re going to try some aversion therapy.”

If I sat very still and quiet, I thought, he might forget I was huddled in his lap on our bed on a sunny Saturday morning. He might stand up and dump me in the floor and not even notice, and then head out for the golf course. He might even smoke a pack of Camels and drink a whole six-pack by himself and eat two Whoppers with extra cheese for lunch. And then he might be entirely too ashamed to try to work me over about my proclivities. I do that kind of magical thinking. Not that it ever gets me anywhere.

I reached up and put my arms around him and began to cover his mouth with little kisses that got more and more intense until I was breathing heavily and sticking my tongue halfway down his throat, and then I started fumbling for his zipper. That gets me somewhere. Sometimes. This wasn’t one of those times.

He gave me back my tongue.

“Nice try. No bull’s eye. Here’s the problem. You associate chocolate and fizzy stuff with pleasure. Who wants to give up pleasure? Obviously, you need to associate it with — let’s say — something far less pleasant. Something painful. Something like having your bare bottom blistered over my lap.”

I tried to act suitably distraught and fearful. But the truth was, I had been over Chandler’s lap before. Not often, but sometimes, just for sort of a different kind of warm up to — you know — “doing it.” Granted, he had never used terms like blistered before, but he seemed to think it was important to be emphatic at the moment. I had my doubts about how well this would work, but considering the effect a few smacks on my backside usually had on both of us, it seemed like a therapy I could live with. Easily.

“Whatever you think, Chandler,” I whispered with suitably downcast eyes.

He caught my chin between thumb and finger and made me look up. Hot damn, I love a man with stubble on his face.

“So this is the plan, babe. I already called Dr. Watson and set up an appointment for you to have some blood work done Tuesday morning. He wants to know what your blood sugar levels look like and then he wants to talk to you about your best chance for avoiding diabetes. The bad news is, he’s pretty sure to give you a thumbs down on this kind of sugar-high you’re on, or any other garbage substitutes like the diet cola. The good news is, you get two days to indulge in one last orgy. Although I don’t think you’re going to see it in such a positive light when it’s all over. At least that’s the goal.”

I was still confused as to precisely how this was supposed to work. He shined some clarity on that right away, starting with pushing me off his lap.

“I want you to have some time to think about what you’ve got coming and why, little girl. And I want you real focused. No distractions. That’s important. So panties down; all the way to your ankles. Go ahead, turn around and do it, and then I’ll pin your shirt tail up for you.”

I might have gasped. I know I swallowed really hard. I remember the knot that came up in my throat in a split second. “You’re not serious.” But some part of me must have thought he was, because I suddenly realized my hands were in protective mode behind my back.

“I’m real serious, sweetheart. You’re about to find out just how serious. And if you make me tell you again to get those panties all the way down, serious is going to feel like about a dozen extra licks.” He stood up and then turned me around with my back to him, all at the same time. I wasn’t quite that fast, but I did manage to push white nylon to almost mid-cheek. That was as far as I was willing to commit.

“Have it your way, then,” he said, apparently unimpressed with my semi-compliance. That little speech’s punctuation was more like exclamation points than periods. I think there may have been more than twelve of them, too. They were so fast, though, I couldn’t have counted, even if I had tried. I didn’t try, because I was too busy trying to make my body bow-shaped so he couldn’t reach his target.

I began to suspect this wasn’t going to end up with me snuggling up to him in our big, wide bed. I also began to suspect I probably ought to cooperate about where my panties were going to end up, although, by that point, they were already headed toward the floor with no more effort from me than the smack-avoidance gyrations I was going through. Those moves were something less than graceful, I’m fairly sure, and I know they were totally ineffective, because Chandler’s palm followed my bottom wherever it went with unerring accuracy, and he even managed to find places I wasn’t very good at covering up with my hands. I really didn’t like those places he found, either.

I must have made some sniffy sounds, because Chandler said, “Don’t you even think about crying yet. You haven’t had anything to cry about. But you’re going to. So you better save every single tear.” At least I think that’s what he said, but he was still smacking away and I was still bobbing and weaving and it was sort of hard to get it letter-perfect, but I did get the idea. I definitely got the idea.

“Now,” he said, “we’re going to get down to business. Unless you need any more convincing about the importance of cooperation in this little endeavor.”

It was a minute before I realized he was waiting for some kind of response from me. He clarified his expectations with two more spanks on the clear left-cheek target I had provided by devoting all my soothing attention to the right one.

“I understand,” I said, although I couldn’t have said precisely what I was even responding to, since all my attention was centered on what I was feeling, and feeling very unpleasantly.

It seemed to satisfy him, however.

“Pick up your breakfast,” he said, sort of pushing me in the direction of the bedside table. “Unwrap the candy bars — carefully, no torn paper — and take it all with you, right over there.”

He was pointing to the opposite side of the room. I couldn’t imagine why. I must have looked puzzled.

“There’s a nice empty corner just waiting for you to stick your nose in it.”

I forgot the gist of our recent conversation about cooperation. Shock wiped it right out of my mind. I was totally unfamiliar with corners. I mean, I knew what they were. I just had no idea how I might fit into one. I was struck immediately, however, with the sheer childishness associated with this whole thing. I didn’t like feeling like a six-year-old when I was that age. I had no desire to return to my childhood thirty years later. So I’m not sure why I stamped my foot — a move not altogether impressive in its adult-ness since my panties were still tangled around my ankles.

“I’m not doing this any more.” I frowned, just in case he missed the footnote.

The next thing I knew, I was staring at the floor with Chandler’s left arm wrapped around my back and his left hand making unyielding contact with my lower abdomen so my bottom had nowhere to go but out, where it presented a clear double-domed tablet for him to write his response.

“Oh, you’re doing this more, little girl. Lots more.” There followed another firestorm of spanks that left me squealing at the top of my lungs and moving my bottom up and down — the only direction available to me, thanks to Chandler’s strategic grip —in an entirely futile effort to avoid his assurance of my compliance. “You’re doing this until I say it’s over. The only thing you have to say about it is, ‘Yes, sir.’ And I want to hear that right now.”

Talk about a conflict of interest. My outraged emotions and my severely compromised comfort level were totally at odds with each other at that point. I proved to be a total wimp.

“Yes, sir.” I hated myself that it came out as a whimper.

When he straightened me back up, he added another level of control. “The only hands touching your bottom from now on will be mine, young lady. So keep yours well out of the way. I shouldn’t have to explain why you’ll want to obey me about that.”

Up to that point, following his directive was probably the most difficult thing I had ever done in my life, because every instinct I possessed was screaming at me to rub and rub hard. It’s a good thing I didn’t know how much more challenging it was going to get.

“Now, one more chance. Unwrap both Hersheys. Leave the wrappers on the table. Take the candy and the DC and get your little bare pink bottom in that corner as quick as you can shuffle over there.”

I did what he said and I didn’t even care that I didn’t understand why he was saying it. I just needed some relief and I knew my old standbys wouldn’t let me down.

While I was blinking and sniffing and shifting from foot to foot as I tried to get the pesky wrappers off the candy bars, Chandler was busy, as well. It was apparently very important to him that I be as humbled as possible, because he had gathered up the hem of my sleepshirt in back and was pinning it to the neckline of that garment.

It’s not like my husband has never seen me in all my glory before, but this was different. This was — humiliating. And it was clear he knew it.

I finally got the brown paper separated from the nut-lumpy chocolate rectangles. It’s a task that has seldom stymied me before, but then, I’ve never tried to manage it while my eyes blurred and my nose dripped and my fingers trembled and my heart hammered. Not to mention my bottom stinging.

I held the candy bars carefully in my left hand and wrapped the fingers of my right hand around that still blessedly frigid DC can, wishing fervently I could drain it in one mighty gulp. I couldn’t imagine being averse to the comfort I knew I had my hands full of at the moment. Some less than charitable thoughts about Chandler’s intellect surfaced in my mind in relation to the whole aversion therapy concept. His plan was only making me want the very things he was trying to convince me I shouldn’t want, more than anything in the world.

He interrupted my musing by cupping his hand under my elbow and moving me toward the corner. I wanted to kick off the panties that were keeping me from walking with my usual authoritative stride and were contributing to the image that I was somehow less than I had been only moments before. I didn’t dare rid myself of their ankle-binding power, however, so I sort of shuffled along beside him. I never realized the distance from our bed to that corner before. It stretched to miles before we reached it, and then I entered the space alone. So completely alone. I felt cold — almost everywhere.

“Keep your eyes on the exact spot where the two walls meet and listen very carefully to me. You’re going to become very familiar with what looks like a pretty dull landscape before this weekend is over, because you’re going to be spending a lot of time here. You’re going to think about exactly what I tell you to think about, and you’d better entertain some deep thoughts and try to remember them. That’s going to be important afterwards.

“I want the Hersheys and the DC gone while you’re standing here. Every chocolate morsel. Every last Coke drop. When I think it’s time, I’ll tell you, and you’ll bring the empty can back to the bed and put it down next to the wrappers on a little tray I’ll have all ready for you there. Then you’re going to bend over my lap and put your head and chest down on the bed. I want your trash right in front of your nose. I want it to be all you can see, because I want you to remember that’s what got you over my lap to begin with.

“I’m warning you right now, little girl, what’s going to happen to your bottom will not be any fun at all. It may take a while. It may get noisy and messy. But you’d better try to remember every bit of it. Because when it’s over, you’re going to write down exactly what it was like, and if you miss anything, we might have to repeat the experience. If I were you, I’d pay special attention to thinking about the connection between how you’re feeling now when you’re wanting that candy and drink so bad, and the way you’re going to feel about it when your bottom starts to seem like it’s on fire. And trust me, that’s exactly how it’s going to feel.

“I can guarantee you’re not going to want to sit down to write your essay or eat your lunch, but you’re going to do it anyway. You’re going to sit all afternoon, right up until the time you need to get ready to come back to the corner with two more candy bars and another ice cold can. But when you’re staring at the walls again, you’ll most likely be thinking about a totally new kind of experience. I’m betting you’ve never had your bottom switched before, have you?”

My heart started to pound even faster, if that was possible, and the space where the walls intersected — that space I’d already been staring at for an eternity — sort of blurred.

Of course I hadn’t been switched before. I’d never been really spanked before. Not in the I-mean-business way I knew was all Chandler had in mind for the foreseeable future.

“Would you like to cut and strip a few switches yourself, or do you want me to do that for you before you come back here?” he asked, as though he was inquiring whether I would prefer to fold the towels in the dryer on my own or have him assume that cheery little chore.

I opened my mouth to answer him with a cutting remark, but good sense prevailed for once. I did take my life in my hands and turn my head enough to glare at him, but the look on his face made me turn my eyes right back to that blessedly blank intersection I was becoming so familiar with.

Looking back, I can’t imagine why I didn’t kick off my panties, turn my back on the corner and stuff the Hersheys in my mouth while I told him what I thought of his therapy in no uncertain terms. But I can’t recall the thought even crossing my mind.

What I can still recall — vividly — is the shame that I had brought this on myself and the dread that I might not be able to manage the well-deserved penalty like an adult. The latter concern would turn out to be totally justified, not too many minutes beyond that time. I would be a squalling, bawling mess of a little girl before Chandler ever got started with the actual spanking. It would go downhill from there. But for the moment, I was still relatively safe in the corner and still living with the illusion that I had some choices that would make this whole thing relatively painless.