Finely Disciplined Thoughts (2 page)

“That cruel? Maybe not to her face. But she’ll hear about it, little girl. She’ll hear all about it. You weren’t the only person with an uncharitable soul there tonight.”

She wanted to die, remembering when Miss Smothers had brought her some small gift she had crocheted or the times she had covered for her when Nika slipped away a half hour early to be on time for a social occasion. Just last week, the spinster had left a simple bag of homemade cookies on her younger co-worker’s desk.

“You must have wanted to be the center of attention pretty badly tonight. You were willing to sacrifice someone who’s never done you any harm to be in the spotlight. You’re a better person than that, Monika Jo. I know your heart. You seem to have succeeded in ignoring it tonight, but that’s going to be hard to do for the next few days. You’re going to think about it every time you sit down. I can promise you that.”

And then she was back over his lap, but this time bent even further, so he had perfect access to almost every inch of her bottom. And the tiny crease that was still protected by the slight chubbiness of her cheeks where they joined her thighs yielded immediately. Colin simply spanned her buttocks with his left hand and scooped the soft, reddened flesh upward, while he smacked the brush across the pale, revealed crease repeatedly.

The upper part of Nika’s body flew up, leaving her almost horizontal across his lap for an instant, as she attempted to deal with the fiery pain of that shameful assault. Her arms waved frantically and the right one hovered bottomwards for an instant before Colin growled at her.

“Big — mistake, — little — girl. Don’t — even — think — about — doing — that.” His threat was punctuated by the fiercest smacks yet, from left to right and back again, repeatedly, while she howled, but withdrew her arm and wrapped it around his leg once more.

He shifted his hand then, allowing her bottom to jiggle back into place in a move that made him smile briefly before he undertook a new line of attack. He leaned toward her and palmed the outer edge of her right cheek, pushing inward and creating a high-rise target for the unforgiving brush that reduced her to ineffectual kicks and broken pleas. When he was satisfied that the crown was thoroughly blistered, he shifted her cheek outward and offered her a half dozen heated smacks along the walls of the fleshy cleft shielding her most private of places.

Nika had one moment of horrified silence as she realized what he was doing, and then she tried desperately to wrench herself out of his grasp.

“Not there!” she screamed, pounding his leg, but nothing she did had the slightest effect on his plans.

“Anywhere I decide Nika, and as many as I decide. And what I’ve decided is, we’re not through here until your sweet little bottom is redder and hotter than I’ve ever seen it. Want a status report?” he asked, almost conversationally.

“N-n-no! Pl-please. Oh! Oh!” she sobbed.

His response was to reverse course, lean back and treat the left side of her bottom to identical ministration, with identical results.

The ash wood brush popped and smacked her rapidly swelling and reddening flesh repeatedly, until Nika was reduced to simply howling and shuddering her way through the torture he visited on her defenseless bottom.

He resumed random smacks all over the tempting territory positioned so perfectly for punishment when she suddenly went limp across his lap with a misery-laden moan.

Colin wiped the sweat from his brow with the wrist of the hand that had been wielding the brush and then lowered the instrument of correction to rest quietly across her punished crowns. His left hand gently rubbed the rest of her well-spanked bottom cheeks.

After a moment, he turned her over and gathered her to his chest. Nika fought him for an instant and then sank into his arms, raising her own to circle his neck and burying her face beneath his chin.

“You’re my good girl, but you made a really bad choice tonight. You know that, don’t you?” he asked softly.

She nodded miserably, snuffling into his shirt.

“ ... h-hate m-me?” she whispered brokenly.

“Never, ever. Nothing is worth more to me than you are, sweetie. That’s why I can’t let you be anything less than the best you can be. But wearing you out has worn me out, little girl. I don’t want to do this again. Ever.” He gave her a moment and then pulled back so he could look into her eyes. “Promise me I won’t have to.”

“I promise. I’m so s-sor-ry,” she said, hiccupping sobs breaking her voice.

“I know you are, baby, I know you are. Now you need some time to think about how to fix this, and how to fight that life-of-the-party demon next time. Go on, now. You know where you need to be.”

Nika wanted to plead with him to keep holding her, although there was no way to keep some part of her blistered bottom from making unhappy contact with his lap, but she knew her husband well enough to know there would be a severe penalty to pay if she failed to obey, no matter how pitiful her current state.

As soon as he felt her body shift in response to his directive, Colin helped her rise. Her slacks and panties had long since disappeared as she sought to escape the punishing smacks of the brush, but the condition of her swollen and aching nether regions still made her progress to the corner a torturous journey.

She felt him step behind her as she faced the corner and leaned her forehead wearily against the intersecting walls. He wrapped his arms around her, and even though she moaned as his hard thighs, encased in new khakis, made contact with her tender flesh, she desperately wanted him to keep holding her. Desperately needed affirmation that he still loved her, no matter how horrible she had been.

As though reading her mind, he pressed soft kisses into the back of her neck and murmured in her ear.

“I love you, Nika. I always will. I love every perfect, naughty, beautiful, blistered inch of you, inside and out. You’re the best thing in my life. That’s why it hurts so much when you act as though you’re less than that.”

And then he left her.

For a while, she simply fought the almost overwhelming urge to offer herself comfort by splaying her fingers across her bright red cheeks and rubbing frantically. Then the familiar post-punishment fatigue set in. Stress told on other parts of her body, as well.

As she raised her head to shift her stance slightly, the glow of the Christmas tree on the other side of the room caught her attention. And suddenly she was 10 years old again at Christmas. A very, very naughty 10-year-old.

Armed with the newfound knowledge that Santa Claus amounted to a lovely legend, Nika wasted no time in sharing the information that elevated her to the level of the grown-up world with her 5-year-old sister. Andee was entirely disdainful of such heresy to begin with, so Nika redoubled her efforts to convince the little girl of the fact. She was sure of her success, and horrified by the results, when the preschooler burst into disappointed tears. Not until that moment had she considered the potentially disastrous consequences of her actions. But one look at her mother’s face when Andee finished sobbing out the cause of her distress let the big sister in the family know she had blundered badly.

Nika sought to make herself scarce, but her mother had an unerring sense of location and, having put a stop to one set of tears, she made haste to bring on another.

“What you did wasn’t a mistake or an accident, Monika Jo Lambert. You meant to hurt your little sister. Well, you succeeded, and now I think you need to hurt a little bit, too.” With that, Nika’s mother grabbed the surprised girl and pulled her into an iron grip that left her bent over and helpless, while a maternal hand lit a fierce fire in her backside.

Her initial reaction was intense surprise, since spankings were relatively rare in the Lambert household and Nika had not been on the receiving end for a couple of years. Then her defensive mechanism kicked in, and between squeals and sobs, she protested the innocence of her actions. But somewhere deep inside, once her mother had made her distress clear and left Nika alone with her thoughts, she heard a voice remind her of the satisfaction she had taken in delivering the life-changing information to her irritating little sister.

Nika was still nursing hurt feelings in her room when darkness fell late that afternoon. Soon after she put on the little pink ballerina lamp by her bedside, the door opened and her father stepped in to her room. She huddled miserably on her bed, the picture of dejection and unjustified suffering, since she was sure her mother would have already primed him with her view of the situation.

Charles Lambert sat down at the foot of his daughter’s bed. He simply stared out into the blackness beyond her window for a moment, and then he turned to her with a sad smile.

“One of the things that happens as you grow up, is that you find out some favorite parts of your life are not exactly the way you thought they were. You found that out about Santa Claus. But you’re a big girl now, and you also found out the rest of the story — the happy part about Mommy and me loving you so much we wanted you to have this wonderful pretend time for a while, and then we wanted you to understand that there’s as much joy in giving as there is in receiving. I suppose it was sort of an exciting thing for you to know — that grown-up secret a lot of other kids haven’t found out yet. The thing is, Nika, when Mommy and I talked to you about it, we asked you to do something important. Do you remember that?”

Nika wanted to deny it, but her guilt and the inescapable truth prevented her from doing anything but nodding her head.

“What did we ask you to do?”

“You said — you said to let that be our secret until Andee was a b-big girl, too.”

“Why do you think we asked that of you?” he asked in his calm, quiet voice.

She shrugged, reluctant to admit anything that might rebound to her discredit.

“I think you do know. Andee’s not old enough to understand things the way you do. What you did hurt her really bad. She’ll be sad for a long time, and she’ll never get to have the same number of happy years believing in Santa that you did. It’s made your mommy and me sad, too. We don’t want to see either one of our girls disappointed, and we don’t want to know either of you can’t be trusted to do what is kind and thoughtful where others are concerned.”

Nika’s heart hurt far worse than her still-tender bottom. Upsetting Mommy was a scary proposition all its own, but disappointing Daddy was pain she simply couldn’t tolerate.

She threw herself into his arms, sobbing her grief with only one discernible word — “Sorry.”

“Yes, I know you are,” he said after a moment. “We’re all feeling sorry today.”

And he eased her back against her pillow and tucked her favorite blanket into her arms before quietly leaving her room.

She remembered that it was a couple of days before she felt completely welcome in her own home again, although no one berated her for her actions after that terrible time. Over the years, parts of the story were referred to with a humorous twist at family get-togethers, and although Nika always grinned good-naturedly when the tale was told, she found there was still a sore place in her heart that had scabbed over but never completely healed.

It wasn’t an accident, either, that she had been cruel where Miss Smothers was concerned. She had shown her true colors at least once before at Christmas, and now her spirit shuddered beneath the weight of two self-aggrandizing sins. She deserved everything that had been dealt out to her – as a 10-year-old and a 32-year-old.

Some part of her knew the start of finding peace lay in confessing her wrong and seeking forgiveness from those she had injured. Even at this late date with Andee. And even though her apology must be directed to a wide range of people in the most recent instance.

She was planning what she would say, alone in her dim corner and still feeling ashamed and lonely, when she heard Colin’s steps behind her.

His hands rested on her shoulders and he leaned in close to whisper in her ear.

“Tell me what you’ve been thinking.”

Nika gulped and two fat new tears slid down her cheeks.

“I need to s-say I’m s-sorry where it matters. I’ll g-go online tonight and apologize to everyone who was there. I’ll ask them to be k-kinder than I was, and maybe M-miss Smothers will never have to be hurt by it. But I’ll t-tell her how sor-sorry I am, too, if I ever think she’s heard about it. And C-Colin, I’ll be her friend. I pr-promise I will. I feel awful.” She leaned her head into the corner again and her slender shoulders shook with quiet sobs.

For just a moment, she was overcome with the need to beg him not to leave her — a miserable little girl again, huddled on a lonely bed with only her blanket and her sorrow and shame for company. But then he whispered her name tenderly, and her heart lifted. She was no longer that repentant, but unforgiven, 10-year-old little girl.

She was Colin’s girl. And Colin believed in redemption.

Then she was in his arms. Those strong arms she depended on to correct her when she sinned, and to comfort her when she repented, and to protect her all the time. He was her completeness; he was what she had been longing for since the first time she transgressed.

Colin held her close, one hand sliding down to caress her still-aching bottom, and kissed away her tears.

“No more feeling awful, sweetheart. It’s all over now. You’ve just shown me what a special, wonderful girl you are, and I’m so proud of you.”

He scooped her up effortlessly and snuggled her securely against his chest.

“Lotion coming up, and when you’ve finished your emails, we’ll celebrate a new beginning. Now, turn out the lights for me and let’s get started.”

She stretched out of his arms just far enough to find the light switch, but she hesitated over the control for the white lights outlining the Christmas tree.

“Could we celebrate in here?” she asked shyly. “In front of the tree? I need a really good Christmas memory.”

He smiled into her deep brown eyes, fringed with damp lashes still.

“That’s exactly what I want them all to be,” he said, and she knew she could trust him to make that come true. In the way only Colin could for her.