Nikki (10 page)

“Even if I don’t
feel
ladylike?”

“Precisely.”

She leaped to her feet. “Hah!”

“Yes. Hah.”

“Enforced falsification. You made me admit I’d push that little button. I thought you wanted
truth
, but you don’t. You just want to keep your power over me. You hate my having a mind. You want me vapid, brainless, pasty, stupid, at the mercy of the whole world.”

“Oh, obviously.”

“You want a hypocrite, a simpery thing without any will, just a something to be used, a pretty-pretty nothingness that’s just a face and a body and manners and pleasingness. That’s a
whore
.”

He had stood up above her and said with a wonderfully calm authority, “Go to your room.”

“Now who believes in force!”

“Did you hear me?”

“You can’t push me back to being a child. You can’t. Nobody can! I see it all now, what you want to reduce me to—a little thing you can control with brute force.”

“Go to your room.”

She had looked at him, and he had been stone, and she had thrilled at his magnificence, his calm, protective power.

“I insist upon my rights to discuss matters in an adult and mature way.”

“On this plane I discuss nothing with you. I said
go!
”

She had marched out, her head high, but the pride she had felt had been in him. And she had sat there in her room, feeling a race of thrills over her whole body. How masterful he had been, how great his dignity and composure, how beautifully arrogant he had been, standing unafraid above reason itself.

Handsome he had been, and Nikki had adored starting arguments with him, confident always that he would best her. Even though she was beyond her mother and her mother’s shelter, there remained someone above her and in control, able to bring her up short. That image of him was hard to retain, it was so smeared over by the other one. She sometimes wished he had died then, before and not after his actual death.

He had begun those spankings. Nikki had persistently overstepped, getting rude whenever she had the chance. Gradually their word battles had become meaningless, serving as mere preliminaries for the moment when he would lose his temper and spank her.

She hadn’t seen that first spanking coming. They’d been at lunch and she wasn’t very hungry, so she casually expressed an opinion about one of the many subjects on which her father had explosive opinions. She kept stroking his feathers the wrong way and plucking one of them now and then, and her mother, who considered it unhealthy to bother one’s head about serious matters during meals, lost her dainty appetite. Her father stood up, hurled down his napkin.

“Enough’s enough. Come with me.”

“Do you mean Mother or me, Daddy?”

“Don’t add coals to the fire. Get out of that chair.”

“Before I’ve finished my luncheon?”

He came around and lifted her bodily to her feet, dumping the chair. “Follow me.”

Into the hall, up to the second floor he’d marched and she’d tagged along behind, feeling giggly. “Daddy?”

“What!”

“I wasn’t excused from the table.”

“We’re not playing, Nikki!”

He went on up to the third floor. Her rooms were at one end; the library, which served as his den and general retreat, at the other. He waited inside the library. She stepped in, took one sharp glance at his handsomely expressionless face, and executed a lightning-quick about-face on the balls of her moccasined feet. He seized her arm, gave it a shoulder-wrenching jerk that snapped her head around, and the door slammed shut.

He rushed her so fast across the room that she flailed off balance all the way. He sat down and flopped her across one knee, the seat of her pants up, and locked her thighs between his hard, wiry legs. Stunned and gasping from the sweep of violence, she hung face down, braced her outspread hands on the floor to lift herself, and twisted around painfully to look up at him across her shoulder.

“Don’t you dare,” she hissed. His anger-glazed eyes snapped at her and she babied her mouth and pleaded, “Dad-d-y-y!” He was blind and deaf, and she felt his hands at the side button of her jeans. She yelped in terror, “No!”

He swiftly unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans. She tried to dive forward, but his legs held firm. She tried hurling her body from side to side, but couldn’t break his hold. Panting and desperate, she tried kicking and squirming, but her pants were coming down and then he was skinning her panties off. Her face flooded hotly and she cried, hacking, half-whimpering little sounds, and covered herself with her hands.

But he thrust them away and warned her, “You’re just making me madder.”

She withdrew her hands and let her arms drop lifeless to the floor and lay exposed and shamed and sick with humiliation. Then his palm cracked her naked buttocks and she flinched and he struck her another stinging, scalding blow. She felt desperate, because she could never live after this, and she thought heartbrokenly that if he could break her spirit and shame her this way, she wanted to die.

She willed herself dead, but it went on and on, stinging blow after stinging blow, and the sensation in her flesh was hot and painful. Then she felt the shift from one buttock to the other, and a small surge of tenderness filled her breast because he cared enough to distribute his blows and not injure her. Then she was suffused with a warmth throughout her midsection, through her buttocks and in her stomach and in her private parts, and the sensation was sharp with pleasure. Then he was releasing her and covering her. She got up and he got up, and they looked away from each other.

The spankings always took place in the den, and after the first ones she could always tell when they were coming by the expression on his face, a tightening across his high cheekbones till the skin shone, a tautness about the flanges of his nostrils, a lift to his black high-winging eyebrows, and sometimes a nervous tic in one of his eyelids.

There was something utterly breathtaking about these signs, so that by the time she was again in position, jeans down, or skirt up, or shorts dropped, and he had begun to punish her, she was already pitched high. She never took a spanking without a sense of outrage and anger at his greater power and his ability to stir those shameful pleasures against her will, but she never failed to feel those exciting sensations.

She would often take the spankings insolently gazing up across her shoulder at him, with a maddening air of unconcern. He almost always wore a pained expression, as if doing an unpleasant job, as though he did not even see her nakedness. But now and then she would see him, a sort of trancelike look about him as though he were caught up in a spell and enjoyed the pure sensuality of it, and then he would get a nervous baffled look, and quite often stop sooner than usual.

The first few times he had been ashamed, but afterward he administered the spankings without visible qualms. Yet a sense of guilt was in him and he would come to see her after she was in bed for the night and pet her sadly and ask her what she would like to have. It became a pattern; one spanking, one concession. She could do this, have that, go there … whatever she had been forbidden she was granted.

And little by little Nikki had felt her will rising above his, and the feel of power was bitter but sweet, and she had decided to revolutionize their lives. The polite gaited show-horses and gentlemanly jumpers were to give way to professional athletes. They must breed and race thoroughbreds.

Nikki had had her way. The barns were remodeled and taken over by brood mares and stallions, a trainer had been brought over from Lexington, Kentucky, a track had been built. House guests began to include professors of animal husbandry, thoroughbred genealogists, experts on horse-farm management and stud techniques. Within a year she had transformed the place, changed its entire mood and character … thanks to the spankings.

Her mother had felt uprooted, but her father had relished the new pattern. She and her father, reading the same storehouse of racing literature, concerning themselves with the same problems, became the new team, almost excluding her mother. The new world was Nikki-created, and Nikki had felt the fact jubilantly. And though her father remained the figurehead, master in his house and stables and fields, he had built the new world at her bidding, and the underlying truth was that he had yielded mastery to her.

He had always been a drinking man, but he began to booze before breakfast. His management was slipshod; Nikki herself sometimes inspected the barns, checked up on the programs of horses in training, the stud books and breeding schedules, and went over the account books. Finding inaccuracies or incomplete records, she would face him across his desk and tell him about his failures. She didn’t hesitate to countermand his orders, either. And he had taken it.

The more she pushed, the more he yielded, and his yielding goaded her further. She’d wanted, truly wanted, to push him so hard he’d balk and smack her back down and reinstate himself. But he drank harder and conceded more, and veered away from her criticisms almost apologetically. And once he had been mumbling drunk and she had caught his gaze steady on her breasts.

But he could still forbid, and he had absolutely forbidden her to ride the teaser stallion.

During the breeding season it was the standard practice to lead a teaser stallion past the mares in order to discover which of them was in heat. Catching a mare on the exact right day of her cycle was a tricky timing problem. If she “showed” to the stallion, she was prepared, put in a breeding stall, and serviced.

The teaser was ordinarily a handsome but “no good” stallion; either he was not a registered thoroughbred or he had a poor pedigree. He was therefore not permitted to mate with the mares. His role was to excite them for service to another stallion. Nikki proclaimed loudly and indignantly about the brutality and injustice to the poor teaser, and had announced that she would ride him out to the mares some morning and would see to it that he covered whichever of the mares responded to him. Her father forbade it with an air of absolute authority, and it became a positive compulsion with Nikki to defy him. But although she was an excellent horsewoman, she was afraid to do it, and she kept putting it off.

She’d never forget the day she had waked before dawn, shivering with excitement, knowing that
this
was the day. She slept naked and sprawled diagonally across her large bed with her arms and legs widespread, taking up as much room as possible. Lying there on her belly that morning, grinning, her eyes sparkingly bright, she was succulently aware of a feeling of vastness and expansiveness.

As she moved her legs together in preparation for getting up, the friction of the sheets and covers on her skin sent tiny needling sensations of pleasure through her. She puffed up her pillow, pushed her face deep into it, giggled, and glided her legs apart, together several times. Then, holding the pillow to her face to keep the sound of her joy private, she rolled slowly onto her side and back, then to the other side and onto her stomach, exulting in the pressure and friction on every inch of her sensitive skin.

Then she was out of the bed and standing with her long legs apart, stretching her arms high and wide. She saw herself in the mirror, her body dim and pale in the pre-dawn light, and stroked herself, loving the velvety feel of her skin. On an impulse, she had put her palms on her buttocks and rolled and lurched her hips and pelvis, and it was so unexpectedly delightful she almost shrieked with glee. The curving, dipping, jolting feel of the motion was altogether enchanting, and she repeated it. Then she raced into her shirt and jeans, and ran out to saddle the teaser.

She had known the stallion shouldn’t be ridden; he should have been led from another horse, with perhaps a second horse and rider flanking and controlling him. But she had decided to handle him. She got astride and took him out, holding the reins tight. He caught the mare scent and began to fight for his head, and she sat him hard and fought for control as he capered and pitched and bucked. Then she let him run the length of the pasture toward the mares across the fence. The feel of control over a half ton of driving stallion power was breathtaking with ecstacy and fear.

She fought him to a stop at the fence. The whole band of mares had alerted and run to the fence toward him, and they’d twitched and whinnied and leaped and run excitedly away and back to him, throwing their heads up and running from the genitals. The teaser had arched his neck and pranced and strutted and spun and reached over to bite at the mares, and the excitement had become so wild that Nikki hadn’t been able to hold his head. He’d thrown her hard and injured himself on the fence before she could catch him. Men had come racing down the pasture in a commotion, her father among them.

He assured himself she wasn’t seriously hurt, then took her into his den and closed the door. He poured himself half a water glass full of whiskey, drank it off and then, with an uncontrolled rush of violence that had quickened Nikki’s breathing, he had caught her and hurled her down across his knee and clamped her thighs between his, clawed under the waistband of her jeans and ripped them off.

Generally, when it was finished, she’d smooth the seat of her jeans or skirt and inquire in a small mannerly voice, “Was there anything more, Father?” Then she would walk out, putting a lift in her step, knowing he was glaring in frustration at the impudent swing of her tail.

But the spanking after the teaser stallion episode was an all-out, open-throttle event, a pure beauty of a spanking, and she’d known that she had never really had a spanking before. She’d fled out of the den fighting tears, and in her room she had taken her pants down; she’d been blistered, and no joke about it. She’d gotten some salve and smeared it tenderly on her buttocks, moaning softly in her throat and wanting to bawl. But after a few minutes the pain turned to rage. Her head up, her eyes glittering, she marched back in on her father.

“There,” she said and pushed the tube of salve at him. “Some unguent, in case you hurt your hand!”

He had let his mouth drop open, and his face had reddened and he had begun to glare, but Nikki’s furious eyes forced his gaze to shift. Nikki took a scornful stance, triumphant over him and hating him for it, and said in a low, intense voice, “I’m sure you’ve heard the definition of a virgin as applied to back country trash. It’s a six-year-old who can outrun her daddy! I’m not six, but almost sixteen, and of course
my
daddy is an aristocrat and a gentleman, and therefore less honest and direct in his approach. But let me tell you, I don’t like these spankings. They’re dirty-trash doings, and they’re never going to happen again.”