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Grace
We were both silent for the rest of the ride. Clean slate, I kept thinking. For everything? For, like, the shoplifting, too? But that had gotten me sent here to Grasskiln, and I couldn’t leave Grasskiln, could I? I found a little smile on my lips as I thought about it: just, like, walking away from Grasskiln, and when Mrs. Brown came to stop me, with, like the police, I would say, Well, I got a fucking paddling from your fucking accepted fucking suitor, and he said clean slate, so I’ll see you in hell, Mrs. Gerald Brown.
So, couldn’t I have just gotten a paddling in court, by the judge or my lawyer or the prosecutor or someone? I swallowed hard as I looked out the windshield and I saw the lights in the distance that had to be Grasskiln. If I hadn’t misremembered, Cal’s house lay on this side of the town.
Cal’s house, with his new wooden paddle in it.
I looked down at my hands, clenched into fists in my lap. Cal wouldn’t paddle me as hard as the judge would have. Would he? My thoughts had become confused as my mind and my body and my heart all tried to process the things Cal had said—clean slate—together with the terror that made me have to hold my hands tightly closed so that they wouldn’t shake.
And the other part. The other parts, because I understood much better than I wanted to how complicated my response had become to my suitor’s calm confidence in punishing me. The unwelcome, helpless need awakened by the terrible news that I had a paddling coming didn’t represent a simple physiological reaction; I knew that because when I thought of getting paddled by the judge I had a little twinge of arousal, but when I thought of getting paddled by Cal I felt my awful training panties start to get damp.
I swallowed hard, and to my distress I couldn’t keep still. I squirmed in the truck seat, as if I couldn’t help trying to feel, for the final time before I got what I had earned with my disrespect, the sensation of my un-paddled backside on the vinyl upholstery. As if I needed to say goodbye to the unbruised state of my bottom, so recently healed from my foster father’s strap.
I remembered with a hot blush, for the first time since I had run to meet Cal on his arrival at Jake and Shelly’s, that I didn’t have any hair between my legs. After following Jake’s mortifying instructions the night before, I had tried to forget all about it. I had even avoided looking at myself in the mirror before and after I’d showered—well, after a single embarrassing glance that I hadn’t been able to help. I felt strange and sensitive down there when I shifted in the truck seat. I realized that Cal would see my bareness, and understand I had shaved my pussy for him, as soon as he took my panties down. The thought made my cheeks blaze like the sun, while—fucking of course—the problem down there got much worse.
He’s going to paddle me. Spank me. Give me corner time. Then, over the side of his bed… with all my clothes off…
And afterward?
How could I possibly have started to think about that? About what Cal would do once he had made my butt into a terrible reminder not to disrespect the man who had just taken me out for a nice dinner… who had every expectation of taking my virginity…
I squirmed again, and Cal looked over at me. I tried to shape my face into a defiant glare, and then I turned away to stare out the window. Two seconds later, I felt him brake and turn, and I saw his house, right there.
Clean slate. I swallowed harder than I thought I’d ever swallowed in my life. Clean slate. Maybe not for everything, but… for the thing that mattered? I felt myself blinking at that, from a long ways away, trying to figure out what it could mean, that my disrespecting Cal somehow mattered more than the shoplifting—or its crazy consequence, the Grasskiln New Modesty Guided Courtship Program. I realized that the truck had pulled into the garage with me hardly noticing, and that Cal had gotten out and walked around to open the passenger door for me. I looked out at him, and felt my face crumple, tears pricking the corners of my eyes and then starting to run down my cheeks.
“Please?” I tried again, though I could feel that the word only represented me going through the motions. “Sir?”
Cal’s face had set itself into a serious expression. Not angry—not at all. That made it worse, I thought, though also… also much, much better.
“Come on out, darlin’,” he said.
I saw his next words in his eyes before he said them, and the feeling that I could read the mind of my accepted suitor dizzied me. More, the words themselves, and the way I felt the truth of them so undeniably and so deeply, brought a strange happiness and even peace despite the part of me that kept insisting they weren’t true.
“You know you earned this. You know you need this. Come on out, and then go to the living room and wait by the couch with your hands on your head.”
I thought I might faint with every step. My knees trembled as I stepped into Cal’s kitchen and walked toward the living room, trying to take the smallest possible strides. I kept thinking he would say something—or even do something, like shoving me forward, or grabbing me and carrying me into the living room the way he had on our first date. I felt my forehead crease as my body responded to the memory, my clit sending a thrill shooting to my nipples. I had to chew on my cheek to keep from whimpering.
Cal let me go slowly, though. Halfway across the living room, responding to some inner impulse I didn’t understand, I stopped and turned to look at him over my shoulder. I beamed the most woeful, pleading look I could into his eyes. Cal’s eyebrows rose a millimeter or so.
“Get over there,” he said. “Hands on your head.”
“But…” I tried.
I watched him lose his patience. I saw it happen, his eyes narrowing and his chin lowering. Then he had covered the distance between us in what seemed less than a nanosecond.
His left arm went around my upper body. Like, all the way around it, gathering me effortlessly into the front of his own muscular frame. I cried out, and I tried to put my hands behind me because I understood somehow—again, as if I could read his mind—exactly what he meant to do with his right hand. I managed to get the backs of my hands up against my butt cheeks despite Cal’s grip on my arms, and I felt an idiotic moment of triumph, before I heard him growl, “Get those hands away, darlin’. Don’t ever cover your bottom when you’ve got a spanking coming.”
My eyes went wide. I felt like I had known he had that growl in his chest, ready to come out. It seemed like the voice of his temper, before he had taken the time—as I had seen him do more than once—to restrain it. Don’t ever cover your bottom. As the words re-echoed in my mind they drew a sob out of my chest, from the sheer depth of the conflict they stirred in me, heart, mind, and above all body.
Feeling his strength engulf me and hearing him say with such complete decision and authority that I must never, ever get in the way of his hand when he meant to punish me… I could no longer deny that, crazy as it would have sounded to the Grace Franklin of five days ago, the words made me feel not threatened but safe. Cal’s ability to restrain me and correct me—to train me, even—I could feel it in his arm and hear it in his growling voice. Even when he had lost patience with my defiance, the masculine beast his temper turned him into would care for me… though that care, right now, meant firm, painful correction.
As if to add to the impression that I had both found my mind and lost it, in the same moment, the knowledge that I was safe with Cal made me more resistant, more rebellious, more of a handful. I didn’t move my hands.
“Wait!” I said. “I’m… I’m going!”
I tried, stupidly, to move forward toward the couch, as if to demonstrate that I hadn’t actually disobeyed him, and I had meant to stand there and wait the way he had told me to.
“Get those hands away from your butt,” Cal said, right into my ear. The words seemed cooler, the tone less heart-jumpingly scary, but they still seemed to rumble through my body, and they still carried a clear threat of rapidly escalating consequences for my defiance. “This is extra. You need to learn to obey me when I discipline you.”
