by Emily Tilton
Now he felt the anger rising inside of his chest, even seeming to work itself through the muscles of his thighs and calves as he lay there with his wife in the bed that should, he thought, be a place of such happiness. He couldn’t even tell what kind of look he had on his face, or what color it had started to turn, but the effect on Mary seemed to him absolutely electric. With wide eyes she scrambled out of bed to the door.
Sam felt certain for a moment that she would open it and run through it—would run through the house and then out the front door into the street, shouting for help, or at least hide in the bushes and call her parents to come pick her up. Instead, to his surprise, she stood up against the door with her hands to either side of her hips, palms flat against the painted wood.
Mary’s chest heaved, making her breasts move rather distractingly in the soft green t-shirt that Sam knew had come from a years-ago summer camp but had gone through so many wash cycles that not a word of its logo could be read. Her round hazel eyes stared at him in what he had taken at first for terror but which now seemed to him a great deal more complicated.
The contemptuous expression that had occupied her face when he had asked about the headache, and the dull, uncaring tone in her voice, burned in Sam’s mind. He knew only that he couldn’t take it anymore, that he had to do something.
Then, suddenly and very much to his surprise, he knew exactly what he had to do. Something about Mary’s posture against the door had suggested it, he realized it, whether she had taken that particular sort of stand intentionally, in order to guard her backside, or not. Slowly but very deliberately, with his eyes locked on Mary’s, he climbed out of bed, feeling the muscles of his arms, his back, and his legs grumble a bit from yesterday’s workout but, as always, fall into line. He had on only the black boxer-briefs in which he slept, and he saw Mary swallow hard as her eyes followed his rising to loom over her. Her brow furrowed deeply, too, and he saw pink stain her cheeks as he took two steps toward her and she tried to shrink even further up against the door.
“Wh-what?” she asked. “What are you...?” She didn’t seem able to finish the question she had started.
An answer to the unfinished sentence flashed into his mind, though, and Sam spoke for the first time since Mary had seen the hurt and anger in his eyes at her rejection of his attempt to care for her.
“I’m your husband, Mary,” he said, trying to keep his voice as level as he could. “And I’ve had it with your behavior.”
“Oh, God,” Mary said. “Please... Sam, I... you... you can’t. You can’t. I’ll go... I’ll go to...”
Her response, the strength of which took Sam a little by surprise, calmed him down and took his anger off the boil. The threat of the thing they had never discussed with one another, because it had seemed to Sam at least so extremely unlikely to play a role in their marriage, had clearly gotten through to Mary in a fashion effective enough that he felt like for the first time since their wedding they were communicating.
The receding of his wrath and the cooling of his temper left behind a kind of slow burn for justice, though. He and Mary had never discussed it, true, but the unnamed thing constituted an essential part, he knew, of New Modesty education, and he had explicitly agreed to live in a community that tolerated and indeed endorsed it as a healthy part of family life.
“You’ll go to your parents?” he asked, feeling a little more of the anger leave him as the idea of what he must do sank in a bit further. “The police?”
Mary’s face crumpled. Sam didn’t know for certain that Ben Johnson spanked Doreen, Mary’s mother, but his new father-in-law clearly supported the maintenance of traditional gender roles in marriage. The police—as Sam knew New Modesty girls learned in Wellness class—would make sure Sam had gone to the orientation class for men moving to the community. Then they would tell Mary that if her husband wanted to bring her down to the station for a public judicial paddling he could do so by appointment.
He had never dreamed that his sweet nineteen-year-old bride could even make him bring to mind these facts from that orientation class. He could see them pass behind her eyes, though, in all their humiliating reality, as he faced her down. Her cheeks grew pinker.
“I don’t know why you’ve been so distant for the past week, Mary,” he said as levelly as he could. “But I’m guessing it has to be related in some way to the tone of voice you just used with me, and I don’t know what to do except show you that it has to change.”
Sam had come almost to the edge of the real issue, and for a moment he debated whether he should just lay it out and say that he needed to have sex with his beautiful wife, that he wanted intimacy with her so badly that he didn’t think he could keep his reason otherwise. The red in her cheeks, though, and the desperate, anxious look in her eyes stopped him: how could he broach such an embarrassing topic, express such a selfish need?
He thought back suddenly to a particular slide from the orientation, one that had made all the men in the room laugh: Sex is important.
Well, yes, his mind said, but love is more important, isn’t it? It seems like she doesn’t want to have sex with me, which sucks, but I have an obligation to take care of her. She doesn’t want to talk about sex, obviously.
“So?” Mary said into the silence that had fallen between them as Sam worked to control himself.
He felt his brow furl at the tone of her voice, which had astonished him. Had he truly heard challenge in that So?
Heat rose again in his chest, and again he had to think through the seething of his temper at her disrespect.
“So go to the bed and bend over it, Mary. I’m going to spank you.”
Chapter Three
Mary’s heart jumped in her chest. “What?” she cried, pretending she hadn’t understood from the moment she had scrambled from the bed. “Why? What did I do? I didn’t do anything!”
Something in her mind seemed to think that if she confused the matter sufficiently, she could calm Sam down enough to slip away. Why hadn’t she already done that? Why hadn’t she just opened the door and run down the hall and then out into the street? Her left hand groped for the doorknob, found it, turned it. She would have to step forward to open it, though, and then make it around the door itself, if she were to get away, all while Sam stood only a few feet away.
Why hadn’t she run when she had the chance? No, neither her parents nor the police would help. But she could apply to leave Smallton, at the New Modesty authority. She would have to walk into town like this, in her sweats, but...
She looked at Sam, and a sob ripped itself from her chest. He had seemed so dangerous a moment before, his face red and wrathful at her disrespect, that she had felt certain she had no choice but to get away. Now, though his blue eyes still held a terrible sternness, he had clearly subdued his temper enough to know precisely what he was doing.
He warned me about his temper, Mary thought miserably. Why did I...
Any of it: why had she avoided him this week? Why had she lied about a headache? Why had she even stayed in bed when she could have gotten up and made him breakfast? That part of their marriage worked just fine: she made good food and Sam liked to eat good food.
Why had she acted that way when Sam asked, so caringly, if she felt better?
She turned the knob back and forth, her eyes fixed on her husband’s face.
“Did you hear me?” Sam asked, his voice soft but his tone utterly serious.
Mary’s mind fled again to the attempt at confusion, though she could tell already that it had no hope of success.
“Did you hear me?” she retorted. “I told you that you can’t do this, and you have no reason to do it anyway.”
She started to step away from the door and to pull it open, at the same time, with her left hand. She would run out the door and down the street. Mrs. Grabano had told them in Wellness class that someone staffed the New Modesty authority twenty-four hours a day, in case of relationship and marital challenges, and girls could go th
ere if they felt they had no other option.
“You know I don’t even need a reason, Mary,” Sam said. “You’re my wife, and if I think you need an attitude adjustment with your panties down, you’re going to get one.”
“But...” Mary’s mind sought desperately for a counter to this horrid argument. Mrs. Grabano had warned the class that a girl who went to the New Modesty authority and applied for an exit from the program would get spanked by her boyfriend or her husband anyway, under the supervision of an official from the program. She felt her face crumple, heard her voice become a whine as she tried to continue her protest. “But I didn’t think you...”
Sam’s reply, coming from his calm face, his expression almost sad now, was in a level voice that made Mary’s heart sink, though she couldn’t tell why she would be unhappy that he had mastered his temper completely. “I didn’t think I would ever have to do this, either, Mary,” he said. “But I don’t know how to get through to you right now. You hurt me when I only wanted to take care of you, and I’m pretty sure you lied to me last night. I think there have to be consequences.”
Part of Mary knew right then that she could avoid the awful thing all New Modesty girls learned about in Wellness class—the right of their boyfriends and eventually their husbands to punish them the old-fashioned way. She had signed the pledge like every other girl in the class, at the end of the semester, saying that she intended to follow the New Modesty by-laws. Like almost every other girl, she had maintained to her friends that she meant to find a man who had no Neanderthal need to enforce them. She thought, in Sam, she had found such a man—she had been certain of it.
She had the door open a few inches. Sam didn’t seem to mean to stop her. He had calmed down, and Mary knew for sure that if she asked him to go back to bed, or to go sit on the couch in the living room, or at the kitchen table, and talk it out as they held each other close or even just met each other’s eyes, he would agree to it. He wouldn’t just agree to it, either, she thought; he would smile gravely, nod, and take her in his arms.
And then... Then she would have to say things, and to think things, she didn’t think she could say or even think.
To her dismay, Mary realized then that she had found a man who didn’t need to use his vastly superior physical strength to push her around, to punish her whenever he felt like it, to demand that he get his way in his house—in his bedroom.
The thought drew a sob from Mary’s lips. She had to get rid of it, to get rid of the image of herself in the pretty white nightgown, in the mirror. She had to throw it back somehow, right in his face.
“So this is about sex,” she said, forcing her lips into a sneer. “I don’t have to have a headache if I don’t want to have sex with you. You know that, right?”
Her jaw dropped a little then, because Sam’s response—like the way he had reacted in their bed when she had said, I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?—seemed faster than lightning, his temper very obviously going from zero to sixty... to one-hundred-twenty... to a zillion in a split second. Her jaw dropped only a little because she didn’t have time to drop it any further. Mary hadn’t finished enunciating the T of right before her husband had reached out with his right hand and slapped her across the face.
As Mary cried out in surprise and pain, a sizable part of her mind not even comprehending what had just happened, Sam grabbed her left arm, just under her shoulder, and effortlessly began to pull her toward the bed.
For a moment, Mary didn’t struggle; she let her husband get her three of the five steps that would take his hulking frame to the side of the bed. When she did begin to try to twist free of him, it wasn’t because she wanted to avoid the dreadful, shameful, old-fashioned thing Sam had clearly decided he would do. Or at least, avoiding the feeling of his huge hand on her bare bottom didn’t represent the most important reason, in the moment.
Mary tried to pull herself out of his grip, struggled to free herself so that she could dart through the door, out into the hall and away, because of how her body had responded the moment Sam slapped her. She needed, desperately, to ensure that he couldn’t find out what had happened down below her tummy—what was happening, now, as he drew her onward.
“Stop, Sam! Goddammit... don’t! You can’t!” The attempt to get away, to Mary’s mortification, only seemed to make the problem worse. Sam seemed intent on ignoring anything she did and anything she said, and the idea of his strength of will, of his determination to make his bride’s backside feel his displeasure, made her heart leap in her chest even as, down there, another kind of leap seemed to take place.
“I can, Mary,” he said through gritted teeth that she knew he had clenched together not in any way out of the minuscule effort it took to manhandle her little body but because of the force of his anger. His struggle to keep his temper under control, the way it demonstrated the strength of his emotion and his need, drew a sob from her chest, as he added the inevitable words, “and I will.”
Mary made one final enormous effort to wrench herself away, but in the course of her movement she found herself pushing against Sam’s bare, hair-covered chest. The contact with the solidity of his pecs, the breadth of his sternum, took her breath away and made all the fight seem to go out of her. She saw in her mind’s eye one image from their wedding night: him above her in the dark, in strong motion, opening her, spreading her, claiming her.
Her pretty white nightgown, worn without panties, hiked up to her breasts. Her virgin slit with a hard penis inside it. Her husband, taking what belonged to him.
The effect on her body of the image, together with the way Sam, with Mary firmly in tow, crossed now to the bed, sat, and pulled her over his knee in a single motion, brought a sob from deep in her throat. She found her face in the navy blue comforter, found her chest on the bed, felt her bra-less nipples, very stiff, brush against the fabric of the old t-shirt. Worst of all she found her waist across Sam’s thick thigh and felt how easily he could raise her bottom, shift her position just as he pleased. Another sob burst from her, into the covers.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said, above her, and for a moment she felt his grip relax a little.
He had misinterpreted the sobs, something in her realized, with a dismay Mary refused even to think about.
“Fuck you,” Mary said, trying to turn her head, bringing her arms under her, pushing up so that she could once again put up a fight.
Sam responded with a growl that made Mary’s whole body shudder. His powerful arms tightened on her, the left across her back and the right on her hip, and he held her in place so firmly she thought she might hurt herself if she struggled any more. Between her legs, the situation worsened so terribly that her heart quailed and her face got blazing hot. Mary began to worry that if her husband did take down her panties he would see the mortifying effect this brutality had on a young woman who had as yet only had sex on her wedding night, the modest bride he had led down the aisle thinking her a good girl.
His voice sounded dark, now—and red, somehow, too—as he put the growl into words. “Mary Hunter, you can end our marriage today, I guess, but you’re going to pay the penalty for talking to me like that. These sweats are coming down, and your panties, too, if you’re even wearing any.”
“Oh, God,” Mary whispered. Yes, of course she was wearing panties; good girls wore panties. But the very thought that Sam would question that... it made her gush, to her confusion and dismay. “Please, Sam.”
“Save it, Pixy,” he said shortly. The use of his pet name for her made her cry out into the comforter in sudden regret, but he hardly seemed to notice. “When I’ve got your pants down, I’m going to spank you until you decide you can bend over the bed for your punishment the way I told you to do. Once you’ve done that, I’m going to finish disciplining you, and then we’re going to talk about what’s going on here.”
Feebly, knowing that she couldn’t succeed, Mary tried to get free of him. He had his right leg over her calves, but she tried to kick anyway, ev
en as she felt his fingers work their way between the polka-dot cotton panties in which she usually slept and the soft skin at the top of her bottom-cheeks.
Please don’t look at my panties. Please don’t look at my panties.
But Sam seemed unlikely to inspect the gusset that Mary felt sure would tell her humiliating secret. He ripped down her sweats with the panties inside them. He clamped his right thigh over her knees.
“I’ll...” Mary started, intending to tell him that she would do the stupid bending thing to get the whole affair over with, and give herself more of a chance to get the panties out of sight, but she felt Sam’s body shift a little, and then she felt his huge hand come down hard on her bare bottom.
Chapter Four
A sizable part of Sam’s mind couldn’t believe he had started spanking his beautiful young wife. Another part kept hearing Why wouldn’t I be, and, even louder, Fuck you, and found both the humiliating position into which he had put her and the punishment his big hand had begun enforcing on her pretty little bottom absolutely just.
Nothing in his head, though, had much traction at the moment over the force of instinct that seemed to emanate from lower down: the righteous anger in his chest and the need between his legs. Holding Mary that way, keeping her still so that he could give her young backside precisely what she had asked for so eloquently and so urgently with her disrespect and her refusal to acknowledge her obvious lie... bringing his hand down over and over on her pert bottom-cheeks as she cried out in shame and discomfort... moving from side to side and up and down to make sure he imparted an even pink, and then an even red, to the whole region between waist and knees... all of it came from somewhere deep inside whose release seemed to him strangely calming.
