Monthly Maintenance: Selected Stories from Blushing Books Authors

by Blushing Books

  Impus was more than just her guide to the living magic that surrounded her, he was her friend. He was the other and best half of her—he completed and perfected her. He loved her, and asked only for her obedience in the very few and extremely reasonable rules he had set over her, the prime directive of which was not to provoke the mundane humans.

  Bedelia went into the parlor, head bent and hands clasped before her.

  “NOW,” Impus rumbled, watching her approach and drumming a talon on the carpet. “WHAT DID YOU DO TO THEM?”

  Bedelia couldn’t help glancing at the three mostly-empty mugs on the coffee table, but she still didn’t feel very guilty. “It was a joke,” she insisted weakly. “I just stirred a little charm into their drinks, so that if they were bad or, you know, not nice, it would come back to them.” Bedelia toed at the floor, unable to meet her familiar’s piercing stare. “As a rash.”

  He waited.

  “On their foreheads,” she admitted.

  He growled once, low in his throat.

  “That spell out the word that best describes them.” Bedelia threw out her arms in a last-ditch effort to win leniency. “Oh, Impus, it’s harmless, really! The spell won’t last more than three weeks, and they won’t know how they got it or even remember me! It’s completely harmless! Remember that time I made it rain fish on the Mayor of Grange-on-the-Woad’s head for a week? This is nothing like that!”

  Impus grunted.

  Bedelia shrugged a little, dropping her arms to her sides and playing with the hem of her witchy skirts. “It’ll just be a little rash…and it might even improve them.”

  His eyes narrowed to slits. “CAUSE AND EFFECT, YOU MEAN.”

  She brightened. “Right!” And then blinked. “Wait a second, no—”

  “COME HERE.”

  “It won’t hurt them!” Bedelia wailed. Her hands were pressed over her throbbing backside, but her feet carried her to him.

  “I KNOW YOU WOULD NOT HURT A YOUTH, EVEN DESERVEDLY,” he said, taking her arm firmly. “BUT YOUR ACTION DOES NOT HAVE TO DO HARM IN ORDER TO CAUSE HARM TO RETURN ON YOU. THREE HUNDRED YEARS SHOULD HAVE BEEN ENOUGH TO TEACH YOU THAT SMALL TOWNS DO NOT NECESSARILY REQUIRE EVIDENCE OF WRONGDOING IN ORDER TO PERSECUTE A STRANGER.”

  “Well…well, no.” Bedelia chewed her lip.

  “HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I BEEN FORCED TO MANIFEST THAT I MIGHT SAVE YOU FROM SUCH PERSECUTION?”

  “Six or…I think, seven times.”

  Impus leaned in even closer. “AND HOW WOULD SUCH A MANIFESTATION LIKELY BE RECEIVED IN THIS SMALL TOWN, IN THIS LATE AGE?”

  Bedelia slowly took her hands away from her bottom. “Okay,” she whispered, unable to meet his eyes. “Okay, now I’m really sorry.”

  He drew himself up to what was very nearly his full height, his horns scraping across the flocking on her ceiling, and made a gesture both dreaded and painfully familiar—he drew a circle with his finger in the air. Bedelia, her stomach twisting nervously, turned around and gripped the arm of the sofa, bracing herself as much as she was able.

  Contrary to what she had once believed, the first swat after a brief respite is not the worst. The second is. Bedelia withstood the initial blow of her familiar’s stony hand, but the second broke her resolution to remain silent. The drumming of flesh on flesh seemed to flow together into a single roar even as the blows themselves began to stand out with increasing sharpness, until she could still feel the imprint of his hand overlaying itself on her bottom.

  Her cries became howls, until the relentless pace of his arm drove the breath out of her, and she disintegrated into strengthless sobs, no longer fighting to be still, only sagging forward on the arm of the chair and writhing in place, just a little, until it finally stopped.

  Impus gathered her up and cradled her against his broad chest even before the heat of the last blow had faded into the hornet-sting of a spanking’s afterglow. She dug her hands into his shoulders, pulling herself as close as she should, as small in his dark arms as a child. He crooned to her, a wordless purr of security and love that she felt rumbling through her bones as well as tickling at her ears. He was tireless and he held her effortlessly while she cried herself out.

  “ALL RIGHT?” he asked, nuzzling at the nape of her neck.

  “All right,” she sniffled.

  He set her gently on the floor and she stepped back, groaning and holding her skirts up around her waist. She had her eyes shut, but she knew when Impus returned to his more diminutive form when she heard a hollow bang—the rush of air clapping as it filled the space he had occupied between one instant and the next. Bedelia rubbed helplessly at her hurt, preferring the pain of her hand over the sting of air alone, but had to giggle a little as she looked at the three empty mugs on her coffee table.

  She glanced back over her shoulder, wiping at the last of her tears with one knuckle. “It WAS pretty funny, though.”

  Impus leapt to the lampshade and chattered at her, but he was a whole lot easier to ignore when he was only eight inches tall. Bedelia, groaning and chuckling at the same time, went down the hall, pausing every few feet to peer at half-unpacked boxes, until she found her toiletries and in particular, a pump-bottle of lotion. She didn’t know how much of its power to soothe was all in her head, but a handful of cold cream gingerly applied was still head and shoulders above the days when she had to either sit in a brook or mince around and wait for the heat to die down on its own.

  She returned to the parlor, still trying to hold the silky flaps of her skirts off her bruised bottom, to find Impus struggling to pour a dipperful of cider into her mug.

  “Oh, you wonderful little fetch, you,” she sighed, and scooped up the mug, Impus and all, to take a deep swallow, not drinking so much as pouring it straight into her soul for warmth. Impus hopped first to her shoulder, and then to the mantle, where he hunkered down, looking curiously smug, the very tip of his tail twitching like a stalking cat’s.

  Bedelia smacked her lips as she took a breath at the half-way point, and then finished off the cup. “One of my better brews this year, if I do say…so…so….” She stammered to a halt as she saw the white gleam of yet another mug hidden to one side of the sofa.

  She bent and lifted it out by the crook of its handle, and turned it to see the few amber drops of cider still collected at the bottom. Bedelia turned very slowly and stared at the mugs on the coffee table behind her…specifically, at the TWO mugs on the coffee table. She looked down at the mug in her hand, and then up at Impus.

  Impus chirred.

  Bedelia dropped the mugs and ran to the hall, where she slapped her hands to either side of the mirror there and stared in horror at the rash spreading across her smooth brow, darkening into letters that spelled out NAUGHTY in old Gothic script.

  The soft scrape and heavy tread of talons brought Bedelia spinning around to see Impus, again in his large form, leaning against the wall with his huge arms folded and his fangs showing in a grin.

  “YOU KNOW, YOU WERE RIGHT,” he purred. “IT WAS PRETTY FUNNY AT THAT.”

  Thankful

  By Sullivan Clarke

  Thankful by Sullivan Clarke

  “So what are you saying?” Marco stood looking at me as I fidgeted nervously under his gaze. “Are you saying you want out of the relationship?”

  “It’s not that I want out,” I said. “I just need a break, is all. You’re too strict, Marco.” My hand dropped subconsciously to my bottom as I spoke. Through my jeans I fancied I could still feel heat rising from the skin of my buttocks, although I knew that was ridiculous. It had been more than 24 hours since Marco had turned me over his knee and spanked me.

  Even now I couldn’t argue that it was entirely undeserved. I knew the rules. Hell, I’d helped Marco come up with them. If I was out for the day I was to leave my cell phone turned on. If I changed my itinerary I was to call him and let him know. But what had I done? I’d turned my cell phone off after deciding to hit the mall with Lucy. And I hadn’t even told Marco I
was going because I knew what he’d say, which was that I didn’t need another pair of shoes.

  I remembered when Marco and I had first decided on a DD relationship. It had been the happiest day of my life. Ever since I was an adolescent I’d dreamed of a man who would be not just a life partner but sort of a guardian, binding him to me with loving limits enforced by regular trips over his knee.

  I’d been guilty of my feelings, terribly guilty. But after a series of failed adult relationships with weak metrosexual types I finally went after what it was I really wanted - a strong salt-of-the-earth construction worker. A Latino man. A real man raised with ultra-traditional values he intended to carry on in his own home.

  The idea of DD didn’t seem so unusual to Marco. When I’d broached the idea to him, in fact, he’d looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. “Why do you act like this is such a weird setup. It seems perfectly normal to me.” Then he admitted he’d thought several times of spanking me and only stopped himself because he feared I’d react in the typical modern-woman way by calling him a brute and leaving him.

  When he realized that was something he need not fear, Marco took to spanking like a duck to water. And I took to spanking like I took to chocolate, luxuriating in it as part guilty pleasure, part necessity.

  Then the honeymoon of our DD relationship ended the day I got a spanking I didn’t want. I remember it well, the day I clearly crossed the line.

  Marco had promised to help me paint the kitchen after the ball game. In the seventh inning I laid out all the equipment, brushes, paints, rolling pin, tarp. But when I went to fetch Marco the game was tied.

  OK, so there’d be eight innings. I could live with that. And I did. But nine, ten and eleven? I couldn’t live with that much of a wait. When I whined to Marco, he pointed out that it was just Saturday afternoon and that the game couldn’t go on forever. Besides, he said, he was off all weekend and with the Monday being a holiday we’d have more than enough to paint the kitchen.

  But that wasn’t good enough for me. I’d waited all week to do this and to me, when Marco said “after the game,” that meant after seven innings. With a scowl, I marched over, snatched the remote from his hand and turned the television off.

  “No, Marco,” I said. “We’re not waiting another minute. We’re painting the kitchen now.” I turned as I spoke, arms crossed, a 5’ 4” sentry guarding the television from my 6’2” mate.

  “Kelly.” It was one word but it carried the warning tone that I had grown used to - the one that made my stomach flop with the wonderful pleasure pain of reassuring fear. But this time the tone annoyed me. Usually, when I disobeyed Marco, I knew in the back of my mind where it would lead because I wanted to go there. But right now, I didn’t want a spanking. I wanted my own way.

  But there was one problem. When it came to domestic discipline, Marco did not have an “off switch.” His traditional values were instilled long before I came along, and long before I broached the concept of wife-spanking he’d already decided it was a good plan. What was a lifestyle choice to me was real life to my no-nonsense husband.

  “Kelly, I’m telling you just one more time. Turn the game back on and wait for me in the kitchen. If you don’t you’re getting a spanking. One…”

  Oh, great. Now he was doing the counting thing. Usually the counting thing was OK. If Marco got to three, the normal ten licks I’d get for a regular spanking would be multiplied by thirty. If he got to five, fifty. He’d never had to get to five. The most I’d ever gotten was thirty and that was enough.

  But today I wasn’t interested in the counting game.

  “Screw this, Marco,” and just as he said, “three,” I threw the remote across the room. The plastic cover popped off, sending the batteries rolling across the hardwood floor where it crash landed.

  I heard one word - “five”- as I found myself in Marco’s strong, blue-collar grip.

  “No!” I screamed.

  “Yes!” he countered, and the next thing I knew I was in that familiar facedown, over-the-knee position I’d dreamed of so many times before I’d met this man. But this wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare - a nightmare of enduring a spanking I didn’t want, which was something I’d never considered.

  And God, oh, God it hurt so bad.

  With other spankings I was always able to maintain the sort of control one invariably has when one is planned or even psyched up for something. But this was so different. The initial swats, delivered over my blue jeans - the ones who usually elicited small yelps - drew loud screams this time. I tried to calm down, tried to become one with my submission and with the pain itself, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. The punishment that had always been a painful comfort was now something separate and apart. I couldn’t get my mind around it, couldn’t get on top of it. And when Marco’s strong hands began to pull my blue jeans and then my panties down, I felt a fear of the man I’d never before felt.

  “No, no, no!!!” I screamed. But Marco ignored me.

  “You’ve only had five!” he said.

  Five? Just five? He was lying. He was wrong. I just knew he was. I was sure I’d had at least ten. If I only had five that meant I’d have 40 more to go.

  “Don’t fight me, young lady!” Marco warned, using words that before this day had made me thrill to hear them, especially when spoken with that thick, sultry accent. But now I was afraid because I did indeed feel like not the young lady I romanticized myself to be over his lap but the young lady he saw me as, a child-wife getting her comeuppance.

  He easily restrained me, pinning my arms, and within moments went to work on the bare skin of my bottom. His hand never lost its cadence once he found it. Right buttock, left buttock, right buttock, left buttock, right, left, right, left…The only thing that varied was where on my buttocks he hit me. Sometimes it was high, just by the top of my cleft. Sometimes his hand would seem to slam down into the entire center of my buttock. Other times - and these were the worst - he’d level a series of slaps at the tender skin of my “sit spot.”

  By the time he was finished I felt beyond spanked, I felt scorched. And I was more than willing to let him watch his game.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t completely break this remote,” he said. From the corner where I stood I watched him pop the batteries back in and snap the cover in place over them. He walked over to where I stood.

  “You,” he said, shaking his finger in my face. “You must learn patience. Now off to bed with you. No supper tonight.”

  “The paint..” I sniffed. “The tops are off the cans.”

  “I’ll put them back,” he said. “And if you are a good wife tomorrow we paint.”

  So I went to bed where instead of basking in my usual post-spanking pleasure-pain, I just cried. My heart was truly broken from what I realized was my first real spanking. My mother had always said, “Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.” Well, I had. And now I wasn’t sure I wanted it after all.

  Now, here I stood, just a day before Thanksgiving - a day after my second “real” spanking - ready to throw in the towel. I was miserable. Utterly and completely miserable. I felt like a failure and a fool. Here I was, having what I thought I wanted and realizing - just as my mother had said I would - that this man wasn’t right for me.

  “How can you say I’m too strict when you told me that this is what you wanted?” Marco looked hurt and perturbed.

  “I--I don’t know!” I cried. And I didn’t. How could I explain to Marco that I’d wanted the PG-13 version of DD, the type that just carried the suggestion of reality without getting too real. I felt horrible, as if I’d misled him and misled myself.

  “We could just take a break from the spanking,” I said hopefully. “You know, just impose a disciplinary moratorium on the relationship. Until I can sort out whether this is what I want.”

  Marco frowned and crossed his muscular arms. “We could,” he said. “But you forget that there are two of us and I like the way things
are set up. I don’t spank you when you are a good wife, Kelly. I only spank you when you are a bad girl. If you don’t want spankings you should just be good. But this is the way things are going to be here. If you don’t like it, then you’re right, you need to leave and decide if you want to come back.” He opened the door. Through it I could see the tidy lawn surrounding our modest bungalow home, the little white fence I’d insisted on having, the olive tree - stout and sturdy - standing beside it with impatient planted at its base.

  I sighed. Why did he have to be so stubborn? Why had I insisted on something without thinking it through? Why had I wanted DD in the first place? What was I going to do? One thing was for sure, I wouldn’t be able to make a decision standing there with a man determined to stay the course. So, picking up my sweater and car keys, I walked out the door.

  “I’ll be at mother’s,” I said.

  I cried all the way there, of course. This was supposed to be my first Thanksgiving with Marco. I’d even already set the turkey in the fridge to thaw. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was supposed to be cooking, not skulking back home to stare at my mother’s smirking face, which is exactly what I saw when I walked in.

  “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it. What happened? Did he hit you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Mother,” I said, turning away so she wouldn’t see my blush. I’d have rather pulled out my own eyelashes than have told her what had happened. Mother had made a life’s work out of emasculating my father; she’d drop dead of shock if she knew I’d actually asked Marco to spank me. “We just had a fight, that’s all. I need to stay here for a couple of days.”

  “You should stay for good if you ask me,” she said. “Of course you’re welcome, even if you don’t care enough about me to tell me what happened.” She stuck out her lip in an exaggerated pout, which I ignored. When she realized I wasn’t going to give her the skinny on what had gone down with me and Marco, she turned away.