She tensed involuntarily as the cool wood of the paddle touched her bottom. It tapped once, twice. Then it was gone and she heard the brief movement of the air a second before it landed with a shocking crack. For a moment there was nothing but the sensation of impact and then a sudden sting bloomed, sharp enough to make her yelp involuntarily. Before she could even fully register this first swat, there was another and another and another, stealing her breath and covering her bottom with a burning heat. The sheer amount of sting was surprising. It made the earlier swats he had given her seem like child’s play. That had been nothing compared to this. That stung. This hurt. Before long, Lainie was twisting and squirming and making involuntary little pained noises, desperate to do anything she could to get away from that blasted paddle. Then, without warning, it stopped.
“Why are we here?” Grant asked quietly from above her.
For one confused moment, Lainie didn’t register the question. She heard the words, but they slipped away like sand through her fingers. Her mind couldn’t grasp the meaning. She felt as much as heard Grant sigh, the muscles of his abdomen moving against her side. He tapped the paddle against her thigh, warning.
“Answer me, Lainie. Why are we here?”
Frantically, Lainie grasped for any sort of coherent answer. “I was awful to you,” she gasped out. “I called you a horrible name, but I didn’t mean it! I’m so, so sorry.”
“I know you are, sweetheart,” Grant said. This close, pressed against his body, she could feel the vibration of his voice when he spoke. Somehow, that made it all the more horribly real. “I’ve forgiven you,” he went on, “but you know it was wrong of you to be so disrespectful, don’t you, sweetheart?” He let go with his left arm long enough to rub her back gently. The gentleness undid her. Her chest seized and her throat tightened painfully. She nodded helplessly, unable to speak but not daring not to answer. “That’s why you’re getting a spanking,” Grant continued. “This isn’t about punishing you so much as giving you the consequences you need to be able to forgive yourself.”
That said, he wrapped his arm securely around her waist once more and lifted the paddle again, peppering already stung skin. It seemed to Lainie that each swat was harder than the one before. The burn built exponentially. A particularly sharp swat caught her low in the crease between bottom and thigh, and the dam broke. Tears flooded, and she was sobbing, crying out not only her guilt from today but what felt like years of exhaustion and frustration from trying to juggle everything on her own, pent up emotions she hadn’t even been aware she was holding in.
At some point, she became aware that Grant had stopped spanking and was now rubbing her back in soothing circles, murmuring words she couldn’t make out in a soft soothing tone. She pushed herself up, wiping a hand over her face to clear away the worst of the mess. At the first sign of movement, Grant helped her up and settled her onto his lap, carefully shifting her so that the majority of her weight landed on her hip and not her extremely sore bottom.
“Back with me?” he asked gently.
Lainie nodded, drawing a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
Grant pressed a finger to her lips, quieting her. “None of that now. It’s over, and you’re forgiven. Unless, of course, we’re not done yet, and you need more to be able to forgive yourself.”
That was a truly horrifying thought. “No, no, there’s no need for that,” Lainie said hurriedly. “I’m good. I promise.”
Grant, the jerk, had the nerve to laugh at her. He actually chuckled. “I thought you might say that. How are you feeling?”
“Sore,” she said bluntly, glaring at the paddle still lying beside them on the sofa. “That thing is evil.”
Grant shook his head. “It’s an inanimate object. It can’t be evil. It is, however, effective. I meant emotionally though.”
“Better,” Lainie said, a bit shocked to realize that it was true. Her butt was hot and sore, but the crushing weight of guilt that had haunted her all day was gone along with a lot of other stress and emotion. She felt empty and limp and most of all, exhausted. As if in testament to her exhaustion, as soon as the thought crossed her mind, she yawned widely.
“Think you can sleep now?” Grant asked. Lainie nodded. Grant moved to set her on her feet, but she whimpered in protest, snuggling deeper into his chest.
Grant glanced down at her, amused, eyebrows raised. “Like that is that?” Lainie nodded again, grinning cheekily up at him. With a long-suffering sigh, he scooped her into his arms and stood up, carrying her across the hall to their bedroom. He deposited her gently on the bed. With a sharp intake of breath, she flipped over onto her stomach. Grant drew the sheet lightly up over her, brushing a hand over her hair and tucking her in like a child. Lainie smiled contentedly, turning her head to watch him as he moved around the bed and climbed in. He draped an arm over her back, drawing her in securely. That was the last thing Lainie remembered before sleep overtook her.
The consensus from most of the things Lainie had heard since moving here was that while punishment spankings seriously sucked, there were some significant upsides. The feeling of forgiveness and having truly paid for whatever had gone on was one. That one she believed. She’d experienced it herself last night, curled on Grant’s lap. She had never remembered feeling like that before in her life, that cherished and protected. The other supposed upside was that the makeup sex was amazing. That she had her doubts about. When Grant had tucked her into bed last night – on her stomach, as she couldn’t bear even the thought of her behind touching the bed – she had been appallingly sore. Her eyes had hurt; her face had been stiff and swollen from crying, and she had felt limp and drained. Sex had never even entered her mind.
She was, therefore, completely shocked to wake in the early hours of this morning, still face down on the bed, to find Grant kneeling between her legs and kissing his way up her spine. They hadn’t woken like this in years, not since the earliest days of their marriage. It had been a very long time since he had taken the initiative like this, taking the matter into his own hands without waiting for her to decide or agree. Some part of her mind thought she ought to be annoyed, but frankly, most of her was so distracted by the trail of heat moving slowly up her spine in the wake of those butterfly kisses, that she didn’t really care.
When he reached her neck, he planted a kiss at the base of her skull, blowing gently into the fine hairs there. Lainie shivered involuntarily and made a low humming sound deep in her throat. She felt his lips curl into a smile against the back of her neck. “Good morning,” he said softly. “Like that, do you?”
“It’s nice,” she murmured.
Grant apparently took that as consent to continue because he began to work his way back down, but this time the kisses were deeper, a little harder and more demanding. He stopped at the small of her back, just above the swell of her bottom. He ghosted a hand across both bottom cheeks, gentle and tentative. She sucked in an involuntary breath, wincing. Much of the horrible soreness from the night before had faded, but she was still extremely tender, as though she were nursing a particularly bad sunburn that was somehow localized only to her backside. “I’m sore,” she told him.
“Shhh,” Grant said, with that peculiar deeper note in his tone that made any further protests flee without conscious permission. He stopped for a moment as he knelt up then he gripped her hips and pulled her back against him, pressing the tender flesh against his hard thighs. She whimpered and groaned involuntarily, unable not to struggle a little. Grant let go of one hip and reached around her to find her center, gently rubbing, thrusting and teasing. Her breath quickened and her whimpers and moans became more frantic and needier. Then, as suddenly as he had begun, he stopped. His hand moved back to her bottom, and he began kneading her skin like a cat, pressing and rubbing. This time, the soreness wasn’t unpleasant at all. If anything, it sent shockwaves through her, ratcheting up the fire that Grant had started. He kept this up for several more minutes alt
ernating between thrusting into her with his fingers and rubbing and pressing on her bottom. He drove her just to the edge, far beyond coherent thought, and then he pulled her up onto her knees and elbows, pushing her shoulders down toward the mattress and drawing her ass high into the air, using his own knees to push hers wide apart, leaving her open to him. Without warning, he thrust into her, hard and fast. He pummeled her sore skin, reigniting the fire from the night before, but she was far beyond caring, spiraling up higher and higher, rocking and keening, until she finally crashed over the edge, feeling Grant follow only moments later.
Lainie woke again sometime later to find them still sprawled together on the mattress. One of them – she had no memory of which – had had the presence of mind to pull the comforter up over them before they fell asleep. She was still lying on her stomach, but at some point Grant had rolled over off of her and was curled on his side next to her. She felt pleasantly boneless and very sore, but in a very good way. Maybe there was something to all that talk about the upsides after all.
Chapter 7
By the time July rolled around, Lainie was feeling more settled in and at home in Corbin’s Bend than she could remember feeling in years. For the first time in a long time, she actually had time to relax and resurrect some of her own hobbies. She had returned to crafting and scrapbooking and met up with Julie frequently to work on their various projects. Julie was currently creating memory books for her three young children, and Lainie had started updating the ones she had started for her own girls when they were babies but had not been able to keep up with over the years. Julie had become a good friend as well. For all her initial reservations, Lainie found herself liking Julie’s spunky and funny nature.
That wasn’t the only thing Lainie found herself unexpectedly liking. Since that first hesitant experiment, she had come to realize that she really liked spanking, at least the erotic kind. Since moving here, she and Grant had been using spanking as foreplay more and more often, and their sex life was better than it had been in years, maybe ever. It was like they were newlyweds again but without the newly married stress that had come along with being newlyweds. They couldn’t seem to keep their hands off each other, and as much as it both shamed and astonished her to admit it, the more demanding Grant was the more she liked it.
Most of all, she was happy, happier than she had been in years if she were honest, and it didn’t all have to do with her improved sex life, though that certainly didn’t hurt. Grant was home a lot more now. Though at first that had been incredibly awkward, with the both of them tiptoeing around each other like strangers assigned to room together in college, they were finally beginning to find their balance again. Now that Grant was home most nights, they had developed a routine of doing something together after dinner. Most of the time it was nothing big, walking around the neighborhood or watching a TV show or movie. Sometimes the girls joined them, and sometimes they didn’t. She couldn’t remember the last time the two of them had had this much time together, but it was good. They were reconnecting and becoming closer than they had been in a very long time.
Her relationship with her husband wasn’t the only thing that had improved of late either. Natalie was positively blossoming in this new community. She had gotten into the art class that she begged to take and seemed to be thoroughly enjoying it. She’d also gone on several of the hikes that Brent had organized to give the teenagers something to do over the summer. As a result, she’d made friends quickly, and now it seemed like every time Lainie turned around she was at some friend’s house or there were neighborhood kids trooping up her stairs and taking over the upstairs family room. Not that Lainie minded, quite the opposite. She was delighted that Natalie had finally found a place where she could be comfortable and make friends.
Before moving here, Natalie had always been somewhat isolated and socially awkward. From very early on, school had been a struggle for Natalie. She’d been held back in second grade before finally being diagnosed with a learning disability in third grade. Allowing the school to retain Natalie had possibly been one of the worst mistakes Lainie had ever made as a parent and as a teacher, it had condemned her socially. The children who had originally been her year mates had shunned her and labeled her as dumb. The children who became her year mates after her retention had shunned her because she had not originally been part of their class. No matter how hard she tried, she had never been one of them. She had been caught between the two groups, never really fitting into either one and being teased mercilessly by both.
By contrast, Kathleen had always been a social butterfly, running with the popular crowd almost from the first moment she stepped her little pink glittery sneakered foot into her kindergarten classroom. A budding fashionista and natural leader, other children, particularly other girls, had always flocked to Kathleen, eagerly following her lead, content to trail along in her orbit. Now, though, she absolutely refused to make any effort to connect with any of the young people her own age in Corbin’s Bend, despite repeated efforts on Lainie’s part to encourage her to do so. She wasn’t at all happy about the sudden turn in social fortunes. She complained loudly and voraciously every time Natalie had friends over.
“You’re welcome to do the same anytime you’d like to,” Lainie had told her after her most recent bout of complaining when the two were in the kitchen preparing dinner. That was yet another change that had come about in recent weeks. Grant had insisted that the girls be responsible for helping around the house. Lainie had given up giving them chores some time ago, finding that it took her longer and was much more stressful to try to convince them to do chores than it was just to do whatever needed doing herself. Grant, however, had reinstated them. Now the girls took turns helping with dinner and dishes and laundry. They quickly learned that arguing with their father got them nothing but lost allowances, lost electronics, and restriction of activities. Thus, Kathleen sat at the table grudgingly peeling potatoes.
“Like I could actually do that,” she spat, glaring at the potato in her hand like it was lethal. “All my friends are back in North Carolina. This is all your fault, you know. If you hadn’t dragged me out here to live in this crazy cult, I could be back home with my friends and be happy.”
“For the last time, Corbin’s Bend is not a cult. Please stop calling it that. Like your dad and I have tried to explain more than once, calling it a cult is disrespectful both to us and to our neighbors.” Lainie felt like a broken record. She’d lost count of how many times they’d had that conversation in the last month.
Kathleen shrugged, the look she gave Lainie making it obvious she hadn’t taken in a word Lainie said. “I call it like I see it.”
Lainie rubbed a hand across her forehead, not bothering to engage in what she knew would be both a fruitless and pointless argument. “Secondly, it wouldn’t hurt for you to at least try to make friends with some of the teenagers around here.”
“Why would I want to do that? Everyone here is lame,” she huffed.
“How do you know that?” Lainie persisted. “They can’t be all bad. Besides, didn’t I see you talking to a boy at the pool last weekend?”
“No you did not,” Kathleen informed her haughtily, flinging her hair back over her shoulders and blowing impatiently at the blonde streaked with hot pink locks that fell in her face. “You saw him talking to me. That doesn’t mean I was talking back. Maybe at first. He seemed cool. I thought I might have finally found someone who lives here who was sane. Turns out, he actually thinks all this crazy spanking stuff is perfectly normal. He had the nerve to tell me he expected to be allowed to spank any girl who was his girlfriend.”
“Honey, for the kids who have grown up here, this is normal,” Lainie explained gently.
“No, it’s not!” Kathleen shouted, throwing both knife and potato down on the table. “This is not normal! No one is ever going to hit me!” She erupted out of her chair, sending it clattering across the floor. “It’s abuse, and I know it even if you don’t. Everyo
ne in the real world says so.” Before Lainie could respond, Kathleen had fled up the stairs. Seconds later, her bedroom door slammed, echoing through the house like an explosion.
“What was that all about?” Grant asked, coming in from work on the heels of Kathleen’s exit.
Sighing, Lainie righted the chair, picked up the discarded knife, and told him. Before she had even finished the story, Grant came over and put his arms around her, letting her drop her head back against his chest. “I wish this wasn’t so hard for her,” she said when she had finished recounting.
“I do too,” Grant replied, “but we can’t help her understand if she refuses to even consider another point of view.”
“That’s a point,” Lainie conceded, “but I wonder if we’re not asking too much of a fifteen-year-old. I’m just beginning to understand this lifestyle myself, and I entered into it as a consenting – if naïve – adult. She didn’t really have much of a choice.”
“She did,” Grant insisted. “We talked about this together as a family. She had as much opportunity as anybody else to raise concerns.”
“She’s fifteen, Grant,” Lainie said. “How much real understanding can she possibly have? I knew your father and grandfather and had at least had conversations with you about this lifestyle before I agreed to it. The girls don’t even have that, not really.”
“We’ve had conversations with them too,” Grant countered. “I’ve tried my best to make them understand. You’ve talked to them. What else are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t know,” Lainie admitted. “I just know I hate seeing her so angry and unhappy. I wish there was something I could do to cheer her up. Maybe if she could get out of her funk, she’d be able to begin to see things differently. It’s hard to think clearly when you’re miserable and brooding.”
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