The silence that followed lasted less than five seconds. To Melissa, however, the interval seemed not vastly longer, exactly, but outside of time altogether, as if it existed in some kind of zone from theoretical physics where time didn’t pass at all and there was nothing except space and consciousness. She remembered one other moment like this, from a soccer game when she was eleven: her only breakaway, defenders and teammates alike somehow flatfooted on the field behind her, nothing in front of her but the net and the goalie and eighty feet of grass; not thinking, not calculating, just doing; her Nikes thokking against the ball, her feet automatically crossing to follow the sphere’s bouncing roll, her eyes telling the goalie she was going to shoot left, the goalie’s eyes wide and mouth O’ing as her arms and legs spread, thok again to the left, the goalie darting in that direction, then Melissa planting on her right foot, pivoting her body, in perfect, instinctive synch with the ball, and thok! with her left foot, shooting to her own right, against the direction of the goalie’s desperate lunge, and the ball bounding into the net.
This was exactly like that. A zone where perceptions and nerves and instincts and mind and body all merged into one autonomous being. Keane must have known Melissa was coming from shortly after she signed up. She must have told Payne. Why? Payne must have asked her to. Why? Because Payne thought Rep might be coming to this event in response to Payne’s message. Keane had gone to the trouble to be sure Melissa was who she said she was. Why? Because Payne didn’t want to reveal herself to someone else. So. The best answer—not the only one, no certainty, but the best answer—was that Payne really was on Rep’s side and Melissa could trust her.
Melissa told Payne everything she knew. Payne nodded, smoked hungrily at first and then more languidly, and toward the end gave Melissa little feminine touches of acceptance and encouragement, fingertips on elbow, upper body inclining a bit toward her. When Melissa had finished, Payne didn’t spend any time thinking things over. She just started talking.
“This is worse than I was afraid it was,” she said. “I wish I could help you more, but here’s the little I know. Your husband was right. Starting several months ago, I picked up a lot of queries on the net and some on my own e-mail trying to find out particulars about a spanking enthusiast who used the play name Rearward. Obviously, I wasn’t the only one getting them. I assumed it was either blackmail or lonely hearts stuff, and either way it had to be squelched, but the net is so huge and unregulated that there’s no way you can squelch anything for sure. All you can do is ream the inquiring party out and tell everyone you know not to respond.”
“Right,” Melissa said.
“Here’s the small amount of help I can give you. One of the people asking this was using the play name Fessephile. That happened to be a name used by an ex-client of mine. That’s the information that I was promising to pass on to your husband.”
“I don’t know if I dare ask this,” Melissa whispered, “but can you tell me the ex-client’s real name?”
“I’d love to but I can’t. We don’t do photo i.d.’s in my business. He always contacted me and came to me under his play name. He paid in cash. He contacted me either by phone from a number that’s not in any cross-directory I could find, or from an e-mail address assigned to John Smith. I’m not kidding.”
“How about a physical description?” Melissa pressed.
“Male. Not young. That’s about it. I’m really sorry, but that’s just the way it is. I’ve dealt with thousands of guys, and my last contact with this one was a few years ago. I couldn’t picture his face to save my life.”
“Well, you really have helped,” Melissa said. “If you think of anything else, can you get in touch with me?”
“Count on it,” Payne said. “Will you be staying at this through the weekend?”
“No, I’m going to leave as soon as I get a night’s sleep,” Melissa said. “I have what I came for, and there are a lot of other things to do now. But you know Rep’s e-mail address.”
“Right,” Payne said. “Good luck. Maggie, I must owe you at least a pack by now. Don’t let me forget.”
The other two women moved off, and Melissa began to make her way toward the far side of the room, where she could exit without going back through the Wilmot Proviso Salon. Sketchy as it was, Payne’s information was filling in some blanks. Or at least raising some possibilities. Why had whoever did this gone after Rep? Maybe they hadn’t been going after Rep per se. Maybe they’d been going after a category that Rep happened to be in—copyright lawyer in Indianapolis, for example. Which is what you might do if you were, say, Charlotte Buchanan and wanted a lawyer you could hold a club over. Except that the one thing Payne was absolutely sure of about Fessephile was that he was male. But maybe—
“Excuse me,” a male voice said, interrupting her thoughts and her determined stroll. “You look like you’re lost in concentration.”
“I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t mean to run into you,” Melissa said, although in fact they hadn’t made contact.
“Don’t think a thing about it. Are you enjoying the party?”
“Uh, sure.”
“Great event, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely,” Melissa said. She wanted to skirt away, but the man wasn’t moving out of her path, and the line for Video Personals blocked her retreat. The man was a little taller than she, balding, dressed in the Rodeo-Drive-casual-shirt-and-slacks-that-cost-more-than-two-Brooks-Brothers-suits look that she associated with the West Coast. His name tag featured a glowing buttocks icon and identified him as Packbrat. He was holding one of the wedding gown white paddles, and making sure she could see it.
“Did you make it to the scene party in Palm Springs last October?” he asked.
“Er, no, actually, not,” Melissa said. She tried without success to sidle around him. “Listen, I was heading off to meet someone, so if you don’t mind I’d—”
“I see that top symbol on your tag,” he said, ignoring her feckless brushoff. “Goes with your name.”
“Uh, golly, thanks. Look, I really—”
“In my admittedly limited experience a lot of women who say they’re tops are actually switches. Would that include you, by any chance?”
“No.”
“You do know what a switch is, don’t you?” the man asked then. His tone was still friendly, still signaling pick-up banter, but the question seemed to have a bit of an edge.
“Yes,” Melissa said, getting ready to guess if she had to. She had felt awkward and then irritated. Now she felt threatened. She’d been faking it all along, and Keane had seen through her effortlessly. But Keane had turned out, miraculously, to be on Melissa’s side. This guy now seemed determined to call her bluff as well, and he gave no hint of being on her side “I’d love to discuss this with you further, but—”
A sharp, no-nonsense, feminine voice interrupted her.
“You are being remarkably rude to this lady, young man,” the voice said. Melissa glanced over her shoulder to see Payne striding up to them with Keane in her wake.
Packbrat, though he was certainly no longer young, clearly understood that he was the one being addressed. Blush red ran up his neck and cheeks and over his bald spot. In less than two seconds his eyes looked in four directions, the last one down. He backed up a step and reflexively raised both hands in a gesture that was simultaneously placatory and defensive.
“I, I’m, that is, I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I didn’t mean to.”
“You’re not nearly as sorry as you’re going to be,” Payne said. “We’re going to get to the bottom of this right here and now—and I mean that quite literally.”
Melissa opened her mouth to demur, but a sharp squeeze above her elbow from Keane preempted any comment.
In three quick paces Payne reached a banquet table strewn with empty plastic glasses and nosh remains. She pulled a straight-back chair away from the table, flipped it around with one hand, and braced its back again
st the table edge.
“All right,” she said, glaring at the man. “Come on over here and get what’s coming to you.”
A tense, exciting stillness started in the center of the little group and began radiating outward through the Ostend Manifesto Ballroom. The buzz of conversation diminished and gradually died away. The tinkle of ice against plastic faded.
Packbrat stood for five or six seconds in wavering hesitation. No one made a move toward him. If anything, in fact, people backed away. He had an unimpeded path to the exit. All he had to do was turn ninety degrees or so, and then five or six normal steps would have taken him through a door into the corridor.
But he didn’t turn. He didn’t protest. He closed his eyes, gulped air into his lungs, then took a step toward Payne. Then, eyes open now, another step, and another, and he was standing two feet away from her, in front of the chair.
“Give me that paddle you’ve been flouting in everybody’s face,” Payne said, holding out her right hand.
Flaunting, not flouting, Melissa thought automatically, but she immediately reproached herself. As long as Payne was saving Melissa, she could use any diction she wanted to.
Jerkily, Packbrat lifted the white leather paddle and held it out, handle first, to Payne. She took it from him, then unbuttoned the right cuff of her blouse and began deliberately rolling the sleeve up toward her elbow.
“Do you understand why you’re going to be disciplined?” she asked.
“Yes.” This came out as a strangled murmur, barely audible to Melissa.
“Why? Tell me.”
A long mumble from Packbrat followed.
“Say it clearly, so that we can all hear you,” Payne snapped as soon as the mumble stopped. “‘Because I was rude to a lady who is a guest at this event.’ Say it. Now.”
“Because I was rude to a lady at this event,” Packbrat managed in a spiritless voice.
“And why am I going to take the time and trouble to discipline you for that offense?”
“For my own good and benefit,” Packbrat said mechanically.
“That’s right. For your own good and benefit. You’re going to get the paddle, you’re going to get it in front of all these people, and you’re going to get it good and plenty. We are not going into one of the private rooms. You were rude in public, so you can take your medicine in public. I’m going to take this paddle, and I’m going to spank you until you can’t sit down. I’m going to turn you over my knee like a naughty schoolboy, and I’m going to give you a sound spanking on your bare bottom.”
She paused. As her words sank in, Melissa heard gasps and excited whispers from around the room. She felt tension increasing around her, the way you feel a thunderstorm coming in about seven minutes before it hits.
Packbrat said nothing. The next words Melissa could make out were again Payne’s.
“Pull down your pants,” Payne said. Packbrat’s hesitation lasted perhaps half a second, but that was enough for Payne to shout, “Now!”
Packbrat was fumbling with his belt and trouser snaps before the echoes of that syllable had died away. He lowered his trousers and his underpants at the same time. His shirttail hid most of his bottom, but what Melissa could see of his posterior was as unerotic as she could imagine anything being.
Regally, Payne sat down on the chair. She raised her right arm almost full length above her shoulder.
“Please assume the traditional position,” she ordered.
As Packbrat obeyed, Melissa saw why Payne had braced the chairback against the table-edge. He was no schoolboy but a full grown man, and his awkward descent across Payne’s lap forced her hard against the back of the chair. The table actually moved a couple of inches under the strain. Melissa had a vision of the table not being there, and of all the awful solemnity Payne had managed to generate dissolving into slapstick as the chair tipped over backwards.
“Is she really going to beat him because of me?” Melissa whispered to Keane.
“You bet. This is the real thing.”
“I can’t let this go on. That paddle looks like it could really hurt.”
“It will really hurt,” Keane said. “Spankings are supposed to hurt. But this wouldn’t be happening if he didn’t want it to happen. Men pay Jennifer Payne hundreds of dollars to do this to them, and this one is getting it for free.”
Payne had pulled Packbrat’s shirttail up to expose his bottom fully, which added nothing to its aesthetic appeal. No man who remembers disco should ever wear bikini briefs, Melissa thought. Payne now had her left arm secured around Packbrat’s waist.
“There’s no sense feeling sorry for yourself,” she said. “You’ve got this coming and you know it. Are you ready?”
Melissa didn’t hear Packbrat’s response, but Payne apparently did. She swung the paddle down and smacked his bottom sharply. It didn’t seem to Melissa that Payne had hit him as hard as she could, but it wasn’t any stage-swat either. Melissa heard an emphatic whap! and saw a coppery mark on the lower half of Packbrat’s bottom, across both of his cheeks. He gasped.
Payne immediately raised the paddle and smacked Packbrat again, and again, and then again. By the fourth whap! the beginnings of a grunt tinctured by a high-pitched squeal had supplemented Packbrat’s gasps. Payne paused.
“What happens to naughty boys who don’t mind their manners?” she asked briskly.
Packbrat managed a panting response, and by the time it was out his bottom had flattened under the paddle again at the start of a second flurry of smacks, which looked and sounded harder than the first four.
“That’s right, they get spanked,” Payne said, punctuating her commentary with repeated stimulus of Packbrat’s abused rear end. “They get whap! spanked whap! on their bare bottoms whap! whap! in front of whap! all whap! the whap! people they’ve whap! offended by their whap! whap! whap! childish whap! juvenile whap! boorish whap! misbehavior whap!”
Increasingly urgent “AAAGH!s,” “WHOA!s,” “YIIIPE!s” and “OH BOY!s” now mingled freely with loud, fervent, and urgent promises of behavioral reform from Packbrat. His toes repeatedly tattooed the carpet in spastic, three- or four-beat rhythms.
None of this seemed to move Payne. The paddle continued to descend relentlessly. At one point, in fact, Payne brought the paddle down across the backs of Packbrat’s thighs, saying crossly, “No squirming! Take your punishment like a man!” The occasional comments Melissa heard from the spectators—running the gamut of originality from “YES!” to “You go, girl!”—offered apparently unanimous approval for the vigor and enthusiasm Payne brought to her task.
“He can stop it anytime he wants to,” Keane whispered to Melissa, grasping her firmly on the bicep. “All he has to do is say, ‘Mercy.’ She’ll stop instantly, and he knows it.”
Melissa realized that Keane had grabbed her again because Melissa had unconsciously stepped toward the chair where Payne was spanking Packbrat. Melissa, however, had no further thought of intervening. The sheer, nervous energy of the moment had pushed her, and she was a bit alarmed by her reaction. She was watching a grown man being beaten in a grotesque parody of what she would consider child abuse if this were a genuine parental spanking. She figured it ought to be repulsive and nauseating, and at one level it was. But she also found it exciting. And not only exciting, she realized with a guilty start, but something else: funny.
I can’t help it, she thought defensively, it IS funny! Such high seriousness brought deadpan to such ridiculous conduct. It was like watching the chorus from Oedipus Rex break off in mid-verse and go into a Three Stooges routine.
Finally, Payne paused again. Packbrat panted in labored UNNHH!’s for a few seconds before Payne spoke.
“All right,” she said in an almost tender voice. “Have you learned your lesson?”
“YES!” Packbrat assured her. “I have! I promise I have!”
“I hope so. Is there anything you’d like to say before we finish your spanking
and you start your corner time?”
“Yes,” he sighed. “Yes. I—I deserved that spanking. Thank you for disciplining me.”
“You’re welcome,” Payne said, as several spectators applauded. “Now, here’s one for good luck—whap!—and one on general principles—whap!—and one to make sure you don’t forget—whap!”
“Thank you!” Packbrat said, very quickly. He actually said this in response to each of the climactic swats, but only the ultimate expression of gratitude was audible over the paddle’s reports.
“You’re welcome. Now, before you pull your pants back up, go over there and kneel on the floor with your nose against the wall, and just think things over while you reflect on your punishment.”
Packbrat slipped from Payne’s lap to his knees. Grabbing the tops of his pants, but careful not to pull them up, he labored to his feet, shuffled awkwardly to the nearest wall, and knelt there in the penitent attitude prescribed.
After Packbrat was in position, Payne stood up and walked over to Keane and Melissa, pulling a black, felt tip pen from the pocket of her skirt as she did so. She rested the paddle on the table nearest them and on its surface wrote in an elegant, cursive hand:
Date—June 27
# of Strokes—4 dozen+
Reason—rudeness
Administered by—Jennifer Payne
She handed the paddle to Keane.
“Give him about ten minutes against the wall,” she muttered. “Then tell him his punishment is over and he can pull his pants back up—and give him back his paddle.”
“He’ll treasure this,” Keane said to Melissa, gesturing with the autographed paddle. “He’ll put it in his trophy case.”
“If I were you,” Payne continued to her soul sister, “I’d make sure he doesn’t get alone with any inexperienced girls. He’s liable to be dangerous for the rest of the weekend.”
“Right,” Keane said.
“As for you,” Payne said to Melissa, “I think you’d better make tracks in a hurry.” Taking Melissa’s arm herself, she began to walk her toward the dealers’ room.
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