by Ashlynn Ally
“Jaden, do your homework!” he commands. “I’m going downstairs to make dinner, and by the time I come back up here, you better have at least started it. You hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” I say in a sing-song, obligatory way. I take a moment to look away from my nails to give him a smile that is actually more of a sneer.
He doesn’t seem to appreciate this all that much. “Enough. Just for that little attitude right there, you’re putting the nail polish away right now. I want to see you sitting there at that desk with your work out before I leave, you got that? And don’t forget you still have a mouth soaping coming. You better believe I remember all too well that cursing tirade you unleashed on me back in the car on the way to the mall.”
Even though my stomach is clenching into a tight knot, I do my best to act like I’m ignoring him. I apply another careful coat of Peach Cream to my pinky nail as if I don’t have a care in the world. In reality, I really had thought he’d forgotten about the whole little washing my mouth out with soap thing. Or at least I’d hoped he did.
After seeing that I’m making no attempt to move, Justin lets out an irritated groan and strides over to me. “You’re really pushing it today, Jaden,” he says, yanking the bottle of nail polish out of my hand and then getting a good grip on my arm and hauling me to my feet.
“Hey!” I protest angrily, trying to keep my still-wet fingernails safe from him. “You just smeared the polish onto my nail bed! Thanks a lot! And look, now it’s all smudged.”
“You can paint them again later,” he says unapologetically, dragging me over to the desk and forcing me down onto the chair. I expect it to hurt a bit after last night’s spanking, but I guess the tenderness must be going away because it doesn’t. “Right now you’re doing your homework. You know, for someone who was so worried about not having anything to do during her grounding, you sure have managed to keep yourself occupied.”
I stiffen, hoping he’s not getting suspicious or anything of me actually breaking the rules and using his computer. I figure I should probably say something to make myself seem more innocent. In the end I figure my usual glowering in anger should do well enough to suffice.
Justin takes a few minutes to rifle through my school bag, checking my assignment book and sorting out all the work I’m supposed to do. “You know you have a book report due for English the Monday after this one,” I hear him yammer on as he lays out a bunch of papers in front of me. “I hope you at least started the book.”
“What book?” I play dumb, knowing it will annoy him.
“It says here it’s a book of your choice. Oh, God.” He makes a face-palming gesture. “You didn’t even pick the book yet, did you?”
“Justin,” I say patiently, like I’m explaining something to a new species of very low intelligence. “Everyone knows you don’t actually read the book when you do a book report. You just read the words written on the back of the book, change them around a little, and write that.”
“I have some books downstairs,” he says, not warranting my explanation with any kind of a response. “If you don’t want to use one of them, we can go to the library. Now get started on this homework. I’ll be up in a little bit.”
He leaves me there stewing in the desk chair. Man, I really hate it when he treats me like such a little kid. I don’t need him to tell me to do my homework. I certainly don’t need him to forcefully sit me at my desk and lay it all out in front of me. Why can’t he give me a chance to prove myself? I still have a full day and a half to get it done anyway.
As if to spite him somehow, I shove all the neatly laid out homework to the side, some of it even falling to the floor. Then I storm up off of my chair and rummage around through Jessica’s old stuff for a bottle of nail polish remover. When I find it, I get to work fixing my smudged nail. After yanking it out of my hand, Justin didn’t even bother taking the bottle of Peach Cream with him. He just left it sitting there on the dresser, the cap not even screwed on right.
After I fix my nail, I decide maybe it’s in my best interest to tackle my homework. But after sitting back down at the desk, I get distracted by an old issue of Glamour. I start flipping through the pages, most of them ads. Who would pay money for this garbage anyway? Especially with the Internet out nowadays.
I’m just getting caught up in an article about a woman who decided to go without makeup for a week—as if that were some huge accomplishment—when I hear the rattle of the doorknob. I realize I should probably hide the magazine somehow, yet at the same time I know it’s already too late. Scrambling to hide the magazine with a pile of untouched homework in front of me would just look obvious and stupid. So I just keep reading as if Justin walking in on this scene doesn’t concern me a bit.
“That better be part of an assignment I don’t know about,” he says, coming up behind me to peer over my shoulder.
“It’s not,” I say blatantly. I think that’s showing pretty good self-control on my part, since what I really want to say is Go. To. Hell.
Towering over me, he slips the magazine out from under my hands. “Then you better hope your homework is all done, because I am through playing around with you, Jaden.”
“Hey! You lost my page!” I spin around angrily, making an attempt to grab the magazine back, but he rolls it up and holds it out of my reach.
“If you think that’s your biggest problem right now, you’re in for a rude awakening,” he says. He starts shuffling through the homework that had been in a neat stack before he left, but is now all over the desk and floor. “Jaden, you didn’t do any of this. You know, I would really like to know what’s running through your head…”
“Nothing!” I burst. “I told you, I’m in withdrawals. I need a cigarette, or a cup of coffee. You have no idea what this is like. I feel like shit.”
“Fine,” Justin says. “Fine. I’ll give you that. After dinner, we’ll go out to the drugstore and get you the patch. But after that, I don’t want to hear any more of these excuses.”
At least dinner tonight is something recognizable—spaghetti. Though not my favorite meal by a long shot, at least it doesn’t have any indistinguishable chunks of vegetables or meat in it.
I sit heavily down in the place Justin already has set for me across from him and start twirling up big masses of spaghetti with my fork. Then I take tiny nibbles off the spaghetti globs, letting the rest fall back into the plate. I’ve ingested about maybe three full strands total by the time Justin is polishing off his plate.
“Are you going to eat that, or just play with it?” he asks, gesturing to my plate while he brings his to the sink.
“I’m full,” I say. “Can we go to the store now?”
“There is no way you are possibly full,” he argues. “All you’ve had to eat today was a smoothie. Don’t think you’re getting up from that table until you’ve cleaned your plate.”
I decide to take a page out of the book of one of my fellow foster kids when our foster mom tried saying the exact same thing.
“Fine,” I say, offering up a sweet little smile. Then I hold up my plate and scrape all the spaghetti onto the table with my fork. “All clean.”
Justin barely bats an eye, unlike the foster mom who went ape shit on the kid, dragging him off to his room and then getting directly onto the phone with his caseworker. The next day after school, the kid was gone.
“You think that’s cute?” Justin asks beguilingly. “Well, okay, you can go ahead and just eat it off the table then.”
I’m not sure he knows who he’s messing with here. A moment later, without missing a beat, I make a nice smooth gesture with my arm and then I’m scraping the spaghetti onto the floor with my fork.
“You did not just do that,” he says, his tone deadpan. “What is your problem today?”
I stare at him straight in the eye, and then say it slowly, spelling it out, “I need. A fucking. Cigarette.” I guess if he was planning to wash my mouth out with soap later anyway, there’s no use in t
oning back on my swearing now.
“Go get in the car,” he says, quiet and serious. “We’re going to the drugstore, and I’m going to deal with you after we get back.”
“Oh, yeah, and what does that mean?” I say in my tough girl voice. You can’t scare me. Actually, considering he’s been threatening to punish me all day without ever taking action, I’m beginning not to take him seriously anymore anyway.
“Just go get in the car, Jaden.”
The ride to the store is tense, neither one of us saying much, though on the way home, I’ve cheered up significantly. I’ve got the patch on my arm already, and I think it might even be working. Plus I managed to evade Justin in the store long enough to steal a Coke and a candy bar, which I plan on consuming for my real dinner the moment I’m alone. This proves to come sooner rather than later as Justin tells me he still has some work to finish up in his office when we arrive home.
“I want you upstairs, and doing your homework,” he says to me. “Try to have it all done by the time I get up there. We’ll be dealing with some of your behavior from earlier, so it’s not a bad idea right now for you to try and win some brownie points.”
Mmm… brownies. What I wouldn’t give. Well, at least I had my Coke and candy bar.
When I get upstairs, I certainly don’t go to my own room. If Justin thought I could finish all my homework by the time he came up, he must have been planning on staying in his office for at least an hour or two. So I go into his room instead and boot up the laptop, the candy bar already ripped open so I can take my first huge, delicious bite. I devour the whole thing in like five seconds, and then start in on my Coke while I find a good YouTube video to watch. Honestly, Justin really should have been keeping a better eye over me. He isn’t very good at this jail keeper thing at all.
Chapter Fifteen
I’m only about five minutes into the video when I hear the door behind me open. I freeze, and all I can think is, oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. What is he doing up here so quick? I thought he’d stay downstairs for at least an hour or so.
I think Justin must be just as surprised as I am, because he doesn’t say anything either for at least a few seconds. He recovers quickly enough though, and then the scolding comes on full force.
“Jaden Sierra, just what do you think you’re doing in here? Aren’t you supposed to be doing your homework? And aren’t you supposed to be grounded, which means no computer?”
He strides over to me then and reaches out to close the laptop. That’s also when he sees the candy bar wrapper and the half-empty Coke bottle. “And what is this?” he continues, gesturing at it, staring down at me sitting in his chair.
“What does it look like?” I mutter, since he seems to be waiting for an answer.
“It looks like more shoplifting!” he snaps. “You’re lucky I don’t make you go back to the store and admit to what you’ve done. Maybe a night in jail will actually bring you to your senses.”
“Maybe,” I agree half-heartedly. “Though it never did much good in the past.”
“That’s it,” he says, taking me by the arm and pulling me out of the chair. “I’m so sick of your smart mouth. You get into the corner. Right now. Hands behind your head, nose to the wall.”
I do what he wants because he’s practically forcing me into position anyway, and then I just stand there while he reads me the riot act.
“First it was your little tantrum in the car over donuts, then the disappearing stunt in the mall, the smoking, the not doing your homework, the spaghetti on the floor, and now I find out you’ve been stealing, and you came in here to sneak onto the computer when you know you’re not supposed to. Now let’s see… did I miss anything?”
I figure we may as well go all out. “No, other than the fact I’ve pretty much been on the computer all day. You know, you really should think about password protecting it.”
My response is met by a quick crack of his hand to my backside. It surprises me enough that one of my legs involuntarily kicks and my back straightens, though I manage to restrain myself enough so as to not cry out.
“Go ahead, Jaden, don’t take me seriously, and let’s see how funny you think it is to have a soapy mouth while getting your naughty little butt paddled. Come on. Let’s go. Into the bathroom.”
Of course the last thing I want to do is go anywhere with him. Unfortunately, it’s not like I have much of a choice since before I know it he takes hold of my ear and drags me out of the room and into the hallway.
“Ow, ow, ow!” I wince, sure he’s about to tear the poor thing right off my head. “You’re hurting me.”
“Oh, I’m hurting you?” he practically chuckles, getting me in the bathroom now. “Not as much as I’m about to, that’s for sure.”
He keeps a tight grip on my ear as he reaches for another new bar of soap. As promised, he runs this one under water for a good thirty seconds with his free hand until it’s horrifically lathery. Then, he brings it to my mouth.
“Open,” he says. Though I try to keep my lips tightly sealed, a quick twist of my ear causes me to cry out in pain, and he shoves the soap so far into my mouth, only about an inch is sticking out. “Now bend over.”
He lets go of my ear only to whirl me around and shove me over the front of the sink. This gives me a good view of myself in the mirror with the soap sticking out of my mouth, as well as Justin behind me with his hand on the small of my back, holding me in place. The soap tastes so bad my eyes are already starting to water, and I feel my stomach buckle as I stifle a gag.
“You better keep that soap in your mouth, Jaden,” Justin says warningly. “Spit it out and I’ll put it right back in, only this time I’ll rub it back and forth against your teeth. And remember, this is what’s going to happen to you every time I catch the F word coming out of your mouth. Eventually, you’re going to learn to speak like a lady, no matter how many times we have to do this. You got that?”
I don’t make any attempt to answer, just stare at him icily through the mirror. Unfortunately, all this earns me is another crack across the butt, which makes me almost spit out the soap.
“I asked you a question, Jaden. You got that?”
I give him a slight nod, but make sure to roll my eyes when I do it. Of course, he sees everything in the mirror.
“Excuse me?” he snaps, pushing me even harder into the sink, his free hand gliding across my butt and then pulling up my miniskirt. “Did you just roll your eyes at me, young lady? You know, I am very sick and tired of this brazen disrespect, and now I’m going to teach you who’s in charge around here.”
He starts peppering my ass with sharp little swats of his hand. It’s just enough pain to make me grimace but not cry out, so I’m able to keep the soap in place. My panties are still up, though after a couple of minutes of this it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Soon I’m starting to make some muffled, crying noises around the soap.
“What’s that?” Justin stops long enough to appraise me. By now, since I’m moving the soap around in my mouth so much, there are suds foaming up around my lips, as well as drool dripping from my chin. “Is little Miss Jaden trying to say something?”
I nod frantically, hoping he’ll take the soap out so I can beg him to stop with the spanking and promise him that I’ve learned my lesson. Not that it usually helps much, but I at least have to feel like I’m doing something to get out of this.
“Oh, now you answer me,” he says condescendingly. “That’s funny because just a couple minutes ago you seemed to be having trouble with responding to my questions in a timely fashion. What’s different now, I wonder? Could it be Little Miss doesn’t like having a big fat bar of soap in her mouth while she takes her butt spanking?”
I feel so humiliated, my eyes burn with fire. Once again I refuse to acknowledge him, averting my eyes from his in the mirror by staring off to the side.
“Well, okay, then. I was going to take the soap out, but since you still seem to be having trouble answering me
, let’s keep it in a while longer.”
He starts spanking me with his hand again, thwap, thwap, thwap, over and over again across my panties. I’m starting to blubber a little bit now, which means I have to tilt my head up to keep the soap from coming out, causing me to almost gag. Finally, the smacks stop coming. I struggle to compose myself slightly, shifting back and forth with my legs, trying to get the pain in my butt to subside.
“Had enough of the soap yet?” Justin booms at me while I’m still choking back sobs. Streams of suds run down my chin and neck at this point.
I nod promptly, refusing to meet his eyes in the mirror. I feel so completely and utterly disgraced.
“Good,” he goes. “That’s better.” Reaching around me, he takes hold of the sides of the soap and pops it out from between my lips. The relief of not having it there anymore is almost as great as whenever he stops spanking me. “Now, tell me what you’ve learned from that little mouth soaping, young lady.”
“Not to swear,” I spit immediately, big clumps of sudsy saliva landing in the bottom of the sink. I’m hoping if I say whatever he wants as quickly as possible, this whole thing can be over soon.
“Oh, you’re starting to catch on, I see,” Justin sings out, slightly patronizing.
We’re both silent for a second, and then he lifts his hand from the small of my back to turn toward the bathtub. I take this as a good sign and use my hands to start to push myself up off the sink. But I only get up about an inch or two before Justin whips back around and shoves me back over, even lower than before, my butt sticking out like a poor, defenseless sitting duck. This time, I see he has the bath brush in his hand, which is long, heavy, and wooden. I can’t help but whimper in spite of myself.
“Uh-uh-uh,” he trills out, almost as if this whole thing is entertaining for him somehow. “Where do you think you’re going? Did you think we were done here? That after all you put me through today you were going to get off with nothing more than a soapy mouth and a little hand spanking?”
