I nodded again, stung by his horribly accurate and relevant memory.
Not as stung as I was a moment later, when he lifted my dress to my waist and began to smack my bottom over my prettiest, laciest knickers.
He didn’t even comment on them, let alone allow them to distract him.
Instead, he spanked away until they felt tight and uncomfortable and prickly.
Once I started ouching and twitching under his hand, he stopped and pulled them down.
‘Stay right there,’ he said firmly. ‘Don’t move a muscle.’
I heard him walk through to the kitchen and scrabble in the drawers. How strange. What could he have in mind?
When he came back, he laid something flat and cool and made, I supposed, of wood against my warmed cheeks.
‘This might be painful,’ he warned me. ‘But you’re getting ten good hard ones. No excuses.’
He was right about the pain. There was some kind of fundamental antagonism between skin and wood. I kicked and gasped and earned two extras, but I managed to hold myself down for the full complement, working through the deep-seated soreness and heat, taking my medicine.
He lectured me throughout and, while I couldn’t have said I was listening very closely at the time, when I thought about it afterwards, I recalled every single word. It seemed that words plus spanks gave a much more lasting effect than words alone. This was a shaming realisation, but one I had to accept if I was going to make a success of the project.
Once he’d put down the wooden thing – a spatula, I noticed – I expected him to send me to the stupid corner, or the computer to write the stupid journal entry, but he didn’t. Instead, he let his hand linger on my bottom, stroking it, then one of his fingers drifted in between the cheeks, making me shiver.
I heard his breathing quicken. His hand slid down inside my thighs. I could almost feel his indecision, almost feel the unruly twitch of his pulse.
Finally, he said, ‘Ah, fuck it,’ in a rough-edged voice and I heard his trousers fall, with a clink of belt buckle, down to his ankles.
I felt a charge of victorious lust right between my legs. He had beaten me and now I had beaten him. His grip on my hips made me snarl with triumph and when he pushed into me, quickly and without finesse, I hissed.
Whoever wrote that book had better self-control than Dan.
Whoever wrote that book was able to look at his woman’s rosy-red upturned arse without the blood rushing to a certain part of his patriarchal anatomy. Or so he said. Personally, I think he was lying.
Dan definitely didn’t share his imperviousness. He thrust away, hard and fast, grunting with the effort of it. His pelvis slapped up against my too-warm cheeks, heating them even more, and he put a hand on the scruff of my neck and held me down until he heard the muffled, garbled beginnings of my orgasm.
That was all he needed to start pumping even faster, until he collapsed with all his weight on top of me so that the sofa arm pressed uncomfortably into my stomach.
‘Oh, God,’ he panted, his damp cheek sticking to mine. ‘Oh, God, Pip. I don’t think I’m up to this.’
‘Hey,’ I wheezed, barely able to get the breath out of my severely compressed lungs.
He took the hint, heaved himself off me and landed with a thud on the sofa. He grabbed my hands and drew me on to his lap – not over it, this time. The deep-seated tenderness from the spatula-spanking made me gasp a little, but I liked the feel of it, right inside me, a living aide-mémoire.
He wrapped his arms tightly around me and buried his face in my shoulder for a few moments. When he withdrew it, he looked sheepish.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘It really hurt,’ I said, ‘but that was what I needed. Don’t be sorry.’
‘No, not that,’ he said with a little snuffle of a laugh. ‘I’d have given you twice as many strokes if you’d given me a hint of defiance. No, I mean … afterwards.’
‘Oh, you shouldn’t be sorry about that. I’m certainly not.’
His lips twisted in a quick smile but his eyes were troubled.
‘I feel like I’ve fucked up. No, don’t make some silly joke, I’m serious. You want this and I want to help you. If I turn it into a kinky sex game because I can’t control my, uh, urges, then …’
‘Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself, love.’
‘Well, that’s it. It’s you I’m supposed to be hard on.’
‘But it gives you a hard-on.’
‘Oh, shut up, Pip.’
I buttoned my lip. He sounded on the verge of tears, bless him.
‘I mean, if I’m going to do this, I want to do it right.’
That’s very Dan, that is. He’s not a man to do anything by halves, and he doesn’t shirk the difficult bits.
‘Yes, but that book … it’s only one way of doing things. One guy’s way. We don’t have to follow it to the letter, do we? We can tailor our own version.’
‘Yeah, I know, I agree. But it’s too soon for that. I’m feeling my way … yes, yes, I know, literally. Don’t say it. I need the book, just while I’m establishing my own rules and routines.’
‘It’s like a hand to hold?’
‘Yeah.’
‘While the other hand is busy … elsewhere.’
‘Pip, you seem remarkably cheerful for somebody who’s just been soundly punished. Why is that?’
I nuzzled his neck and kissed him. I felt madly, blissfully, hormonally in love with him. I mean, more than usually. It was weird.
‘Because it makes me feel loved. How upside-down is that? I can’t really explain it any better. And I don’t mean I didn’t already feel loved – because I did. But it makes me feel really deep-down cared for.’
He blinked at me a few times in rapid succession.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘That’s funny. It’s something the book mentioned, but it also said I had to be careful afterwards, to make sure you realised I didn’t dislike you or, or, you know, wasn’t doing it to … Well, the thing is, I’m supposed to cheer you up afterwards. I’m supposed to tell you everything’s OK and I love you and everything’s forgotten and forgiven. But … it’s like … you’re doing that. I’m confused.’
‘It’s early days, darling. It’s a learning curve, for both of us.’
I had to smother the desire to make some pathetic joke about how he was learning about my curves. Perhaps I should add that to the sin list. Inappropriate punning will be punished. God, I really can’t help myself.
‘I’m sorry, love. I don’t mean to be a dithering plank. I want to be all manly and firm-chinned and resolute and all that. I feel I’m failing in that.’
‘You’re the manliest, most resolute and firmest-chinned man on the planet, Daniel Wheatley. Don’t let anyone tell you different.’
He seemed happy with that.
3 August
I was optimistic about the direction all this was taking. And then I took a look at Book 2 of The Book.
I wasn’t supposed to look at it.
Dan has been guarding it with his life since I brought it back from the sorting office. He wrestled it off me within seconds and disappeared into the bedroom with it.
When I followed him, he clutched it to his chest and ordered me out.
‘Can’t I see? It’s my business, surely.’
‘No, it isn’t. I need to inwardly digest it before I can share it. Pip, don’t. If you come any closer, I’ll have to, to spank you.’
He sounded too anxious to be convincing, but I thought I’d let him have his way in this precisely because of that. Poor Dan. I wanted to make this easier for him.
But would making it easier for him make it harder for me?
I had to know.
So, having two hours before he was expected home from his shift, I went on a book hunt.
The obvious place to look was the bedroom, but Dan was a police officer with ambitions to be a detective, so I supposed he’d eschew the obvious. Or maybe a double bluff? I started in th
e bedroom.
I looked in his sock drawer, wardrobe, under the bed, in the box where he keeps the sex toys … nada.
I had a similar lack of success in the cutlery drawer, the bathroom cabinet, behind the PlayStation, inside the tumble dryer. This book had vanished.
Had he taken it to work with him? Surely not. Imagine the furore, should he be caught with it in the locker room.
I had to try and think outside the box. Where would I never look in a million years?
It took a while for inspiration to strike, but when it did it was harder and more exquisite than any of Dan’s belt licks.
The box file in which I kept all details of my tax affairs and investments.
I took it off the top bookshelf and laughed with fiendish delight to find it several times heavier than I expected. When I opened the spring clip, there it lay. Advanced Discipline Techniques: A Handbook for Marital Harmony.
The cover was very plain and it was spiral-bound like someone’s dissertation – but it was obviously cheaply self-published, by necessity, so this wasn’t too surprising.
I skimmed over the annoying foreword with its continuing antediluvian insistence on fixed gender roles and patriarchal rule and went straight to chapter one. Caning. Eek.
Chapter two, then.
But I couldn’t focus on chapter two, which was a bit dull and about chore lists and micro-management. Something kept tugging me back to chapter one.
The cane, that instrument of legend and lore. Its reputation was enough to make strong men quake. Before my time, it had been the ultimate sanction in school – well, the penultimate, I suppose, expulsion being more serious – something to contain the uncontainable elements of youth.
I couldn’t imagine being called upon to use it on a young person now. I certainly couldn’t work with children if I was expected to do so. But how did I feel about it being used on me?
I’d seen it in films and historical dramas on TV and the ferocious swish and crack were noises that both terrified and excited me. I’d often felt myself blushing and having to look away. The idea of it exerted a power and fascination over me that I found both repulsive and compelling.
When I pictured Dan, in his uniform, maybe, or his best suit, wielding the slim, crook-handled monster, I had to put my fist in my mouth to suppress a moan.
But he would never use one of those things on me. It would hurt.
God, yes, it would hurt, and the pain would last. Imagine the stripes and the soreness and the difficulty sitting down for days afterwards … imagine how chastened I would feel every time my bottom met some surface or other. And I didn’t have to imagine how wet it was making me.
Damn.
Did I actually want to be caned?
I decided I’d better flick swiftly on. Flick the pages of the book, I mean, in case you think I’m referring to something else.
I ignored the boring chore chapter, but the next chapter was even worse. Toilet training. Was this serious?
Before I knew what I was doing, I’d picked up my thick laundry-marker pen and scored through the whole chapter.
The nib hovered over chapter four as well. ‘Anal Discipline’, what the fuck? But I read the first paragraph and put the pen down, my hands suddenly shaky.
This was the most depraved, the most horrible, the most humiliating thing I’d ever read about. But it was turning me on. Oh, God. What kind of person was I?
Butt plugs. Lubricants with sting-factor. Ginger root! Ginger root? The idea of putting any of these things up my bottom made me squirm in my chair. But the squirming was accompanied by a heat and an undeniable juiciness. I tensed my sphincter muscles for all I was worth, but that only aroused me all the more.
I stood up, opened the window, tried to get a breath of air, but the day had been still and humid and, even now the sun was setting, it hadn’t cooled a great deal. I held on the window frame and visualised myself in the corner with a plug of root ginger up my arse. How on earth would that feel? I couldn’t really imagine it, but I could imagine Dan looking on with his arms folded and a smirk of satisfaction on his face as he watched me writhe and, oh, God, it was too much.
I ran to the bedroom and got the toy box out from the bottom drawer.
Before a minute had elapsed, I was doubled over on the carpet – couldn’t even take the time to get comfortable on the bed – running a vibrator around my clit then thrusting it inside me. But what would it feel like, I wondered as I pushed and pulled, what would it feel like in that other opening? I yanked it out and reached between my thighs, trying to line the tip up with the tight pucker inside my cheeks. It was difficult to do – one really needed a partner for this, if unpractised in the art – and I lost courage before I’d gone much beyond a tentative nudge.
I reverted to my normal techniques and came, tearfully and breathlessly, on the carpet, my cheek pressed into the scratchy pile.
I felt groggy for a long time, overheated and sticky in my clothes. Eventually I dragged myself into the shower and began to think about covering my tracks.
If Dan came home to find the book out on the coffee table …
Not that I was going to be able to keep my secret perusal under wraps for long. After all, I’d crossed out a whole chapter. Presumably he would notice. Or perhaps he hadn’t read that far and he would think the author had done it … Hmm. But I mustn’t lie or look for ways to wriggle out of trouble. That wasn’t what all this was about.
I’d defaced his book and I’d have to own up to it.
And he couldn’t do anything advanced yet, surely. No running before we could walk.
All the same, I took care to replace it in the box file and stack it carefully on the shelf, only making it into the kitchen to think about supper when I heard his key in the lock.
It was both of our customs, when we were the last one home, to try and establish what might be cooking by sniffing the air.
Dan was no different, peering around the kitchen wall to try and work out what he would be eating later.
‘Running late,’ I said apologetically, a saucepan in each hand.
I put up my face to be kissed.
‘Busy day?’ he asked, stepping back once the greeting was performed.
‘Well, not busy, as such, but … distracting. Spaghetti carbonara? OK?’
‘Sure.’ He flicked his eyes, quickly but unmistakably, towards the top of the bookshelf. ‘So, what was so distracting?’ He put his arms around my waist and whispered into my ear. ‘Not got a secret lover, have you? You don’t usually shower in the evening.’ He took a big lungful of the citrus-scented shampoo in my hair.
‘I do if I’ve been outside with the crew all afternoon, doing basketball hoops.’
It was only half a lie. I had, in fact, been doing that.
‘Right.’ He chuckled and turned away. ‘Yeah, carbonara. Got any garlic bread?’
He wandered out into the living room area and flicked on the TV.
I wondered when he would find the book with the scribbled-out chapter.
Tonight?
Tomorrow?
Next week?
I put the pasta on to boil, threw the bacon into the pan.
I had to bring the subject up, or I would be pussy-footing around it all night.
‘So, how’s it going with the new book? Any important insights?’ I poked my head around the kitchen units, mock-casual.
As I did so, he dropped on to the sofa a long, thin paper package he’d been holding.
‘What’s that?’
He coughed. ‘Just, um, nothing. Why are you asking me about the book? Guilty conscience?’
I left the cooking to itself and headed to the sofa, wanting a closer look at the mystery shopping.
‘Oh, y’know, curious,’ I mumbled, peering over the sofa back. The bag was plain brown paper, the top sellotaped over. Whatever was inside was long and very thin. ‘Did you go shopping after work?’
‘The bacon’ll burn,’ he said.
‘G
o and see to it then.’ I lunged for the package and he snatched it up, clutching it to his chest. ‘If you’re so worried.’
‘It’s not for prying eyes,’ he said, shaking his head at me maddeningly.
‘Now I definitely have to see it,’ I said.
I ran around the sofa, but he had it behind his back and was crossing the room too swiftly for me. He was going to get away from me and I wouldn’t know if it was … what I thought it was …
I leapt and made a desperate grab. It tore the paper and, even though I ended up falling over myself on to the floor, I had achieved my objective.
I could see exactly what the brown paper covered. It was a lighter brown, sleek and slender, varnished and vicious. It was a cane.
‘Happy now?’ said Dan, ripping off the rest of the bag and swishing his purchase through the air.
I was dumbfounded, a pile of sexually charged fear on the wood laminate.
‘Is that … for me?’ I whispered, once I’d sorted out which limb belonged where.
He put the tip of it beneath my chin and tapped, very gently, but I nearly wet myself.
‘Who else?’ he said. His smile was teasing, with an underlying chill factor that made me shiver.
‘You have to know how to use one of those things,’ I said. ‘The book says so. You have to practise. You can’t just start using them willy-nilly.’
Oh, God. I have no talent for crime. Massive talent for self-incrimination though.
‘And how,’ he said, removing the cane from beneath my chin and tracing the outline of my neck and shoulders with its tip, ‘would you know what the book says?’
I swallowed. ‘I found it,’ I said. ‘I had a look at it.’
He put the cane down on the table.
Confessions of a Kinky Wife Page 6
