by Piper Stone
He smiled. “You knew the wrong kind of boys. I would have punched you in the nose, or at least left you with a terrific shiner.”
“That would hardly have been gentlemanly.”
“I wasn’t a gentleman at ten. I’m probably still not, so you might want to watch your back for a while. Besides, what happened to equality of the sexes? Women’s liberation?”
“Back then, I didn’t see being equal as particularly useful.”
“And now? Your mom tells me you quit your job a while ago. She’s afraid it’s for good.”
“And that would be your business, why?” I asked smugly.
“It’s not, really. You just don’t seem like the kind to sit around on your tail and…”
“Is that what you think I do?” I demanded.
“Sorry,” he apologized. “Did I hit a nerve?”
“Dennis doesn’t want me to waste my time doing the wrong thing.”
Silence.
“Besides, he says it’ll be better that way, after we’re married. I can travel with him on business trips, and…” I stopped. It sounded lame, even to me.
“Your dad says you always wanted to write – books, I mean.”
“Yeah, well, who doesn’t?” I shot back. “Half the world and all their cousins think they can write a book. My God, what else about my private life did you and dear old Dad talk over while you were out sprinkling the flowers?”
“Nothing, really,” he said quietly. “He’s very proud of you. Both your parents seem—”
“Well, I wish you’d just butt out. You don’t know anything about me, and I certainly don’t care to know anything more about you than I already do. Let’s just leave it at that, all right?”
He shrugged. “Whatever you say.”
But I was on a tear now. I was mad at him for bringing up things I was trying to forget, mad at my parents for blabbing about my personal life, and mad at Dennis just for being Dennis, and for being there. But mostly, I was mad at me – for being a disappointment, a failure, and a total screw-up.
So what else could I do? I stormed into the house, changed for dinner, and sat for the next hour, sipping more eggnog, and sulking. Finally, when it looked like nobody was going to come inside and feel sorry for me, I grabbed my mom’s car keys and headed for the garage – minus coat or gloves. A little drive to cool down. It had begun to snow heavily now, and the car skidded crazily as I backed down the driveway, and into the road. I winged the mailbox, swore, and hit the brakes.
Dennis was standing in the driveway, waving his hands and shouting, but since the house is on a hill, I was basically skidding, more than driving, so I yelled at him to screw off and go back in the house, then slid peacefully to the bottom of the hill – where the car stalled and wouldn’t restart.
Acting as maturely as always, I grabbed the cheap fleece throw Mom keeps in the back seat, wrapped it around my shoulders, and climbed out of the car. Then, after swearing at the car again and giving the front tire a good, solid kick, I started out for a little walk in the woods. But first, I leaned back inside, pulled my almost brand new engagement ring off my finger, and stuck it in the ashtray, where it glittered like a forgotten Christmas ornament.
I probably walked close to a mile, in a skirt, lightweight sweater, cheap fleece blanket – and three-inch heels. After the first quarter mile, I was freezing my butt off, my feet were like blocks of ice, and my teeth were chattering, but after making such an idiot of myself, I was too proud to simply turn around and go back. I was making a statement, right? I knew Dennis well enough to know that he’d come after me in the car, if for no other reason than to deliver another lecture on immaturity, so when I heard the crunch of footsteps coming up behind me, I assumed it was him.
But I was wrong. It was Jeff, and he didn’t look like a Really Nice Guy anymore. He looked cold, and mad as hell. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted, trying to be heard over the wind
“I’m taking a walk. Where’s Dennis?”
“The last time I saw your fiancé, he was packing the car to leave.”
“Leave!” I cried.
“Yeah, I think he’s had enough holiday merriment for one weekend. He says he wants to get back to the city before the roads get too bad.”
“You came looking for me alone?”
“He told me he hadn’t brought snow boots with him, and that he catches cold easily. He seemed to think that you’d come back when you got ready.”
“Well, he was right,” I said smugly.
“You look like you’re freezing, and you’ve worried your parents,” he said, pulling off his jacket and slipping it over my shoulders.
I shrugged the jacket off and handed it back to him. “They should have known better. I’m thirty-three years old.”
“Yeah, well, maybe they’d stop worrying if you started behaving like a grown up, and not a six year old brat.”
“And exactly when did my behavior become your business?”
“Maybe when I walked a mile in a damned blizzard to find you.”
“All right, smartass, you’ve found me. Now what?”
The Really Nice Guy glanced around at the snowy woods surrounding us, and smiled. “You have no idea how glad I am to hear you ask that question,” he said. And then, he began to misquote a very familiar poem.
“Whose woods these are I do not know,
His house is at some distance, though
He will not see me wale the blazes
Out of someone who’s had it coming for two damned dazes.
“My apologies to Robert Frost,” he said when he’d finished. “My version doesn’t scan too well, does it? You know the poem?”
Of course, I knew the poem – the unbutchered one – but I quickly decided this was a literary question I probably shouldn’t answer, or even acknowledge. It was probably a joke, but the look in Jeff McLaughlin’s eye was making me a little wary.
It was when he started pulling down branches and breaking off switches that I went from wary to panicked.
There’s just no delicate way of describing what happened next, so I’ll just blurt out the whole miserable thing, and be done with it. What he did was: 1.) Sit down on a large rock. 2.) Haul the still astonished me across his knee. 3.) Flip up my nice, warm skirt. 4.) Pull down my flimsy panties, and 5) Start flailing my exposed rear end with the damned birch switches or maple switches or whatever the hell they were. (Biology was not my strongest subject in school.) Yep, right there in the middle of the woods, in a foot of snow, while the snow was still coming down.
When I realized what he was about to do, I tried struggling, of course, but my feet kept slipping in the snow. A bit of sage advice, here. Don’t go out walking in a snowstorm in three-inch heels. You can’t get any traction when you really need it. He – the tall, muscular male in flat, sensible brown leather loafers from JC Penney’s who was whipping the holy hell out of my naked behind with a couple of slender but very sturdy switches – had both feet planted solidly on the ground, whereas all I could do was teeter and slip and slide in the icy sludge until I finally twisted an ankle and lost a one hundred and fifty dollar Manolo pump (half of a pair, at three hundred bucks – plus tax.)
It hurt like hell – and I don’t mean the twisted ankle. The damned twisted ankle was a walk in the park compared to what was happening to my bare ass. Robert Frost had it all wrong, folks. There wasn’t one thing about my stopping by the woods that was lovely.
There’s something really awkward about being turned over the knee of a man you barely know and getting spanked. I mean, I imagine it’s not exactly a party even when you know the man, but a virtual stranger? So, when he finally quit smacking my behind and set me on my feet, I simply stood there, glaring at him.
“Start walking,” he ordered, giving me a little push forward.
“Through all this snow?” I wailed.
“You want to wait ‘til it melts? I guess we could wait here until we both freeze to death. Y
ou’re free to do what you want to – and I’m sure you will – but I’m going back to the house.”
“You could go and get the fucking car,” I suggested sullenly.
“It’s stuck in a snow bank. Shut up and walk.”
“I hate you,” I snarled.
“That’s fine, so long as you can hate me and walk at the same time.”
“You’re an asshole, you know that?”
“That’s not fine,” he said. “I think I’m beginning to get some feeling back in my hand, so if you use that word again before we get back to the house, you’re not going to like what happens.”
“You had no right to do that!” I cried. “It hurt, damn it!”
The Really Nice Guy wasn’t impressed. “It had better damn well have hurt. My right hand is numb, and I think I may have torn a rotator cuff. If you can sit down before tomorrow night without yelping, I’ll consider the whole thing a failure.”
“Very funny.”
“Right now, I’m trying to get sensation back in my hand,” he said grimly. “But if you still think it’s funny five minutes from now, I’ll be happy to bend you over something or other and cheer you up a little more.”
“You’ve made your point, McLaughlin. Could you just shut up now, and walk?”
He grinned. “You know, it seems to me that for someone who just got spanked, your manners haven’t improved a lot.”
I stopped walking and faced him. “My feet are cold! My hands are cold. My nose is freezing. Thanks to you, the only part of me that’s not freezing is my ass – which feels like I sat down on a fucking kitchen burner! You’ll have to pardon me if I don’t feel like being too polite about it.”
“You’ve got another problem, you know,” he said. “What are you going to tell Dennis?”
“Tell him about what?”
“About where we’ve been on this snowy afternoon, and how long we’ve been gone?”
“I’ll tell him the truth – that the car broke down, and we had to walk home.”
“So, you’re planning to lie.”
“It’s not a lie. The fucking car did break down, and we are fucking walking home.” I kicked a big pinecone, and watched it skitter across the snow. When I looked back, Jeff had stopped, and was pulling a snow-covered branch down low enough to break off a switch.
“This one’s birch, I think,” he said, testing the switch against his palm. “One more F word, and we’re going to stop for a minute or two and try this out. Looks like I didn’t get much bang for my buck with that first spanking. Hasn’t Dennis ever spanked you for crap like this?”
“Of course not!” I exclaimed.
“Well, that explains a lot.”
“I don’t know what kind of people you normally associate with, Mr. McLaughlin, but most normal, civilized men do not spank their female companions, or even wish to.”
He laughed. “I hate to tell you this, but most normal, civilized men aren’t all that civilized. Studies show that the average American male fantasizes regularly about spanking his ‘female companion.’ And oddly enough, most women have shared that same fantasy, at one time or another.”
“Where do you get all this crap?”
“Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Oprah. You know, all the highly regarded scientific journals.”
I rolled my eyes.
We walked for a few more minutes, and found Mom’s car, still stuck at an angle in a small snow bank. And completely blocking the driveway.
“Can you get it out?” I asked sullenly. “Dennis won’t be able to get my car out if we can’t move Mom’s.”
“I can try. Get in. You’re turning blue.”
I got in the car and turned on the ignition, then huddled under the fleece throw in the passenger seat while Jeff tried to clear the tires. A few minutes later, he climbed in the car, rubbing his hands and shaking snow from his head.
“Have you got something in here to clear the windshield? A scraper? I already checked the trunk.”
“I think there’s one in the back seat,” I growled. “Just wait a minute.” I knelt on the front seat and reached for Mom’s big, blue plastic ice scraper, which was on the back seat. At that moment, the car slipped slightly to the right, and the scraper slid onto the floor.
“Shit! Now, you’ve done it. I can’t get to the fucking thing, damn it!”
“Tell me,” he said wearily. “Can you do anything without cussing?”
“Just shut up for a minute, will you?” I grumbled. “I think I can just reach it if I…” I shifted position and tried again, taking advantage of the gap between the two headrests to get between the seats. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, it fucking moved, again! I told you not to move the car!”
“I didn’t—” Suddenly, he stopped in mid sentence, and turned off the engine.
Okay, there I was, wedged partway between the seats. The position was awkward, with the lower part of me considerably higher than the upper part. What I didn’t realize was that, quite aside from being uncomfortable, I had left my rump poised at an extremely vulnerable angle – an apparently inviting angle.
It was an invitation that Jeff was more than willing to accept. Before I could wriggle out of the gap and straighten up, he had tossed up my skirt and applied two quick, hard smacks, one to each already scalded cheek.
I responded with a stream of invective, concluding with the unfortunate phrase, “fucking asshole.”
“Okay, that’s it,” he said grimly. Turning slightly in his seat, he held me between the seats, yanked my panties down to my knees, and began smacking everything he could reach, which was pretty much everything one might want to smack. All of which proved that given sufficient incentive, it is perfectly possible for a strong, determined male to deliver a thoroughly unpleasant and memorable spanking – backhanded.
Having never been spanked in my entire life before today, my few minutes (maybe as little as ninety seconds) stuck between the seats were something of a revelation – or perhaps an epiphany. Part of me – the logical, upper part – was saying that this couldn’t be happening. This was the twenty-first century. Women were liberated, and equal. Men simply didn’t go around spanking liberated women. Not twice in one day, anyway! The lower part of me, though, being at the center of attention and having an entirely different perspective on things, wasn’t telling me much of anything. It was simply being set on fire.
I pulled out all the stops. In the first sixty seconds under the Really Nice Guy’s really strong right hand, I shrieked every profanity I had ever heard in my life – and several I think I made up. But it wasn’t until my cussing changed to howls of pain, and then to sobs of remorse that he finally stopped.
He extricated my head and shoulders from between the seats, handed me his handkerchief, and then turned on the ignition. “Are we feeling a little more reasonable, now?” he asked pleasantly. “A little more in the holiday spirit?”
“You’re going to jail for that, you know,” I shot back, trying to pull my underwear back in place in the cramped quarters. “As soon as we get back to the house, I’m going to call Joe Fratelli. He’s the chief of police here, and a friend of Dad’s. He’s known me since I was four years old. He’ll—”
He grinned. “If the man has known you that long, he’ll probably give me the key to the city for what I just did. From what your dad told me, you were the town menace, even as a kid. Something about stealing plaster sheep from the manger scene at the Baptist Church and holding them for ransom?”
He pointed to my left hand. “I just noticed something. Where’s the rock?”
“Not that it’s any of your damned business, but I’ve decided that Dennis and I need to take a little break from one another, to think things over.”
“Things like me?”
“My God, you’re arrogant! Why should anything be about you?”
“Because we both know something’s going on between us, whether you’re willing to admit it or not. You’re trying to wriggle out of what’s been a dumb arra
ngement from the beginning.”
“What was so dumb about it?”
“You’re too good for him. Okay, maybe that’s not fair. Let’s just say you’re not right for him. I’ll make you a bet I can tell you all there is to know about your fiancé.”
“You’d be wrong, “ I said smugly. “Dennis is an extremely successful man, and a complex one.”
“Okay, here goes,” Jeff said. “He doesn’t like hot dogs, or baseball. He likes golf. He likes tennis too, but he sucks at it, so he says it bores him. He’s not particularly good at golf either, so he only plays with guys who are even worse than he is. When he has to play with someone better than him, he starts complaining about a sore shoulder before the first tee.
“He makes cracks about your family, and then says he was just joking. He thinks you’re ten pounds overweight, and raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t say anything every time you order dessert. He gave you a membership in a health club for your birthday, but not his health club because he doesn’t want the people he knows to see you and think it’s his fault that you’re ten pounds overweight. You’re crazy about animals, but Dennis thinks they carry disease. He likes leather upholstery and glass-topped tables with stainless steel legs. He always uses coasters. He drives a Lexus or a BMW because he thinks a Mercedes would look too obvious. He owns at least one limited edition print by Warhol or Lichtenstein, and he keeps it or them in the bedroom.”
“Are you finished, Doctor Freud?”
He grinned. “Almost. He never got spanked as a kid, votes Republican, and doesn’t like making love first thing in the morning – which you do, incidentally. Okay, how did I do?”
I sighed. “Twelve.”
“Twelve what?”
“He thinks I’m twelve pounds overweight, not ten. And the membership is at his club, but another branch. It’s not his shoulder, but his knee, that he complains about. Okay, so maybe Dennis and I do have a few problems, but I still don’t see how that’s any of your business.”
“You don’t?”
“No, I don’t.”
Before I could see it coming, he pulled me against his chest and kissed me, long and hard. Seconds into the kiss, I felt my resolve failing, and kissed him back.
