Bad Girls (10 page)

Why do I think a spanking will make it all better?

At 11:04 PM 4/23/2004,
[email protected]
wrote:

I don't know why but that's just how you are. And because that's how you are, because you're overcome by this appetite – an appetite so complimentary with my own – I will do it to you. You're possessed by something you can't do yourself; you hunger for pain and humiliation that can only come from someone like me.

But maybe it makes sense, Ellen. After all, what hurts worse: a spanking or the way you torture yourself? All those questions in your email make me think that being you is very hard. Yours is a restless mind, too restless. This is what's amazing about you and what's wrong with you. This is why you want to be overcome by a man. You wonder if a man can be strong enough to take you away from yourself? Can a man's firm hand on your backside give you a respite from all the questions?

It shouldn't, but I'm going to show you that it can.

At 11:31 PM on 4/23/2004,
[email protected]
wrote:

No Tom. It's worse than that. The better parts of me have atrophied from disuse. I'm like a blighted tree, decaying from the inside out. There's something wrong with me. I'm broken. Men don't believe me when I tell them this. That's why I break up with them, because they don't really know who I am. You have to believe me. You have to show me that you believe me by beating me hard. That's why you'll do it, Tom. You'll do it because you can see how bad I am.

You won't have to come up with a reason to spank me. I've done plenty. I've always taken advantage of people. I've always lied. It's easy because everyone believes me. They tell me I intimidate them. I know they won't question me. Plus, whenever I get caught I come up with some way to make people feel sorry for me (e.g., ‘I'm so sorry. I only lied because I didn't want to disappoint you.'). People have learned not to be hard on me, not to expect too much from me. They keep their distance because I seem fragile. The really sad part is that I began to believe it myself. I've stopped expecting much from myself. I've become so accustomed to how easy it is to lie that I've forgotten how to do anything hard.

That's why I need you to spank me, Tom. I'm wasting my life. I'm wasting myself. Stop me from wasting away.

Facing the wall with Tom's fingers inside her, Ellen thought about those words and her knees got weak. She was dying for Tom to get on with it. Please, please, see me for what I am. See me even though I do everything I can to hide myself. I've tried to be honest with you. I've been more honest with you than I've been with anyone else, ever. So don't torture me with condescending pity and false acceptance. Hold me to a higher standard. Do your man thing, Tom. Be my god.

Tom stood close behind her, letting her wonder what was next, letting the voices in her head go crazy before he would drown them out with intense pain. Her voices were praying to this man, pleading with him to be what she needed. Understand me. See me for what I am. Don't hate me for who I am, just beat it out of me. Bring me some respite from myself.

Typically, Tom's impulse would have been to respond to her brave self-disclosure with praise and love. Typically, he would be tender with her in her moment of profound vulnerability the way he might be with a baby bird fallen from its mother's nest. The heartfelt care Tom offered the wounded was one of the strengths of his character, but it was one of his demons as well. He had learned the hard way that he was too easily had. He was too readily suckered by those who feigned injury to get the best of him or by those, like Ellen, for whom injury had become a way of being.

No, there are some things that can't be redeemed with unconditional acceptance and sincere understanding. There are parts that are just bad and have to be dealt with as such.

His demons would meet her demons. The bad of her moral masochism would meet the bad of his sadism and neither would be elevated. They had to be dealt with one way or another. Together, in that hotel room, these urges would simply be what they are: the other side of love, the profane parts of the soul.

To go there required them to establish a distance from each other, the distance enabled by Tom's objectification of Ellen and by the shame it made burn inside her. Their paths were diverting. They shared certain common elements – nerves, exposure, vulnerability – but they were also separated by the gap that separated the dominant from the submissive, the active from the passive. A chasm would separate their experiences when he was beating her, but they would still be enmeshed in such a way that each was the safety net for the other, each offered to contain the overflow of emotions in the other.

He would contain her anguish, holding her both physically and emotionally, binding her so she didn't explode or disintegrate; she, in turn, would call for the man inside Tom who he hid from the world and from lovers in particular, for that was the part of him that Ellen wanted most. She wouldn't judge him harshly when he let himself go and left her bruised and battered.

Tom could see her slipping into her private silence, into the small corner of her soul where she went to hide, and he wanted her back. He turned her back around so that she was facing him. He held her firmly and she wasn't sure whether he was going to pull her towards him in an embrace or to bend her over and begin her beating. She wasn't even sure which she wanted. He could do anything he wanted to her. This scared her.

‘What are you scared of, Ellen?'

It was as if he could see right through her and this made him grow even further in her esteem. She wanted to say something but she didn't know what.

‘You can tell me, Ellen.'

Silence.

‘You need to tell me, Ellen, if you want me to make it better.'

She had long ago despaired at ever making anyone else understand. She would never be able to adequately describe it; she didn't really believe that there were words for it. But here, feeling so little, so exposed, so raw, it came to her. Maybe it was just the imminent spanking, so long dreamed of and now assured, but it seemed like the dawn of a new day, the edge of a new experience. It was the hardest thing for her to say, yet here, so vulnerable and scared, she found herself able to say it.

‘What if I can't be fixed?' Even as the sentiment expressed despair, she felt hope. It was like she had been waiting her whole life to say it. ‘What if I'm hopeless and you leave me after you spank me because I can't change?'

‘But Ellen, you already have changed.'

She revered him for saying that, as if him saying it made it true. She was in awe of him. He was pulling it off. It was really happening. He took her by the arm and walked her over to the bed, where he sat down and pulled her over his lap. All the petulant resistance and childish resistance she prophesied in the emails fell away and she cooperated, silent and passive. She was right where she wanted to be, right where she was meant to be. She felt little and helpless and it was exactly perfect, just like the emails.

At 5:10AM on 4/25/2004,
[email protected]
wrote:

Sometimes you make me feel like a little girl, like you've knocked the grown-up right out of me. I drop things when I'm thinking of you; I lose track of time when I daydream about you; and I forget what I'm doing when you come into my mind. I feel so stupid.

At 5:25AM on 4/25/2004,
[email protected]
wrote:

I have the feeling that the little girl in you doesn't have many people to talk to. You probably don't let her out much. This correspondence is probably pretty precious to her. After all, she'll be the one across my lap. Naked, ass stinging, pussy wet, tears on her cheeks… she'll be glad because for once she's getting all the attention. The Ellen who is old beyond her years, the professional who gets the best of people, who intimidates them, is the one who's out of place here. The spanking will drive away that façade.

Maybe the only thing you need to escape is yourself. I'll be your accomplice. I'll aid and abet the prison break. Is this what they mean when they say submission will set you free? We'll be free to be ourselves, even the dirty, sleazy parts. After all, these are the parts that meet strangers in hotel rooms to do our kink. I'll beat the shit out of the superego that tells us how bad it is and how wrong it is to want it.

It wasn't, however, Ellen's superego that felt it when Tom began her spanking. It was her right cheek and then her left. Alternating cheeks had always been a favorite of Tom's, and his rhythm was the object of much careful consideration. One, two, four, even ten per cheek before switching. He was drawn to symmetry and even numbers. He typically began a spanking relatively softly, each stroke more ceremonious than agonizing. At first it drew its intensity from the message it sent and not the force of its impact. It was when the woman began to acclimate to the experience that it got more intense. He liked the early, incremental intensification. The switch to more in a row on a single cheek, the slight increase in force, only barely perceptible. By the time he built the hand spanking to its most intense any other implement couldn't match it. It wasn't that the other implements weren't more painful than his hand; it was that he could spank so much faster with his hand, showering the blows upon burning skin at a rate that caused sheer panic and absolute agony. In his experience, more women struggled during the hand-spanking portion than any other, because when his hand was in full swing they were inclined to do anything for a pause, any pause at all, no matter the cost.

Tom spanked with several implements not because they hurt more but because they gave his hand a break and offered some variety to the experience. Moreover, the specter of the belt, paddle and cane in her future made them worthwhile, if only for the sheer terror they inspired. He rarely made it all the way through the cycle, from hand to cane, but that was what Ellen had in store. There was no way she was getting away with any less than his best. She would be pleased afterwards to know she'd taken the worst he had ever given, and she would be disappointed to know that anyone else had received more.

Of course once the spanking started in earnest she would hate it. She would hate herself for wanting it and regret having asked for it so persuasively. She would wish she'd expressed more doubt about what she could take and she would deny having ever really wanted it so hard. That much was natural. What felt more perverse to Tom was the way she could hate it and get so excited by it at the same time. In fact, he got a kinky pleasure from the way the torture worked on multiple levels. There was the torture of knowing what she was in for – a hard, painful, humiliating spanking. Then there was the fact that she would know she'd asked for it, sought it out, even. When she would beg for mercy and he ignored her she could be sure that she only had herself to blame. She would have to admit that she had demanded he commit to the severity. When the moment of reckoning came, she could be assured that she had brought it on herself.

The paradox that never failed to arouse Tom was that even though she knew she really did wanted it, it was his role to make her not want it, to make her try to get out of it and force her to take it, holding her to her desire. Tom wanted her to not want it, even before it started. Then once it started she definitely wouldn't want it. But Tom relished demonstrating her arousal and the way her body betrayed her by showing him how much she loved it.

‘Look at you,' he said when he took a break from the spanking to stick his fingers inside her slick pussy. ‘You're enjoying this way too much.'

‘No, no, I'm not. It hurts. It's not sexy; it just hurts. I don't want to be spanked.'

‘You say you don't want it, but if you didn't would you be this wet?'

Silence.

‘Would you?'

‘No.'

The truth was that he knew it wasn't sexy to her. He knew it hurt like hell. But he tormented her about her body's paradoxical reaction, enjoying the way it tore her in two, pain on her face, pleasure between her legs; pain on her ass, wet anticipation boiling over deep inside.

He felt cruel at moments like this – a true sadist. But that's what this was about, and he wondered how it could span the highest words about love and redemption and the lowest abuse of the dirtiest parts of her body.

She was wondering the same thing. As the spanks fell over and over on her ass it was as if she were split in two: one part was possessed by the pain, the burning and the anticipation of the next blow, while the other part sank deep into something she had once heard referred to as ‘sub space', an experience of falling deep inside herself, with the agony of the beating driving her far away. But there was also something forming inside her head as well. It was an angry voice, a manifesto of resistance that went something like this: ‘What the fuck am I going to do with this? Why the hell should he be bothering with me? He cannot love me; he doesn't know me. And if he doesn't love me but I let myself fall into this, I'll be hurt. Fuck that. What if he really does beat the shit out of me? The memory of it will bind me to him. I'm not sure I can stand as much pain as he's talking about anyway. That's terrifying. If he really does this, I will be his. I will need him, and I don't want that, not now, not ever.'