Learning to Blush (3 page)

She shuffled miserably to her and Graham’s apartment and felt the communicator on her wrist buzz. God, those communicators were annoying pieces of work… They were larger than a watch, and so when she was called on one, the vibration it caused seemed to rattle her arm up to her elbow. She entered the bedroom and pushed her communicator under the main screen in her living room. Her husband, handsome in his uniform, looked very serious and very concerned when he appeared on-screen. “Are you alright?” he asked her.

“Thorton tell you what happened?” she groaned. Exhausted, she sat back on the sofa right in front of the monitor.

“Damn right he told me what happened! You put us behind by at least twenty hours, Eleanor! You disobeyed a direct order!” he griped, his neck showing the vein that only seemed to swell when he was angry.

“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t know we were trucking on full speed. It could have worked, if…”

“I’m not interested in another one of your inadequate excuses,” he said, ripping his hand through the air. “I called to see if you were alright.”

“Well, why don’t you just read the medical report, if that’s all you want?” she quipped.

“Your attitude will get you nowhere with me, young lady. I called you because I’m your husband; I love you, and I worry when you’re injured,” he snapped, trying his best to be patient, but she could see that his nostrils were flaring with rage.

“Well, don’t worry. Fie cleared me for work at five.”

“Commander Hux assured me he won’t shoot you, even though it’s his right to,” Graham added with fervor.

“How comforting,” she replied sarcastically.

“It’s not that comforting for
you
. What trouble you’re in is of your own making. You better believe you and I will discuss this later.”

Graham was a head-of-household type that didn’t actually discuss many things with his wife. However, he did like calling his punishment sessions with her ‘discussions’, much to her disdain. “Goody goody gumdrops,” she huffed. “It’s been awhile since we discussed something.”

“Yes. Too long,” he agreed ominously. “I’ll see you later on.”

“Uh huh,” she agreed, watching the screen turn off.

She did what Fie recommended—she put her clothes in the freshener, took a shower, took a nap, and damn it all if her arm felt fine afterwards! She wiggled it around stiffly, trying to loosen up the muscle, and then washed the gunk off her goggles, which were still dirty from earlier, and which she always wore in her hair like a headband until she needed them.

The walk down to the engineering level she felt was akin to walking “the long mile” to one’s execution back on Earth. It was both too long and not long enough. She was sure that Thorton would still be angry, and as she walked through the Engineering Level and found herself avoiding more and more furious gazes from the other engineers and mechanics, she became absolutely certain that she was indeed walking to her doom.

She finally spotted Thorton. He was standing on a raised platform with sparks flying around him, his eyes covered with safety goggles as he welded the scraps of the secondary engine back together.

She cleared her throat. She didn’t think he would really be able to hear her above the noise, but was mistaken. As soon as she made her little cough, he turned off his welding gun and turned his head slowly down towards her.

“What do you want me to start on?” she asked, pulling her hands behind her and looking repentant and nervous.

He snorted ruefully. “You know the strap of leather I have hanging in my office?” he asked her shortly.

She gave a nervous chuckle, as if he couldn’t possibly be serious.

“I want you to get it,” he told her, looking more serious every second. “And you want to be fast, Girl, because the more I work on shit that you messed up, the more pissed I get, and the worse it’s gonna be.”

She gulped, not liking that order one bit. “Can we talk this out first?” she pleaded.

He tugged off one of his safety gloves with a violent jerk.

“I’ll get it!” she assured, scurrying away from him. She knew where that was going—the last thing she wanted was punishment leading up to another punishment. Thorton obviously wasn’t at his most patient that day.

She had worked under him for nearly nine months now, and although he threatened her constantly, he had never used the leather strap on her, although she knew full well that the entire existence of the strap was a contingency from Graham to have her work under Thorton. Graham didn’t want to see her shot, or even whipped, and yet had the foresight to predict that she was going to be a huge pain in Thorton’s ass and that, eventually, Thorton would want to—or would have to—do something about her.

The strap of leather actually had
dust
on it. She found herself blushing as she came out of the office with it… She wanted to hide it under her jacket to keep any of the other men from seeing it and predicting what was going to happen. But then she figured they already were aware of what was going to happen to her, and it was humiliating. All she was to the others at the moment was a little girl about to get her bottom smacked by her boss. To her, it seemed so utterly ridiculous.

Probably back on Earth, if whipping was still done in the Navy, a spanking would never seem adequate. But the Swarii were certainly a gentler race of beings, at least in regards to their females. They revered women to the extent that it would kill them to see one of their women suffering… Although it was rare that a woman would actually deserve severe suffering. Executing or physically damaging a woman was unheard of.

Spanking was more common… But not as common as it seemed to be for Ellie! A ‘difficult’ Swarii woman who ‘constantly’ got spanked was a joke in Ellie’s mind. Men considered a ‘brat’ to be a woman who didn’t have their dinner ready by six or someone who would try to use sex as a reward system for getting what they wanted. Married Swarii women were absurdly obedient and submissive… Ellie was neither. She felt the pull to submit to her husband, certainly, but she knew that pull was just a biological instinct from her Swarii-side; one that she pretty much squashed with the help of the fact that she was mostly human.

Graham was a very, very patient husband. And fortunately for her, he was very educated and intellectual enough to realize that she wasn’t fully Swarii and couldn’t be held up to the same standards as other Swarii wives. Even so, her bottom was the victim of the flat of his hand more than enough times.

By the time she got back to Thorton, he was nearly done with his welding. Thorton was actually on the ‘short’ side of the Swarii-height spectrum, but she never really noticed, and it was rare somebody said something about his height. Thorton was burly—he was extremely muscular and built up from years of manual labor. Her husband was quite lean in comparison; Thorton seemed like he had rows upon rows of muscle…

She was beginning to think she might not survive the strapping.

Finally, his welding torch fired off and he pushed his goggles off his eyes and up onto his forehead so he could get a better look at his work. He then turned and looked at her in a way that divulged that he knew exactly how long she had been standing there. He pulled off his gloves and his protective apron and slapped them both down onto the platform before he climbed down.

“You cleared for work?” he asked as he stepped up to her with a sharp look of resolve in his eyes.

“I wouldn’t be down here otherwise,” she assured, swallowing; looking at his busted lip with a slight amount of guilt that she knew would dissolve as soon as he started punishing her.

“You nearly got yourself killed,” he reminded firmly, yanking the leather strap out of her small hands.

“I know, I’m sorry. It was a bad judgment call on my part,” she admitted, her heart beating quickly. In fact, she was beginning to think her heart had relocated to her throat and she now had to both breathe and swallow around it.

Thorton gripped her arm and pulled her to the steps leading up to another grid level. “It wasn’t
your
damn judgment call. It was
my
judgment call. What you did was directly disobey me. I’m the boss here!” He sat down on a step and pulled her over his lap with a single, firm motion. “Something you’re gonna learn,” he assured grimly.

“Can’t we do this in your office?” she squeaked in a plea, listening to how the sounds of other engineers working were beginning to quiet so they could watch her punishment.

“No,” he replied firmly. “You’ll have everyone working overtime. They
deserve
to see this.”

She felt him raise her skirt and pull down her leggings, and instead of protest, which wasn’t going to work, she tried squinting and imagining that she was somewhere else… That this was all just a bad dream and that really not every damn engineer on the ship couldn’t see her lacy, white panties.

The first CRACK she heard of the leather hitting the delicate skin of her bottom made her remember that this was very real, everyone seeing her undies was the last thing she should be worrying about, and that she really was going to get her ass blistered by Thorton.

She tried to grit her teeth and just ‘take it’ without kicking her legs around while hollering like a spanked toddler, but that was not meant to be! Thorton was surprisingly good at delivering sufficient pain with every blow so that she was struggling like a wild animal in less than thirty seconds.

Because of Thorton's size, she didn't seem to be providing him much of a physical challenge, even when she put her arms back to try to stop him. He merely pinned her wrists uncomfortably to the small of her back, making her even more helpless and pinned than ever.

Graham was a lecturer—he liked to speak when he was spanking her, hoping that she would learn something wise during the process. Thorton didn’t say anything. He merely ground his teeth and grunted every now and then, but that was it. Her screams, once they started, easily drowned that out.

She hadn’t been strapped in a good long time—not since she was working in her Frian master’s harem, by Peyton, a human that escaped with her about a year after he used the leather strap on her. She was beginning to realize that Peyton had been easy on her; possibly because it had been her first spanking, possibly because he had been in a hurry that day.

Thorton was not in a hurry. He was too busy making an ‘impression’. She was beginning to realize that nobody else in the service had ever been spanked for corporal punishment, and therefore no laws were written down—no limitations were set for Thorton. She was beginning to wonder if she could literally be spanked to death.

It didn’t really matter; she was going to die of embarrassment first anyway. Not because she was certain her bottom was going to be the reddest anybody in the room had ever seen, but because, even though she liked to act tough on a day-to-day basis, she was blubbering like a damn baby. She was crying so hard she could barely catch her breath.

The leather had strapped every square inch of skin from her mid-thigh to the top of her bottom, of this she was certain. In fact, she was pretty sure Thorton thoroughly strapped everything twice before he put the strap down and yanked her back into standing.

She tried to dry her eyes on her coat sleeve.

“Get back to work. You still haven’t even replaced that damn radiator. I don’t care if you work through the night,” Thorton told her, his voice sounding hard and void of all sympathy. She couldn’t see his face very well—the tears were still blurring her vision.

He slapped the leather strap in her hand and her fingers closed around it. “Put this where you found it, Lieutenant.”

She sobbed something that was supposed to come out as, ‘
Okay
’, but it didn’t really sound like either of their languages. She tried to pull her leggings back up under her skirt as quickly as possible, letting out another sob as the fabric tightly clung to her swollen skin, and then she walked away, her head hung low, still trying to correct her breathing to normal.

Thorton pursed his lips into a thin, white line as she walked off. That wasn’t as enjoyable as he thought it was going to be. Pain in the ass that she was, Thorton didn’t like causing Ellie pain. It was too easy to view her as a cute little sister, where it was his lot to bear her more than bear-down on her.

That being said, she scared the hell out of him! He needed to get the point across… And Graham agreed. Her blasé attitude towards authority had to be nipped in the bud before it got her into some serious trouble.

He went back to work, thinking about how he was going to get things to change under his command, particularly if Ellie was going to work under him during the next nine-month stint. In a way, he hoped she would. He honestly liked working with her. They were a good team, despite her horrible attitude. They knew each other’s strengths and limitations.

And besides, Ellie was probably the only woman he even had a relationship with, except maybe the human girl, Mary. When he got leave to take a wife in the Swaraan lottery, none of the three thousand girls attending were a match for him. That had been a blow, even though he was invited again to next year’s marriage festival to try again. He was beginning to have his own doubts that he was even a good mate. He was rough around the edges…

He shook his head. Nope. He was going to keep his cousin’s wife alive. If not for Graham’s sake, then for at least his own… Somehow.

Chapter Two

Ellie’s lip quivered as she stared at her husband, hoping for some sort of pity. He was a firm man, but not a mean one. She knew very well that, despite how disappointed he would occasionally be with her, he really didn’t like to see her unhappy.

Truth be told, there was a glint of sympathy hidden somewhere underneath his exasperation, but that's an emotion he chewed back. “Damn it, there’s no having this conversation with you if you’re going to get all emotional,” Graham said, openly frustrated.

“You’re demoting me, and I’m not supposed to get emotional?” she countered, her eyes glassy.