Old-Fashioned Values (2 page)

“Because you’re a guy and I’m a girl?”

“No—because I’m the guy I am, and, if you accept this spanking like a good girl, you’ll be
my
good girl.”

Good girl
. When he said that, Sally knew that she would go back to his room and have a spanking.

Silently, he paid the check in cash, fixing Sally with his eyes through the whole process. Sally looked back as steadily as she could, her lips compressed into a tight line. Mark didn’t ask if she was coming, and she didn’t say she would, but when he put his arm around her waist as they left the burger joint, she snuggled into his chest and said softly, “Will it hurt a lot?”

Mark stopped walking, on a sidewalk slick from a chilly autumn fog, and turned Sally to face him. “When I punish you, Sally, it will hurt. Sometimes it will hurt a lot. But I promise that I will never harm you, or let anyone else harm you. Your bottom’s going to be sore tonight, but you’ll think twice before you use foul language again, won’t you?”

Sally felt her eyes grow wide. “Yes,” she whispered. Then a thought she couldn’t stop came to her, and she blurted out, “How many girls have you spanked before?”

“Well,” he replied, putting his arms around her waist. “That’s rather a long story.”

“Really?” Sally said in amazement. “Like, more than two?”

Mark laughed, hugged her for a moment, and then turned her around and began their progress toward his dorm again.

“No, you’re the first.”

“Oh. Then… um, how is it a long story?”

Chapter Two

“My sophomore year I had this incredible teacher,” Mark said, as they walked through the fog along College Street, toward Jackson House. There, Mark thought with some disbelief, he suspected he probably would actually spank Sally Lanchester, the amazing girlfriend he had never quite believed he could have. “He was the instructor in my macroeconomics class—not a professor here, but a guy they hire as a lecturer, pretty much because he likes to teach and he’s smarter than any of the professors in the department.”

He looked down at Sally, who had a very puzzled expression in her eyes. He didn’t blame her—it was certainly a rather odd way to start a story about his experience of loving discipline.
So beautiful,
he thought, distracted for a moment by her strawberry-blond hair, her crystalline blue eyes, and her freckled ski-jump nose. He had almost stopped himself from saying anything when she had used the word ‘fuck.’ He couldn’t believe his good fortune in having gone on a first date with Sally Lanchester, let alone a second. How could he throw that away by telling her that he planned to spank her?

And it could all still go wrong, of course. John had warned him about that.

“His name is John Gammon, and he’s forty. He was in a long-term relationship with a psychology professor, but she moved to California two years ago. And… well, he believes very strongly in loving discipline.”

“He spanked his girlfriend?” Sally whispered. Mark could tell she would need a very long while to get used to the idea, if she ever did. That she had allowed his arm to remain around her waist—that for that moment, coming out of the restaurant, she had snuggled in closer to him and asked about whether it would hurt—seemed to say that she might.

“Yes,” Mark answered simply.

“And how did you find out about it?”

“I was at his office hours, and we were talking about a paper assignment. It was about modernity and labor, and while we were discussing the impact of modern Western nations tapping the potential of the female workforce, he made an offhand comment about how he happened to think that in certain respects, traditional notions of family structure still had a lot to recommend them. I was surprised, and I asked him to explain. And he said, ‘Well, strange as it sounds, I think a household works better when one person takes charge of it.’ So I said, I think, ‘What, like
love, honor, and obey?
’ He must have heard something in my voice, because he said, ‘Does that intrigue you?’ and I had to say ‘Yes.’”

He glanced over at Sally; her eyes were as wide as saucers.

“So he said, ‘Well, I suppose I could get into trouble for telling you this, but you look like a trustworthy guy, so I’ll risk it in hope that you’ll understand that I’m trying to get you to challenge your preconceived notions. I spank my girlfriend.’”

“Um, wow,” Sally said.

“I was pretty shocked, actually, but… I did find it incredibly intriguing, and it also matched a lot of thoughts I’d had when I looked at my parents, whose marriage is pretty messed up, about how my mom sometimes seemed to be begging my dad to take charge, but he just refused. So I think I said, ‘Why?’ and John said, ‘Well, it’s not really the best office-hours conversation,’ and then he moved on and I let it drop, of course.”

They walked on in silence for a little while. They were about a hundred yards from the front door of Jackson House now—almost the decision point, as Mark began to think of it, for better or worse.

“So that was it?” Sally asked. She had a curious note in her voice that made Mark think she was more interested in the long story than he had thought she would be.

“No,” Mark said, stopping them in front of the dormitory. “I thought it would be the end of it, but then John invited me over to his house for dinner. Like I said, he was seeing Professor Baxter—Carol—who left for California two years ago. When I called to accept, he told me that I should only come if I truly wanted to see what traditional loving discipline could look like. That he knew it wasn’t for everyone, but that he believed in it so strongly that he felt a kind of obligation to mentor guys who seemed smart, and seemed like they might be interested in it for the right reasons.”

If he had thought Sally’s eyes were saucers before, they were as big as plates now. She whispered, “So what did you see?”

“I saw him spank Professor Baxter.”

“On her bare… rear?” Mark felt himself smile slightly at the thought that Sally seemed to have a hard time saying ‘bottom.’

He nodded.

“Why?!”

“She had gotten behind on this article she was writing. Apparently she was the one who had encouraged John to invite me over—not because she wanted me to see her get spanked, of course! But John is a big believer in the role of shame in loving discipline, so when he decided he needed to give her the belt about the article, he thought it would be the right time to take her suggestion, and invite me over.”

“Oh my God,” Sally whispered. “And…”

But Mark stopped her. “I’ll tell you more of the story upstairs. If you’re coming.” He looked into her still-wide eyes. “Are you coming?”

“Would you… I mean, you wouldn’t ever spank me with… someone else there, would you?”

Mark thought hard for a moment. “I can’t honestly make that promise, I guess. But I should say that Professor Baxter told me that before John started taking their loving discipline to that level, they agreed that he should have other people watch her get spanked if he thought it would help her learn her lesson. So I can promise that I’d never let someone else watch unless we talked about that being part of your punishments beforehand.”

“Wait,” Sally said. “Doesn’t that mean that this professor—Professor Baxter—said it was okay with her for other people to watch her get spanked?”

Mark nodded. “It does, and she did.”

“I… I don’t understand that.”

“Well, for right now, let’s start with whether you’re going to be a good girl for me tonight, and learn your lesson.”

They were standing two feet apart, not touching. They wore heavy fall coats, buttoned up all the way against the early November night air. Mark watched Sally bring her hands up, clasp them, and wring them a little. She closed her eyes, and he wanted to kiss her—they hadn’t kissed yet, and here he was telling her either she would submit to a spanking, or they would break off whatever little relationship they had built over two dates, one of which included this highly unusual conversation.

Sally bit her upper lip, making him want to kiss her even more, and then she opened her eyes and whispered, “Okay.”

Mark reached out and took her hands in his. “I want to kiss you,” he said quietly.

Sally’s eyes widened, and then a smile broke out on her face. “Kiss me
and
spank me. That’s quite a combination for a second date.”

“Do you want me to kiss you?”

She giggled. “Yes.”

So he did, briefly, chastely, and tenderly, and then he led her up the stairs and into Jackson House, still feeling the wonderful, warm pressure of her lips on his.

As they climbed the stairs to the third floor, where Mark’s single was, he couldn’t help looking at Sally’s bottom ascending ahead of him. Her little blue skirt accentuated the pertness of her taut, athletic cheeks rather distractingly. Really, though it was a modest garment, its pencil shape left less to the imagination than Mark felt quite comfortable with, all of a sudden, knowing that if he were going to go through with the spanking he would have to tell her to raise it, and then watch her panties come into view.

He realized that without even noticing it he had come up against what John had called ‘the sex problem.’

“Now the first time you spank your girlfriend,” John had said, “you’re going to notice that you get hard.”

Mark had shifted uncomfortably and looked down at his coffee. It was not territory he had expected to cover with his macroeconomics instructor, frankly.

“Look at me,” John had said. What the hell was it about John Gammon? How could he tell Mark Weaver to look at him, that way—like a father (though not at all like Mark’s real father). Like a military commander.

Mark looked at him.

John said, “You may even be hard now, thinking about it.”

Christ
. Mark realized he was indeed hard, thinking about a hypothetical girl for whom he might someday have responsibility—that kind of responsibility: to spank her when she needed spanking. He looked back at his coffee and then found the will to look back up into John’s ice-blue eyes.

John didn’t even need to say that he wasn’t going to ask Mark if he actually was hard, nor that if Mark ever did actually find himself spanking his girlfriend he, John, wouldn’t ask whether Mark had gotten hard when he spanked her, or when he watched her adorable little bottom go up the stairs in front of him in a navy blue pencil skirt. Mark knew that John spoke hypothetically: that was part of his spellbinding power—hypothetically, but always with uncanny accuracy.

“That’s not something a good man can avoid, Mark,” John said. “If you didn’t get hard, it would mean you weren’t the kind of man your girlfriend needs—and, someday, your wife will need.”

“A good man?” Mark asked.

John took it as a more intelligent question than Mark had meant. Or maybe Mark had been halfway to the right question, and John took him the rest of the way, like the extraordinary teacher he was. “Ethically, yes.”

“Ethically?” Mark was getting there, but it was like he was struggling up a slope of learning, and John was standing at the top of that slope, beckoning to him.

“Ethically, if you’re the kind of guy your girlfriend needs, you will be aroused by the thought of spanking her, and you will be even more aroused if you do have to spank her. It’s your choice what you do about that arousal.”

Mark felt his brow furrow. “My choice? That sounds like you’re saying if I want to take advantage of her, it’s okay.”

“No,” John said. “That’s the opposite of what I’m saying.”

He didn’t go on for a long moment, letting Mark try to figure out the meaning of his words. John sipped his coffee and checked his phone. Then he turned back to Mark. “You have the choice of whether to show your arousal, whether to bring your arousal up as a part of your interaction with your girlfriend. Above all, you have the choice of whether to ask your girlfriend to gratify you, sexually.”

“But…”

“I know that you’re thinking that when I say ‘you have the choice,’ I mean that you can do it if you want. To be blunt, after you spank a girl, you will almost always have it in your power to fuck her, too. And that’s actually part of what I mean—but it’s the least important part.”

Mark had no idea how to respond. He thought he could glimpse an important, deeper significance to John’s words, but he had no idea how to articulate it.

“The most important part of what I mean is that
you have the responsibility
to decide what to do about how hard you get when you spank your girlfriend. It may well be right to fuck her after you spank her.”

Mark gave an embarrassed snort of laughter at that and looked out the window. He didn’t even have a girlfriend at that point. He’d only had one, so far, and it had lasted mere weeks, and that had been long before he’d met John and started to think that John’s way of doing things made sense for him. Yes, Mark was desperate for sex. He was a guy. It was normal. But he didn’t want to hook up. He wanted to find a girl who understood intimacy, and wanted to talk about the kinds of things Mark talked about with John and Carol, as Professor Baxter had encouraged him to call her after that first night.

“But,” John said with finality, “you are the one who needs to give an account to yourself—and to whatever supernatural powers you believe in—for whether you used your masculine power in a way that did harm.”

Chapter Three

Sally stood outside the door of Mark’s dorm room, wondering if boys’ rooms looked different from girls’. Stupid thought, but she had never seen the inside of a boy’s room, and now she was going to.

Because he’s going to spank me.
Her mind retreated from the thought in alarm, back to,
Lucky me… I have a senior boyfriend!

Mark unlocked the door and Sally started to tremble, looking into his face, which was untroubled by the fact that this was apparently the first time for him as well as for her.

He isn’t the one whose bottom is going to hurt, though. He’s not the one telling his girlfriend that she has to obey him from now on, or he’ll break up with her.