Old-Fashioned Values (23 page)

That was when George led Mark into the kitchen. “Mark here,” George said in a forced voice, “says that he and Sally have agreed to stop seeing each other for a while, out of respect for our feelings. That sounds like at least a temporary solution to me. Sally will come home for the summer, and maybe the two of you can work this out. For now, I think we should let them get back to school.”

“But they’ll stay for dinner, of course,” Rowena said, as if it were an insult.

“No, thank you, mom,” said Sally, weeping harder than she had yet wept. She got up and ran to Mark, who put his arms around her silently and held her tight.

* * *

Sally spent that last night in Mark’s dorm room. They did nothing but hold each other in the narrow bed, while she cried and cried.

“September,” Mark said. “Even if you can’t get your mom to understand, we’ll be back together in September.”

“That’s
seven months
. I feel like I can’t last a
day
.”

When they woke around dawn the next morning, Sally said, “Spank me one last time. Because I lied to my parents.”

So Mark had Sally take off all her clothes and lie on the bed over a pillow, and he whipped her with his belt. Then she moaned, “Please, my lord,” and there was no way he could resist: he got up on the bed behind her, rock-hard, and entered her very gently. Usually when they had sex doggy-style, his dominance came out very forcefully, and he fucked very hard, but that morning, because Sally was sad and he was sad, and it was their last time for a long while, he thrust tenderly and slowly even in that dominant position.

Sally whimpered, sighed, and moaned. “Play with yourself,” he commanded. It had become one of his favorite things, to watch her pleasure herself, at his command, while he was inside her. She came and came again, and then he felt his cock pulse inside her beautiful pussy as the springs of the little bed groaned at the frantic, climactic motions of lovers who know that they have come to the end, for now.

* * *

She and Rachel were in equally bad shape, it appeared when Sally got back to her room to find Rachel lying unconscious on her bed, outside the covers and in her clothes, clearly having cried herself to sleep. That Cassandra had now joined their side in the dispute helped a little, but not very much.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Cassandra pleaded quietly with Sally, as she stood in the doorway from the common room into Rachel’s bedroom. “I tried to cover for you, but your mom was threatening me and shit… and there’s Mark’s shirt in your bed, and his picture on your dresser, and that book about domestic discipline was lying on your desk. So I tried to explain that I had thought it was weird at first, but now I think it’s still weird, but also it works for you, and Mark and John are good guys.”

“I know,” Sally said. “It’s okay.”

“Do you want me to call your mom?”

“No, that’s alright, thanks,” Sally said, smiling a little. “Mark and I are going to stop seeing each other until September.”

“
September?
Sally, you’re eighteen. You don’t have to please your parents anymore.”

“I know, but I need them to understand as well as they can. For the sake of the future.” Putting it that way, making it about the future, suddenly seemed to help Sally feel better about the terrible prospect of the separation. What was seven months compared to the whole future?

“Well,” Cassandra said, “you could always fuck secretly, right? That would be hot, wouldn’t it?”

Sally blushed and, to her surprise, actually giggled. “Maybe,” she said.

“And Mark would spank you for being a naughty girl and wanting to fuck, right? And then fuck you like a porn-star?”

“Cassandra!”

“Just saying.” Cassandra went back to her own room.

Sally went to sit on Rachel’s bed, next to her best friend’s sleeping form, and rubbed her shoulder until she stirred. “Rachel?” she said.

Rachel seemed to be coming back from a very long way away, and she didn’t even really wake up as Sally helped her out of her clothes and into her nightgown, and then under her covers.

“What time is it?” Rachel mumbled.

“About seven, I think.” Sally got up.

“Don’t go! Please stay with me, Sally.” Rachel’s eyes opened at last and looked into Sally’s. “I’m so… oh, God, I don’t even want to think about it.”

Sally sat down on Rachel’s desk chair. “But it’s done now, isn’t it? Even if we have to wait for the future to come? Come for real, I mean.”

“Come,” Rachel said, her eyes closed again. Now, in the semi-darkness that was lit only by the rosy glow of sunrise coming in through Rachel’s casement window, Sally saw a smile flit across her mouth. “John told me that I can play with myself as much as I want while we’re apart, but I have to keep a little notebook and write it down every time I have an orgasm, and what I was fantasizing about, and he’ll review it when we start seeing each other again.”

Sally laughed. “That’s so hot.”

“You could do that for Mark.”

“I don’t think I want him to let me, though,” Sally replied. “I’d feel wrong, touching his property that way when he’s not there.” She giggled. “But, um, maybe I should, I don’t know, spank myself for him?”

Now it was Rachel’s turn to laugh. “Every time you’re tempted to play with yourself?”

“I’d probably have to do it five times a day, then,” Sally admitted. “Ever since this whole thing started… well, I never used to do it, and I still don’t, because I know Mark wants to, you know, take charge of me there, but it’s so hard not to—and I never even used to think about it.”

Silence fell for a little while. Then Sally said, “Cassandra says we should have secret sex with them.”

“I asked John about that, and he said no. He said it could ruin everything.”

Sally sighed. “I guess he’s right. But I have to admit that secret sex does sound, you know, hot.”

A silence ensued that was so long that Sally assumed Rachel had fallen asleep. She didn’t move to leave, though, because she didn’t feel like she wanted to be anywhere but here at Rachel’s side, since she couldn’t be with Mark; now she and Rachel had to be each other’s link to the wonderful past, and the more wonderful future.

But then Rachel said in a sleepy voice, “Sally?”

“Yes?”

“Are we going to marry them, do you think?”

“Yes,” Sally replied without hesitation.

“Oh,” Rachel said, even more sleepily. “That’s good.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Friday of Labor Day weekend, just before classes started up for the fall semester at Mendon College, Mark and John waited at the ferry terminal in Vineyard Haven for Sally and Rachel to arrive. Sally had picked Rachel up at Bradley airport in Connecticut and then they had driven straight to the ferry in Falmouth. Mark had hardly been able to concentrate on the conversation he was having with John about his campaign for town council, so sure had his subconscious mind been that the visions of fiery car wrecks might come true, and this long-awaited day of joy would turn into some spectacular tragedy.

“Mark,” John had finally said, as they sat at his kitchen table with Mark’s position papers laid out in front of them. “I promise you, the girls are going to get here safely.”

“Don’t you think we should leave for Vineyard Haven, though? The traffic can get pretty bad, right?”

John sighed. “Alright. You’ve concentrated enough over the past few days, I guess. Just please don’t literally jump out of your skin, if you can help it. I hate dealing with bloodstains.”

Mark laughed, but then he said, “You really think we should start with maintenance?”

John grinned as he took his car keys from the hook by the door. “Absolutely. I’m telling you, the girls are going to be like powder kegs, erotically, but what they really want and need is discipline.”

“Okay,” Mark said doubtfully as they headed out to the car.

The six-and-a-half months had crawled by, but at least crawling was a kind of motion. Sally had been allowed to come to Mark’s graduation, with a friend named Melissa who also had a senior boyfriend. They had hugged, very awkwardly, and whispered that they loved each other, but Melissa had clearly been assigned by Sally’s mother to take careful notes, and so that had been all. Sally, who had driven Melissa there, was expected home for dinner, and had dutifully returned to Greenwich.

In the one instant of that awkward hug, though, Sally had pressed a note into his hand, and that note, Mark thought, probably was responsible for keeping him sane over the summer.

I’m keeping a notebook of how I spank myself every day, because you’re not there to do it for me, sir. All my love, your Sally

Other than that, Mark had not seen Sally at all, except for once or twice across the quad. He texted her every day, “Good morning; I love you.” And “I love you, too, sir” always came back. At first he had worried about what might happen if her mother saw that she was still calling him ‘sir,’ but he decided that it might actually help Rowena Lanchester understand, if Sally kept doing that despite her mother’s best efforts to deprogram her, as Mark was sure she thought of it.

It hurt to think about that process, with only “I love you, too, sir,” to see him through. He imagined Rowena sitting Sally down every day and asking if she still thought she wanted a man to spank her when he decided she had been naughty. He imagined Sally gradually realizing that no, she wanted to be the daughter Rowena Lanchester had thought she was raising, who would report to the authorities a man who abused a woman that way. How could Sally’s submission not be eroded in two months at home with nothing but the country club and her mother’s pressure to keep her occupied? Surely Sally was coming to the Vineyard to break up with him forever?

From what John told him, things with Rachel had been even more difficult. Aside from one desperate email, in which Rachel had, John said, implied that her commitment might be wavering, to which John had replied, “I know it’s hard, sweetheart. I’ll see you Labor Day weekend. Love, John,” they had had no contact at all until John had invited her and Sally to come to the Vineyard for their reunion. Both girls had replied nearly instantly that they would be there, and that Sally would collect Rachel from the airport and bring her to the ferry.

After that, only the text that said that they were on their way.

Mark stood as far out on the dock as non-passengers were allowed to go, scanning the entrance to the harbor. It was a very hot day, and the sweat dripped down his back and stained his blue polo shirt under the arms. John was reading inside the air-conditioned terminal. Sometimes Mark wished he were forty. If he had received an email from Sally that said she didn’t think she could take it anymore, he would have been in his car and driving twice the speed limit toward her house in an instant. But since he had started working for John in his consulting business, right after graduation, he had gradually come to realize that John’s wisdom consisted in large part of having lived twenty years longer, and the way that seemed to make a person take things less to heart.

Surely they couldn’t be coming to break up with them, could they? But surely they must be, because how could they last a whole summer?

He felt a hand on his shoulder—it was John. “Two things, Mark. First, even if you’re a kind person and you don’t want to break up with someone long distance, you don’t come all the way to an island to do it.”

Mark laughed and smiled. “I guess I know that.”

“So you don’t have anything to worry about, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Second, Sally and Rachel are submissives. They just are. Their parents can’t cure them of it, and all their parents’ attempts have almost certainly only made them more sure of who and what they are.”

Mark nodded, and that was when a speck on the horizon resolved itself into the ferry from Falmouth. Buoyed by John’s words, Mark strained his eyes to find the girls on the top deck of the ferry, as it made its turn and then backed up to the dock, but of course he couldn’t see them in the sea of passengers, even as people started to stream down the gangways while the cars began to roll off and drive away through the traffic-filled streets.

So when Sally ran up and threw her arms around him from behind, it took him completely by surprise. He turned, held her, and kissed her, vaguely conscious that next to them Rachel and John were doing much the same thing.

“Oh, sir,” Sally was saying through the kisses. “Oh, sir. Can you spank me right here? I’ve been so naughty, and I’m, well, being very naughty right now, at least if the state of my underwear is anything to go by.” She giggled, and Mark felt as if knots tied tightly around his heart, to hold it together, were coming undone.

“Did you spank yourself every day?” he murmured.

“Every day,” she said. “I have my notebook in my bag for you to review.”

“Well,” Mark replied, instantly dropping into his dominant role, and feeling like it fit him like a pair of old jeans, “we’re going to have maintenance tonight. I’ll look at the notebook beforehand, and any faults I see in it will be punished.”

“Oh my God, sir. Really?” Mark looked down at her. Sally’s eyes shone, and of course he couldn’t help kissing her. And then he couldn’t help it again, and again, and again.

* * *

“Sir?” Rachel asked, when they were finishing up dinner with a dessert of ice cream. “Sally and I have talked about it, and we would like to make a request about our maintenance.”

“You may certainly make a request, young lady,” John said. “But let’s talk about your parents first, okay?”

Rachel nodded. “Mine say they’ll be watching, but they’re much, much calmer now than they were. I gave them so much stuff to read that they were sick of BDSM by July, and my mom actually said ‘Okay, I get it. I get it.’” She laughed.

John looked at Sally. “My mom is still really angry,” she admitted. “But my dad wants to get to know Mark, and my mom finally said that as long as there’s never any spanking in her house, she would just consider me kinky.”