Old-Fashioned Values (3 page)

Mark opened the door, which sported the standard whiteboard for notes, even though in the age of the smartphone people only ever wrote things like ‘Hi Mark’ on it. Someone had written that, in what looked like a feminine hand, but otherwise nothing on the door could help Sally by taking her mind off the strangeness of the occasion.

She stood motionless, looking into the dark room. Mark reached across her front to flick the lights on, and she saw a small, tidy room. The only apparent difference from the one senior single she had seen in her own dorm, Castle House, was that Mark’s comforter was blue, where Zoe, her RA, had a pink one. Both of them even had the same poster of the Constitution on the same wall.

Still, she couldn’t make her feet move into the room. Thank goodness they were alone on the landing, which served only three singles. Jackson House was known for studious residents; the other two seniors were probably at the library. Mark put his arm around her shoulders and said softly, “I want you to be sure about this. A lot of times people even get married without knowing that one spouse needs loving discipline and the other doesn’t want it anywhere near them. I want us to start off right.”

“Anywhere near their bottom, you mean,” Sally blurted out, not sure that her mind could even function at all with the thought of having her bottom bared in Mark’s room, in a very little while.

“Well,” Mark said. “John says that actually more often wives decide they would like a firm hand, but their husbands don’t have the inclination to help them that way.”

“Help them? Are you kidding?” Sally had been looking into the room, focusing, oddly enough, on the Constitution.
“Insure domestic tranquility.”
Now she turned her face to look up at Mark, a head taller than she. Why was that so sexy—that he was taller? The guy she’d been kind of boyfriend/girlfriend with the previous year, her senior year in high school, had been only a tiny bit taller than Sally. She hadn’t minded that, but to have the arm of a tall, handsome man around her shoulders somehow seemed so much nicer.

This was where sexism came from, of course, but also, it appeared, where part of Sally’s emotional makeup lived. White wedding dresses and tall handsome men.

And spanking, it appeared. She felt her chin quivering.

Mark said gently, “Let’s go in and keep talking, okay? I promise I’m not going to force you to take this spanking.”

Something about the way he put it seemed strange. Then she understood. “
This
spanking. But another one, in the future, you might force me to take?”

Mark gave a little sigh through his nostrils. “If you come in, I’ll explain.”

Sally stepped resolutely through the door and went to sit in his desk chair, wondering if he would sit there to spank her, over his knee, or whether he would sit on the low bed and have her lie over his lap. Or would she have to lie on her tummy on the bed? Or bend over the chair?

Why was her brain doing this to her? Flashing all these images of herself, her panties down, getting ready for spanking, getting spanked?

She sat, still in her green duffel coat, and grasped the arms of the chair tightly. She didn’t plan to move into any sort of position for spanking until she felt… what? Conversely, if she was thinking about it not happening
until
something else happened, she realized that she
did
plan to move into a position for spanking if Mark… what?

He took off his pea coat and hung it on a hook on the back of the door. She watched him sit on his bed, only a foot away. He put his hands on his jean-covered knees and looked at her intently.

“First,” he said, “may I close the door?”

Sally blushed. So many guys, she was sure, would simply have closed the door. Mark was a gentleman—there was no doubt about that.

A gentleman spanker,
a voice in her mind hissed.

“Yes,” Sally said softly.

Mark rose, went to the door, and shut it. Then he returned and took up the same position he had held before, with the same intent look into her eyes.

“You asked if I would force you to accept a spanking.”

Sally nodded.

“The answer is Yes.”

Sally felt her eyes widen.

“I think it’s important that when we commit to one another—whether we’re headed for marriage or not—you commit to accepting my decisions, as I commit to taking care of you. If I think you need to be punished, after tonight, I’m going to punish you whether you like it or not. I believe that you need to know that I’m not going to let you get away with things like foul language—or letting your grades go, or any of the stuff that can happen when you’re away from home for the first time. This first spanking is different because it’s the first, but after this, we’ll have a kind of unwritten contract, and I’m going to make you abide by it.”

“And if I break up with you?”

“If you break up with me because I tell you I’m going to punish you, I’m still going to punish you.”

“No—that’s not fair!”

“It may not be fair, but I believe that it’s what’s right. After I punish you, in that case, we can go our separate ways.”

“And if I break up with you without you telling me you’re going to spank me?”

Mark gave her a puzzled look, and then seemed to understand what she was saying. “If you’re asking whether I’d spank you because you told me you wanted to end our relationship, I hope that’s just a crazy fear talking rather than any underestimation of my character. I’d never, ever spank you out of revenge. I’ll try never to spank you out of anger, but one of the things John told me is that people who do loving discipline need to be realistic, and sometimes a guy will spank out of anger.”

Sally saw herself in her mind’s eye, showing a bad grade to Mark—saw his face darken, saw him point to the bed, where she must lay herself down for punishment… She still couldn’t figure out why these visions of spanking seemed to stick in her brain.

She realized she had broken eye contact with him, and was looking down at her knees, still covered, for now, in the navy blue rayon of her skirt.

“Look at me, Sally,” Mark said gently. Sally raised her eyes to meet his again. “If I ever spank you in anger, it would only be because I felt I needed to be sure you got a message about your safety.”

He had a kind smile on his face that seemed to make everything a little more comprehensible. “Like…” she ventured, “playing in traffic?”

Mark laughed. “Exactly like that.”

“Not like a bad grade?”

Mark shook his head. “I do plan to discipline you about your academic work, because I saw how that helped Carol—Professor Baxter. But I’d never do it in anger.”

“But…” Something about ‘plan to’ had made things seem less reasonable again. “Um, how many things do you plan to discipline me about?”

Mark said, “May I hold your hands, please?” His voice had nothing but courtesy in it, but its tone conveyed an authority at the same time that seemed to make Sally obey him. She released her grip on the arms of the chair and extended her little hands to him, and he took them in his big ones.

“I plan to have three non-negotiable areas of loving discipline: your manners, your grades, and your safety.”

Sally nodded. It sounded so reasonable, though manners seemed like rather a big area. Still, Mark’s manners were impeccable, and it made her think that the part of this strange thing called loving discipline that concerned guidance in things like manners merited some consideration.

“After that, I’ll have some suggestions for other areas in which I think you might benefit from some holding to account, and I’ll want to hear—eventually, when you get used to the idea—about any areas where you think you’d like to try a disciplinary regime.”

“Where I’d
want
you to spank me?”

“It’s not impossible. Carol actually asked John to spank her if she got behind on that article.”

“I thought you said that John decided she needed the whipping.”

“He did, but that was because the previous month she had told him she wanted that article specifically to be part of their agreement.”

“What was the whipping like?” Sally whispered then, unable to keep her curiosity in check any longer. “I mean, did he make her cry?”

“Yes, but I don’t think that was because of the pain. Or not just because of it, at least. After dinner he told her to get ready for her whipping. So she went to the living room, and she got an ottoman and lay herself over it. John had me sit on the couch and then he took off his belt. Then he said ‘Get ‘em down,’ or something like that. So Carol undid her jeans and pulled them and her panties down to the middle of her thighs. Then John gave her a little lecture—questions mostly—and had her promise to finish the article the next day, and then he started to whip her with the belt.”

“How long?” Sally asked in a whisper.

“I think he must have whipped her fifty times or more,” Mark said

“Oh, God.” Sally felt very faint.

“They’d been practicing loving discipline for several years,” Mark sad. “Carol definitely wanted it like that—even if she didn’t want it like that right then, if you know what I mean.”

“Would you…?”

“No, of course not,” Mark said. “If we go ahead with this I think you’ll find that you may ask me to punish you more severely when I think you need it.”

Sally shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

Mark looked steadily into her eyes, the same gentle smile on his face. “Well,” he said, “time to decide.”

At that moment, Sally did feel like her life was about to take a dramatic step forward. She couldn’t see what lay on the other side of that step, but it didn’t have to do with wedding dresses. It was about joining her life to the life of a man who, though still young, seemed to possess an utter assurance of what he wanted and needed. One thing she could tell about the step forward was that it involved trusting Mark—and that to trust Mark was to surrender… no, to
submit
an important part of herself to him. Sally Lanchester would belong to Mark Weaver in a way she didn’t think she’d ever contemplated that even a married wife—in the modern world, at least—could belong to her husband. She shivered at that thought.

Then she said, “Okay.”

“Alright,” Mark said, “I want you to stand up and come lay yourself down over my lap. Before you lie down you should probably hike up your skirt a little bit, so I can bare your bottom when I have to.”

Sally felt herself blushing very hotly, but she stood up and went to stand on Mark’s right side where he sat on his low bed. Could she really hike up her skirt the way Mark had told her to?

Now, though, something about the flow of this strange little scene seemed to take hold of her. She found that she had already put her hands down to her thighs to gather her skirt above her knees and then to the middle of her thighs. She didn’t know how she could feel so very embarrassed even though Mark hadn’t seen anything at all; she had gone running with him the previous week and he had seen her in running shorts that were much, much more revealing than her hiked-up pencil skirt. But the thought of why she had hiked her skirt, and of how he would soon take down her panties to spank her, made the hiking itself a sort of humiliation she had never experienced before.

Her eyes were closed, and she felt Mark’s right arm come around her waist, hugging her gently, letting her know that the time to put herself in position for her first spanking had to come.

“Lay yourself down now, Sally,” he said quietly.

She opened her eyes and looked into his face. It was strange to look down at him, but soon, of course, her face would be the one turned down to the carpet, and her bare backside would be what Mark looked down upon. Sally bit her lips as she looked at him, suddenly even more fearful than she had been before.

“You used a bad word, Sally,” Mark said. “It’s time to learn your lesson.”

Suddenly Sally realized that as much as this scene had to do with Mark, and what Mark apparently wanted in a relationship with a woman he might spend the rest of his life with, it had more to do with Sally herself and what kind of person she wanted to be. Did she want to be a person who used foul language and didn’t let anyone tell her that it was an unattractive trait? Hadn’t there been something in her decision to say ‘fuck’ that was almost a plea to Mark to correct her behavior?

She realized that there were tears in her eyes, and she thought of what Mark had said about the way Professor Baxter had cried when this John Gammon person had whipped her in front of Mark. Sally couldn’t even say why she cried now. All she could tell was that it had to do with a lot of things: shame, and fear, but not just shame at the thought that she would to get a spanking like a little girl, or fear that it would hurt. No, there was also shame about having said the bad word, and fear about disappointing Mark Weaver, who somehow already seemed to be a person she didn’t want to let down.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Mark said even more gently. “Time for your spanking.”

Sally nodded and let Mark help her bend down and lay herself over his lap for her punishment, with her face in his blue comforter cover, which smelled deliciously of him—the Mark-smell she had really only gotten in very small doses, from snuggling her face into his coat when he had his arm around her. Now here the exciting smell was, in Mark’s own bed—and she was smelling it because he had decided she needed to be punished.

Chapter Four

Mark looked down at Sally’s pert little bottom, still covered by the blue fabric, but ready now for him to bare it completely.

“Once a woman submits to her punishment,” John had said, “you need to be sure to take control. If you think you should be the one to bare her backside, then you need to go ahead and do it. If you think it would help her more if she had to do it for you, then go ahead and give her the command. But don’t fail to take control. The first time, to help you get used to it, you should probably do the baring yourself. Here’s the most important thing, though: don’t pretend that you’re going to avoid the erotic things you feel about spanking your girlfriend by avoiding baring her bottom yourself. After you get her panties down you’re going to see the same thing whether she takes them down for you or you take them down. There’s no use pretending that a pretty girl’s backside isn’t a thing that gets a man hard—that is if he is the kind of man who thinks spanking a girl is sometimes a very good thing.” John chuckled. “In one way or another.”