Old-Fashioned Values (8 page)

“Things are going great,” Mark said in response to John’s query about Sally. “I’m calling to ask if you’d come have coffee with us. Sally really wants to meet you.”

John laughed. “Really?”

“Yup. And she’s actually got a roommate who she wants to introduce to you.”

“Didn’t you say that Sally is a freshman?”

“Yes—but I’m pretty sure that it’s not a dating thing.”

“What, then?”

“Rachel—that’s the one Sally wants to meet you—and Sally have this other roommate, who thinks Sally’s in danger of being abused by me. Rachel’s on Sally’s side, mostly, but Sally really wants to help Rachel understand why loving discipline is a good thing, at least for her. I told them that you would probably be glad to try.”

“Absolutely, Mark,” John said.

* * *

John was sitting by himself at a table in the café when they came in. He saw Mark, and could instantly tell that it must be Sally who held his hand the way a sub holds her master’s hand when they enter a dungeon. She kept herself a half pace behind him without, John thought, even realizing that she did it. She looked at Mark to see whether he saw John, and the look in her very, very pretty eyes was of adoration.

I knew you could do it, Mark Weaver,
John thought, letting his bosom swell with pride just a bit.

And the curvy, dark-haired girl must be Rachel.
Whoops
. Rachel was most definitely his type, and she was most definitely a sub, and she was most definitely very, very young.

How did John know that Rachel was a sub? He couldn’t say for sure, beyond the way that she held her arms clasped across her chest, as it to proffer her sizable breasts to the man who knew what to do with her. There was something in the way she looked around the café, maybe. And that must be because Mark had told her about John, and Rachel knew that John might be in the café. Sally might not think that introducing Rachel to John Gammon could lead to anything, but John knew immediately that if he let it, it would.

John had always had a weakness for girls who grew into their curves when they were still young women. Though Carol had passed thirty when he met her, she had also had the air of a girl who wasn’t sure about being a woman yet; a girl who searched for a guide to teach her about what adulthood, and adult relationships, entailed. If you took Carol’s dissonant ingenuousness—the little girl peering out from the woman’s face—and multiplied it by ten and took ten years off it, you would have Rachel.

John waved, and the three of them came over to the table. John stood up and gave Mark a hug, which startled him a bit, but really John felt so happy for the young man that he couldn’t resist, and he didn’t want to—especially because he got to see Sally’s own startled reaction. It helped him gauge what she had heard about him, and the unusual influence he, John, had had on her life without having ever met her before.

He shook her hand gently and said, “It’s very nice to meet you,” resisting the temptation to say something more, like, “You seem a very well-behaved young lady.”

Then he shook Rachel’s hand, careful to keep his face entirely neutral, still completely undecided whether at the end of this coffee he would get her number or not. “Nice to meet you, too,” he said. Then he said to all of them, “What are you having?”

Mark said, “Oh, you don’t have to do that, John.” He betrayed not the slightest hint on his face of what John knew to be the truth, that buying coffee even for himself and Sally, let alone—which John was sure he would have done if John had let him—for Rachel and John, would have represented a serious expenditure for him.

“Nonsense. I claim the privilege of age,” John said.

“Thanks,” Mark said, his real gratitude shining out in his smile.

When John had brought them all their desired coffee (espresso for Mark, lattes for the girls), and when he had sat down, he exercised the privileges both of age and of didactic experience and said, “So, we’re here to talk about what I call loving discipline.” The girls’ eyes widened at his frankness. Mark smiled slightly, and just a little uncomfortably.

“I have a feeling,” John continued, “that part of the problem, such as it is, is that you girls think that being spanked as a grownup is something shameful.”

“Isn’t it?” Rachel interjected. John looked at her. She had caught her right cheek in her teeth, and was chewing on it very slightly. In Rachel’s voice John heard the yearning he had thought he would hear: she wanted to be told that it wasn’t shameful at all… that to think about it all the time, the way John thought she probably did, didn’t make her a pervert.

And he wanted to tell her that, but he knew, from long experience, that he had to tell her in a way that would help her
believe
it, and that would take a great deal of time. Nor might John be the right man for the job.

So he said, “It is and it isn’t. Part of the point of the kind of discipline I practice, and it seems like Mark and Sally are starting to practice, is to make the submissive partner feel ashamed of herself, with regard to what she’s done that doesn’t come up to the standard she and her dominant partner have decided on. That’s why the punishment we use more than any other is something that, in the old days, was for children.”

“Spanking,” Rachel whispered, almost as if she hadn’t been intending to speak at all and the word had simply crept out of her mouth.

John looked at Sally. “Sally,” he said. “I have a feeling you know what I mean.”

Sally turned bright red, and a part of John felt a certain envy of Mark Weaver for having found such a wonderful blusher. She nodded quickly.

“Forgive me for using my instructional skill here,” John said, “but, Sally, can you unpack that a little bit? Afterward, how did you feel about being spanked like a little girl?”

Sally’s blush only deepened. She looked at Mark beseechingly. Mark said, “Go ahead, Sal. I’d like to hear this too.” The young man really did have a special air about him—a sort of wisdom that made you feel he was older than his years, but which you also felt couldn’t exist in an older person; there seemed to be too much energy in it for that. Watching him guide Sally gave John a sort of pleasure that he had always thought he lost his chance at, in not paying more attention to the job of finding someone with whom to spend the rest of his life. Carol had probably come closest to being that person, but John had known that she would leave—her future elsewhere was just too bright. He had decided that loving her while she was around was more important than pursuing the phantom hope of children for whom he supposed he would be too old, anyway. Now Mark Weaver seemed to him, though it was a cliché, the son he’d never had.

Sally looked back at John. “Well,” she said, “like you said before, John, it made me feel ashamed of myself. I guess a big part of that was… I don’t know… Feeling like I let Mark down, and now he had to spank me. It sounds kind of weird to say it, I guess, but being ashamed like that seemed to make me want to do better for Mark and for myself.”

“Aren’t you just fooling yourself, though?” Rachel asked. Now she too turned red. John had to admit that while her blush wasn’t quite as pretty as Sally’s—Rachel’s darker coloring made the pink hue a little less cute, he supposed—nevertheless the way she wore it was much more attractive to him. “I mean, that’s what Cassandra would say, right? I mean, I’m not saying that’s what I think…”

“I don’t think she’s fooling herself,” John said gently. “But I can also see how a woman who isn’t put together the way Sally is—and maybe the way you are—” John paused there, just for a split second, to see how Rachel would react to the suggestion that she too might be a submissive, which was possibly a word she had never heard, though if John had read her correctly she knew exactly what a submissive was. To his satisfaction, Rachel looked down at her coffee, her mouth twisting to the side. She knew she was very much like Sally. “I can see how someone put together differently could easily think that Sally is fooling herself, because she would never feel that way.”

Now Sally, her voice demonstrating that John had given her precisely the kind of confidence he had wanted to give her, said, “I think that’s exactly right. I mean, I don’t think Cassandra can ever really get it. But I kind of think that maybe you do get it, Rachel.”

“Is that why you wanted to meet me?” John asked softly, for a moment pretending that Mark and Sally weren’t even there.

“Yes,” Rachel whispered.

“Would you like to try it?” John asked.

“Maybe?”

John held her eyes with his for a long moment, smiling. Then he glanced over at Sally. Sally had her mouth open a little bit, as if she couldn’t believe what her roommate was saying.

“Why don’t you and I talk about this privately sometime soon?” John said, turning his attention back to Rachel, who still had her eyes fixed on his face.

“Today?” she asked.

John laughed. “Well, I’m not doing much this afternoon. We could continue this conversation after Mark and Sally take off.”

“Okay,” Rachel said.

“Rachel!” Sally said.

“What?” Rachel asked, finally breaking her stare at John to turn to Sally.

“Sally,” Mark said, with a warning note in his voice.

Now Sally turned back to look at him.

Mark said, “John is a very good friend of mine. I think he is probably the most trustworthy person I’ve ever met.”

“But Mark…”

“I hope you’re not suggesting that Rachel wouldn’t be safe with him, because that would be very disrespectful, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.” Sally sat looking down at her latte.

John saw a very puzzled, but also very curious look pass across Rachel’s face. He doubted that she had known previously that Sally called Mark ‘sir.’ He could also see that a thrill of arousal had gone through her when she heard it.

“I’m sorry, John,” Sally said.

“That’s quite alright,” John replied. “You’re just looking out for your friend. So let me assure you that I would never consider doing anything that we might call practical with Rachel today. After she and I talk, she’ll need to do some thinking. And I hope you’ll be there for her to discuss the things I ask her to think about.”

“Of course,” Sally said, a note of relief in her voice.

“See?” Mark asked, only the tiniest bit chidingly.

“Yes, sir,” Sally said again. John could scarcely believe how very happy it made him to watch Sally show her submission to Mark that way, and to see him accept that submission so gratefully and gracefully. Only a college freshman, and she had already found a man to whom she could look up as a guide. The chances were probably, John supposed, against them getting married, but he wouldn’t put it past these two to do the hard work required to establish that kind of bond.

The conversation turned to much more conventional matters. John inquired about their coursework and about their career plans. He made the offer he had made to Mark, and which he had made to several promising students before Mark, to help them along their career paths in any way he could. Sally and Rachel, he knew, could not yet see how important the kind of assistance John could give might be down the road, but he felt confident that they would remember it when the time came. Helping young professionals get started in what they tended to think of as the real world—though John had long since decided that there was no such thing—provided one of the greatest pleasures of John’s life.

As soon as it could be done politely, Mark and Sally left. John watched Sally hug Rachel with an adorable sort of shyness—as if she were sending Rachel off on her honeymoon.

After they had gone, and John had gotten himself and Rachel a refill of their coffees, Rachel sat nervously looking at him, clearly waiting for him to begin the discussion.

He smiled at her to reassure her, and then he said, “What can you tell me about what you’re looking for? I want you to take that question literally, by the way. I’m not asking you to tell me what you’re looking for, because I have a feeling you don’t really know what that is. I’m just asking you to tell me what you think you can tell me about it.”

“Spanking,” Rachel whispered, as she had whispered it before when Mark and Sally had been there.

John chuckled. “Well,” he said, “that’s something I could definitely provide a la carte, if called upon.”

“A la carte?” Rachel asked.

“Rachel, people get into spanking for a lot of different reasons. Some of them—not many, in my experience—just like the sensation of the spanking. When you think about what you’d like a guy to do if he should happen to spank you, is he saying anything?”

Rachel’s face went utterly crimson in an instant. “No,” she whispered.

John decided to push it just a little bit. “Rachel, your face shows me that that’s not true. When I tell you that sometimes I spank girls because they lie to me, what does your body tell you about whether you’d like to be one of those girls?”

“Oh, God, Sally was right. I don’t think I can do this.”

John took out his business card and pushed it across the table to Rachel. “Here’s what I want you to think about,” he said. “And I want you to talk this over with Sally. If a man like me were to spank you, why would he be doing it? I’m going to give you a little assignment. I want you to write me the story of your first spanking. Think of it as an optional assignment. If you do complete it, call me, and we’ll meet again—for lunch, this time—without any obligation to come back to my house after lunch, of course.”

“Okay,” Rachel said, meeting his eyes for one brief moment, and then looking down again at the business card.

“I’ve enjoyed meeting you very much, Rachel,” John said. “I hope you will call.”

Chapter Ten

Sally’s jeans came off that night, just a few hours after they had coffee with John and Rachel. Mark felt, as he took his girlfriend’s shirt off her torso to reveal her breasts just scantily covered in the lacy white bra, that he simply had to see her in her panties, and only her panties. He hadn’t seen her bare bottom since the night he had spanked her, and he felt like the constant force of his lust would drive him a little crazy unless he took things another step forward, and made it clear to Sally that when he wanted to enjoy the sight of her in her underwear alone, he would.