Assigned a Guardian (7 page)

Chapter Six

The next time Patrick saw Kayla was a week later. Her muscle tone had begun to return, so they took a walk, clutching coffee from the admin café, as they both now called it, like every other resident of Draco. When Patrick realized that he had said, “Let’s get coffee at the admin,” and Kayla had made a face, but said, “Okay—it’s not like I’m ever going to have a half-caf no-foam again,” he knew that they were truly on their way to being real Draconians. They sat on a bench on the town green. The carefully planted trees were not tall—the oldest of them being only about fifteen years old—but they did make Patrick think of home, and they did provide a little bit of shade from the hot sun. Draco was a hot planet, and though that meant energy in such abundance that as long as they kept the battery arrays in order no one need ever want, and true prosperity was just around the corner, it also meant covering up, and lots of sunscreen, always.

Or staying indoors, which was most Draconians’ solution, since there was always so much work to be done. Still, there were a few other people on the town green, enjoying a little time off.

The terraforming had begun right here, and there was even a statue of Kayla’s father at the very center. The first vegetative ecosystem had covered 100 square kilometers, with the first hydroponics farms on the outskirts of that Zone 1, as it was called. The atmosphere had required extensive modification, and still wasn’t as favorable as it could be to plants from earth—which was why food gardens grew in domes, with air filters. These trees, and the thousands of others throughout Zone 1, had been raised on the hydroponics farms and gradually acclimatized to the different mix of gases in the terraformed atmosphere. The grass on the town green was the result of ten years of composting in the farms; it had been planted three years before and was still the only open-air grass on Draco, though Zones 3 and 4, spreading out in concentric circles from Zone 1, now had trees.

And at the heart of it all, the town green, next to the admin building. From it radiated out the first grid-laid streets, lined by the modular buildings with their boxy lightweight, ultra-strong titanium frames and their renewable wall panels, made of wood-pulp composite. There were a few nostalgic looking houses now, built in the log-cabin style with composite ‘logs’—Patrick had seen them as he had tagged along with an engineering unit as it made its rounds, while he tried to get a feel for how things worked. Those houses were far out in Zone 3, though, where their builders hoped to have real farms someday, when a critical biomass for such luxuries as heirloom tomatoes and roses was reached. For now, though, the families who lived there were all attached to the hydroponics farms in one way or another: growers, plant scientists, truck drivers who brought the goods to the distribution centers.

“I went on my first date yesterday,” Kayla said.

“Oh?” Patrick replied, though he knew about the date already, from Joe’s report. They had told Patrick that Joe would mail once a week, but it was actually closer to once a day. Joe was worried about Kayla.

“Guy named James. Rising star in the administration. Honestly, I just didn’t want Joe to even have to threaten to spank me,” she said glumly. “And James is really nice. I almost wish Joe had picked another one for me to start with, but James matched most of my interests—like folk music and economics—and Joe said I should just go for it.”

“The date didn’t go well?”

“Not really.” Kayla laughed. “I mean, at least he didn’t try to spank me. Though he did say that he could if he wanted.”

“What?”

“It was my fault. I wouldn’t shut up about the Basic Law, and how unfair it is.”

“So he threatened you? What a gentleman.”

“No, he didn’t threaten me. I actually made him admit that he could spank me, to prove my point.”

Patrick sighed. “Do you think you’re going to be able to stop doing that?”

“No,” Kayla said flatly.

“Joe’s going to punish you, you know.”

“For that? For what I did on the date?”

Patrick nodded. “He’s going to check with James, and James is going to tell him.”

“No, he won’t—he’s a nice guy. He said he felt sorry for me.”

“Well, Joe is going to figure out what happened. You can be sure of that. Even if James lies, which he probably won’t do.”

He looked at Kayla. She had drawn her feet up under her on the bench and was looking at Patrick with wide, fearful eyes. How could she seem so vulnerable, and yet be so infuriatingly intractable?

“Please, Patrick. Please tell him I’ll do better? Don’t let him spank me this first time. I’ll try—I’ll really try.”

“Alright,” Patrick said, looking out across the green at the buildings that made the place look so, well, alien. “I’ll do my best.”

* * *

But Patrick’s best wasn’t good enough. Kayla got spanked later that same day, when Joe came to meet with her at the women’s dormitory. Patrick met Joe on his way into the building, and said that he thought Kayla probably deserved some slack, and Joe said that slack was exactly what he didn’t believe in, and that was that.

“I think you should come with me,” Joe said. “I want to be sure she knows she can’t avoid a punishment by talking to you.”

So Patrick went, reluctantly. Kayla was waiting for Joe in the one of the little rooms where guardians met with their charges. Patrick noted instantly that a strap, a cane, and a paddle hung on a rack on the wall of the room. Other than that, and the three chairs, the room was completely bare except for one of the administration’s posters. This one actually featured a girl over a man’s lap, her bottom bare and her face obscured by her hair. The girl’s shapely bottom was already a little pink, and the man’s hand was raised. The caption was
He knows how to find the best in you
.

Kayla looked at Patrick hopefully, then at Joe. She clearly saw the grimness in his eye, because she turned back to Patrick now with fear written on her face. Patrick shook his head sadly.

“Kayla,” Joe said, “come here.”

“Why?” she asked, her voice quavering.

“I have to punish you, sweetie. It’ll just be over my lap, with my hand, because I know you’re scared. If you don’t try harder on your next date, though, it’s going to be the strap. You need to understand that.”

“But…”

“No buts, Kayla. We have to be clear about this. I brought Patrick so that you understand that as much as I respect him and his opinion about you, you’re not going to spare yourself any discipline by trying to get him to talk to me. I’m not going to add any to your spanking because you did that—but next time I will.”

Kayla backed into the corner of the little room. Joe sat in the high-backed chair clearly intended for the guardian. “Over my lap now,” he said. “Don’t make it worse.”

But Kayla just shook her head.

“Patrick,” Joe said, “could you go get her, please? Nice and gently.”

Patrick’s mouth felt very dry. Could he really go and get Lawrence Lourcy’s daughter, and bring her to this man’s lap for a bare-bottom spanking? He had to. Unlike Kayla—and undoubtedly because as a man his lot on Draco presented far fewer unpleasant differences to his lot on earth than Kayla’s did to her—Patrick could do what was necessary here in their new home. He stepped forward and put his arms around her.

“Shh,” he said. “It will be okay. You know why Joe is doing it.”

“No!” she cried. “No, I don’t! You have to make him stop.”

“Shh. Yes, you do.”

“Why?” Kayla started to cry.

Patrick looked at the administration poster and almost simply borrowed its words, “He knows how to find the best in you,” but said instead, simply, “You need it.”

“No, I don’t!”

Patrick began to tug her gently toward Joe. She resisted for a moment, but then she shoved him away and walked under her own power over to the big man in the chair, who reached out his hands to take her by the waist and guide her to his right side.

“Take the jumpsuit down,” he said. “You can pull down your panties when you’re over my lap.”

“Oh, please…” Kayla said, but she reached for the zipper of her jumpsuit at the same time. Patrick watched her blush get redder and redder as Joe helped her pull it down, taking no liberties, of course, but making it clear that he was in charge. Kayla was blinking back tears, as she seemed to try to find something to look at. Patrick was not among the things upon which she rested her eyes, though. As he sat down to watch her ordeal, he just hoped she wouldn’t hate him forever; he had tried, hadn’t he? The fact that he thought that maybe Joe had a point had nothing to do with it.

Kayla’s jumpsuit was bunched around her thighs now, revealing cute briefs of blue cotton that must have come all the way from Earth with her. Patrick wondered whether she wore them out of habit, or because she somehow felt attached to them. They definitely made him think of home, and of his own few relationships—of girls in blue panties and black panties; of sex in nice hotels and in his comfortable house in Seattle. Kayla started to bend over Joe’s lap. Firmly but patiently, he guided her over his thighs.

“Get that bottom high for me,” he said gently, and Kayla tried to comply, with a little sob. “Pull those panties down now.” Kayla reached back with her right hand and hooked her thumb in the waistband. She tugged them down on the right, and then on the left, revealing a pert little bottom that Patrick couldn’t deny he had rather wanted to see bare for quite a while.

“Kayla,” Joe said, “why am I punishing you?”

“What?” Kayla turned her head to try to look at Joe, but couldn’t crane her neck that far. She settled for looking up at Patrick, confusion in her eyes.

“It’s very important that you understand what I’m trying to teach you. Do you need me to tell you why I’m going to spank you, or do you already know?”

“I already know,” Kayla said miserably. Patrick was a little surprised at the resignation in her voice.

“What’s the reason, then?”

“I didn’t give James a fair shot.” That was interesting, Patrick thought. It was a much more honest analysis of the date than she had made to Patrick on the town green.

“That’s right,” Joe said. “I’m not saying he’s your future husband, but he’s highly compatible with you, and all you could talk about was the Basic Law, according to his account, which I have no reason to doubt.”

He started to spank her. It took Patrick by surprise, to see it just start that way. Joe spanked Kayla hard, five times in a row, across both of her little cheeks. Kayla clearly did not have a very high threshold of pain, for she started to cry out, and to kick and squirm, from the very beginning. Joe put his left arm across the small of her back and held her firmly, though, as he smacked her bare bottom.

“Ow! Sir… sir, please!”

Kayla’s bottom was already bright pink where her guardian had started her spanking.

“Should I have a reason to doubt James’ account?”

“Ow!” Kayla really squirmed now, apparently desperate to escape the punishing hand of her burly guardian.

Joe delivered six more spanks, alternating between right and left. Kayla screamed like a wildcat and struggled desperately against him, but she had not the slightest chance of getting free at all. Her arms flailed and her legs kicked, but Joe simply ignored them.

“Should I doubt what James told me?”

“No!” Kayla cried.

Joe spanked her thighs, right and left, six times in alternation, below her bunched panties, even as her legs kicked. Patrick shifted in his own chair, a little uncomfortably, not quite sure how happy he was about the raging erection the spanking had given him.

“Are you going to try harder next time?” He spanked five more times right in the middle. Kayla’s bottom was a blazing red, and her shoulders heaved with sobs.

“Yes, sir,” she cried. “Please stop! I’ll try so hard!”

Was Patrick imagining it, or was there an unfamiliar note of compliance—the compliance almost of a little girl—in Kayla’s plaintive voice?

“Alright,” Joe said. “Your punishment is over. You did alright for your very first lap-spanking, sweetie.” He tugged the panties back up over her bottom, stood her up, and gave her a big hug, while Kayla continued to weep quietly. Joe stroked her back tenderly as he hugged her. “Shh, sweetie,” he murmured. “Shh, it’s okay. I know what you need.”

Chapter Seven

The next time Kayla saw Patrick, she had just ruined everything that had been left to ruin. She had tried. Maybe she hadn’t tried very hard, but on the next date, with James again, she had not said anything at all about the Basic Law.

And Joe hadn’t spanked her. But James had decided that he wasn’t interested in a third date.

“Kayla,” he said, “in two, three years tops, I think you’re going to find a guy who’s going places, and you’re going to go places with him—as much as anyone goes anywhere on Draco. Administration, head of hydroponics, head of info-tech. You know what I mean. You’re famous, and you know it—and I’ve had fun, really, on these dates, because I knew I was going out with Kayla Lourcy.”

In her very best moment on that date, Kayla said, “You’re going places, James. I can see that.” She meant it, too. If she had actually been looking for a boyfriend, or even a spouse, she would have been way into James. Tall, dark, and handsome. Incredibly smart. Witty. Self-assured, without being clearly enamored too much of his dominance the way some men with his talents and education seemed to be.

“Yes,” he said simply. “I am. And if I could get in a time machine and go two years in the future, I might think that another date with you would be worth it, though I have a feeling my timing would still be off, and some other lucky alpha would have snapped you up.”

Did they actually call themselves alpha? Wow.
But of course self-assurance was what being a so-called alpha was all about, of course.
Snapped me up. Wow.
It was undoubtedly a sign of some kind of growing assimilation that she didn’t throw her drink—a vodka and tonic, which was all Draco had to offer, unless you liked cheap wine or homebrewed ale—in his face.