Bad Girls (7 page)

The description section, however, brought the daunting specter of what I faced into full relief. In it the implements were described in vivid detail, as well as the sensation each caused in the recipient and the damage it left behind. Moreover, the range of strokes and the minimum and maximum time limits for receiving each implement were outlined in the chart that would come to set the boundaries of the pain I would come to know so well. Indeed, my only consolation during so many punishments was that the chart permitted no endless spankings; every spanking would end eventually, even if it seemed at the time to go on forever.

Finally, the section that was most descriptive and therefore offered me the most to think about was an appendix entitled
Supplemental Punishments
, which included extras to be added on to the prescribed spanking to increase the physical or emotional severity of the punishment. These included enemas, forced penetration – with inanimate as well as animate objects – loss of privacy privileges, corner time (before and after), forced exposure, bondage, humiliating and uncomfortable positions, methods of treating the skin of my bottom to make the spanking more painful, tasks I must perform in addition to receiving the spanking, other parts of my body that can be subject to painful or humiliating treatments, and methods of prolonging a punishment so as to make it more memorable. The document emphasized the deterrence function of each of these supplements, but I couldn't help believing that some of them had as a further benefit the erotic satisfaction of the author. The detailed and loving descriptions gave him away.

By the time I finished the document I was both terrified and horny as hell. The two even seemed related. I needed Pete to fuck me, immediately. It seemed the only way to release the panicky anticipation that threatened to overflow inside me. Spanking had never before turned me on, and this was a different sort of arousal than any other I'd ever felt. I was wet, yet also scared. I didn't want to be spanked, ever, but it was all I could think about. While Pete fucked me I imagined him spanking me and came easily and frequently. Afterwards I offered a silent prayer that my first spanking would not come for a long time, maybe all this was for show and real spankings were few and far between, but I was still dying of curiosity.

Of course, it's probably pretty obvious given my multitude of bad habits that I didn't have to wait for long.

‘Where did you get such an idea?' I asked over breakfast the next morning.

‘Before I went to law school I was a parole officer. Mostly it sucked. I couldn't wait until I had enough money saved up to go to law school. But sometimes I would meet someone who was really great. I had this prostitute once who I became friends with. She was great. She taught me everything about her business and it's helped me put a bunch of nasty pimps and violent johns behind bars. One thing she described stuck with me. She told me she got a lot of requests from men who wanted to spank her. Now she hated it, but she decided that turning away money wasn't good business, so she just figured out how much she would have to charge to make it worth her while. She had to take into account how much it hurt, how much the marks would cut into future business, and how many she could take in a week. In the end she charged so much for them and got enough takers that she could give up sex altogether. Something she hated made her life easier and more lucrative. I admired the way she handled it, and it got me thinking.

‘She taught me that everything had a price, but it wasn't until I became a prosecutor that I made the connection between what she did and my world. Here's what I realized: there are a lot of ways to pay a debt. Did you know that the German word for debt,
Schuld
, also means guilt? So, there are lots of ways to pay a guilt, too. Spankings just seem appropriate. I think they're wasted on children, who don't really have cognitive skills like judgment or symbolic equivalence to understand. It's not just about action and consequence. It's about recognizing an external authority and entering into an abstract economy of value, recognition and reinforcement. I learned from that prostitute that sometimes all this could be best communicated on a bared backside.'

‘You're weird,' I said, though his story fascinated me more than he could have known.

‘What about you, how did you end up like this?'

‘Like what?'

‘Like a law school dropout, debt ridden kleptomaniac.'

‘You say it like it's a bad thing.'

‘It all depends what you're comparing it to, I guess.'

‘Well, I used to be a guilt ridden bulimic with bad taste in men.'

‘I see you're still working on your taste in men.'

We laughed at his joke.

‘I blame it on Jesus and the Pope,' I said. ‘In Catholic school we worshipped men from afar, and when I finally met them in real life I treated them like gods. When they rejected me I thought it was because I wasn't thin enough or sexy enough. If they made ridiculous demands – like I drop out of law school – I did what they said. I've finally grown out of it, but I still seem to have issues with authority.'

We laughed again, even though it was sort of sad.

‘I can assure you that I'm not God, though I've been accused of making ridiculous demands.'

‘At least you're up front about it.'

‘I make ridiculous demands down back, too.'

Like I said, Pete wasn't that funny, but I gave him credit for trying. We both had to leave for work, so we kissed goodbye like a normal couple and headed in our separate directions.

I hadn't given up the hope that I might avert a spanking until I lost the third of my three jobs in a single day. At that point I realized I was certainly in for it. I didn't remember reading any specific punishment for getting fired three times in a day, but I was pretty sure it would be pretty bad. Having been late, bitchy, petulant and attitudinal with everyone else that day, I found that I couldn't turn it off. It was a throwback to my bulimic days, when I would start with a bite of ice cream or a handful of potato chips and end up unable to stop myself before I'd finished off the bag or the pint. I couldn't stop being bad, arriving late back at Pete's even though I could have arrived on time, failing to do the chores that were on my daily to-do list even though I had plenty of time to do them, and adding a few additional misdemeanors to my accumulation of transgressions.

I was under the mistaken impression that it wouldn't really make a difference. I had fucked up. I was going to get a spanking. What use was there in trying? Was I ever wrong?

Purging after a binge was pretty nasty no matter the size of the binge. Throwing up was throwing up; it didn't really matter how crazy I'd gotten. Spankings, however, are another story. The spanking I would have gotten for losing one job was but a fraction of the spanking I got for losing three, and the supplements I got for my attitude and other failures made certain that I would never go on a bad binge like that again. From that day on I would always be on my best behavior after a spanking offense, knowing it was essential not to make it worse. Every little bit of behavior, whether good or bad, made a difference come spanking time. How I wished I didn't have to learn that lesson the hard way.

It began with the looks of disappointment and the flipping pages in the punishment document to find the appropriate punishment while I waited, panties unceremoniously lowered around my ankles and hands behind my back holding my skirt up. Then, after hearing what I had in store for me but without any frame of reference to know what it would be like, I had to go off to the bathroom and perform the cleanliness inspection on myself. Even alone I was utterly humiliated to be reaching back and spreading my cheeks so I could peer between my legs and inspect myself for god-knows-what. Who the hell was he to make me do this? I thought about leaving, but I knew I wouldn't. Something needed to put a stop to behavior that even I knew was ridiculous. I had been out-of-control like this plenty of times before and nothing I tried ever worked. If this could put a stop to it, it would be worth it no matter how much it hurt.

That was easy for me to say before I knew how much it hurt. During the punishment I wasn't so sure. Afterwards, though, I felt new and cleansed. It was a lot worse than the nuns ever did, but it made me feel so much better. First, Pete gave me a warm-up spanking of prescribed length. I'd always thought the idea of a warm-up spanking was one of the most ridiculous things I'd ever heard. I had no way of knowing how much it actually helped. At the time it just added to my embarrassment by making me wait through a series of sissy slaps for the real punishment to begin. Even Pete seemed sheepish to be starting out this way. He seemed to know that this was anticlimactic, a letdown after all the build up, but he wrote the book, so he had no one to blame but himself. Pete and his tepid theatrics; Pete and his geek wet dreams; this is stupid. As if responding to my growing disdain, Pete began to spank me hard enough to make me have second thoughts. Soon it began to add up. By the time he finished the warm-up and announced that the proper punishment would begin, I was sore enough that I wondered if it would be more than I could stand.

I had always been bad with pain. Even the nuns took mercy on me and never gave me spankings like they gave other girls. I guess even then I was used to getting away with things. Being special came naturally to me, but lying ass-up on Pete's lap didn't make me feel very special at all. I wondered how many asses had been there before mine. The spanks hurt like hell, so was it any wonder my thoughts were getting bleaker? My ego was getting as bruised as my butt. With the nuns, at least it felt like they were paying attention to you. Here Pete seemed to be more interested in his book than he was in me. He was just doing his job; prosecuting the accused, holding the guilty accountable, and administering clear, immediate feedback. He was a prosecutor through and through, and I knew how prosecutors felt about people like me. He was just getting his perverted kicks. The only way he could really like someone like me was if he was so emotionally crippled that this was the only way he could relate to anybody.

That was the nuns talking, though. Jesus won't love you if you're like that. Jesus tries to love everybody, but he can't love someone who lies, can he? That's what they would say to us when they spanked us. At least Pete left out the Jesus business. Pete was all about swift and clear reinforcement, of the painfully memorable kind. He was doing a good job of it. It was quite horrible and all I could think about was how incomparable the pain felt. I had forgotten the way that one part of your body could be so possessed by agony that everything else disappeared. Spank. Spank. Spank. It just kept coming, each worse than the last. I imagined his point of view. He saw nothing of the agony, of the way my face contorted, the way my breath stopped, the way my head felt like it would explode with pain and fear. All he saw was my fleshy ass bounce and redden as he swatted his hand on it over and over again. It was so unfair it made me cry.

‘You don't understand how much it hurts, Pete. You don't understand.'

‘You should have thought of that before you lost your third job, Nicole. You made it hurt like this. I didn't.'

‘It's not fair.'

‘None of it's really fair, is it? Most shoplifters get away with it. Lots of girls have daddies who pay off their credit cards. None of it's your fault, is it?'

‘Why do you have to hit me so hard? It's only making it worse.'

‘If you still think so afterwards I'll never spank you again. But you'll thank me for it, Nicole. You really will.'

‘No.' I said it more in despair than denial. I would thank him for it because he cared. The more it hurt the more I would know he cared. As if to emphasize the point the spanking got harder until I couldn't talk or think or even cry. I saved up all the tears for after it was over, when they finally poured out because I hadn't gotten away with it. Some ill-tempered French lady and a couple of judges immune to my charms and no daddy to bail me out or pay my debts and a boyfriend who cared made sure of that. God, why did it always have to be so hard for me? Then Pete held me, and it seemed like maybe the next year wouldn't be as hard as the last one.

That's not to say the next few months weren't hard on my backside. I hated the spankings; loathed them; feared them; and avoided them every way I could, including behaving myself. But spanking also began to turn me on like it never had before. Why? Well, it was how he did it to me. It was the way his masculinity and strength held me in place, grounded me, hurt me and contained all the chaos of my life. Spanking was the keystone of my private submission and exposure to him. My life was an open book to him; he could open me whenever and wherever he wanted. The spankings were a mixed bag. They reflected his kindness, the attention and patience and way he cared for me, and his cruelty, his obsessive-compulsive rigidity, his cold adherence to the prescribed punishment, the inflexibility of it. Moreover, if I had refused he would have dropped me flat. It wasn't that he was that way to be mean, and it wasn't like the spankings were more important to him than I was, it's just that that's how it was. You hear that a lot with obsessive-compulsive people – that's just how it has to be. You get used to it and accept it. The rules were the structure for the relationship. No rules, no relationship, and that, I confess, turned me on too. I was an object. I liked being an object. It turned me on, whether I was his object to fuck, his object of desire, or the object of his rules and the object of his rule. ‘The law makes us free.' He liked to quote Kant and it feels true. It was our catechism. When I'd believed myself to be free I was a slave to my bad habits. With Pete, subservient to his elaborate order, I was free.