The Bottom Line (29 page)

‘Hmm,' he said, ‘looks good so far. Now let's see them properly.' I slipped down the shoulder straps, leaned slightly forward, dropped the bra on the bed and stood there again.

‘Hmm,' he mused, ‘nice tits.'

‘Do you have to use such a vulgar word?' I asked, embarrassed.

‘Oh come on,' he said, ‘it was our favourite English teacher who told us that words were just collections of sounds and that the meanings were what human beings gave them.'

I remembered as he soon as he said it. It had been when we were reading how, according to Philip Larkin, we get fucked up by our parents. The class had been momentarily stunned and nobody had been willing to read aloud the offending words, so I gave the explanation that had just now been tossed back at me. Darren smiled as he saw recognition on my face. And then he unbuckled his belt and began running it through his trouser loops, moving as he did, so that he was standing between me and the bedroom door.

‘I don't know what you're doing now,' I said, ‘but I'm going to put my clothes back on and pay you off.'

‘You're a tough lady,' he said, ‘but I need to know just how tough.'

‘It's better than the last label you gave me,' I said, ‘but the show's over. You've seen all there is to see and you've punished me for my bad memory. You've even got your own back for anything I did when you were in my class. As I said, the show's over now.'

He had finished removing his belt and now doubled it, creating a ferocious-looking weapon in leather, about two feet long, which he stood there swinging. While he made no effort to move, he made no effort to let me move either.

‘Not quite,' he said. ‘This is where we find out just how tough you are.' I said nothing but tried, unsuccessfully, to stare him down.

‘Don't you at least want to know what I'm going to suggest?' he asked.

‘Not particularly,' I replied.

‘Come on,' he said, ‘you may as well listen. If you say “no” I'll pack up, go and you can find another gardener.'

I swallowed hard and didn't move. The wetness between my legs was still there and I felt as though my exposed breasts were stretching out towards him, begging him to take hold of them, to fondle them, to squeeze them, to suck my nipples.

‘I'm going to give you six strokes with this belt,' he told me. ‘Six hard strokes. After three strokes you can tell me that you've had enough. I'll walk away, you can get dressed and you'll probably never see me again. If you can take all six, I think we probably know what comes next.'

‘Six?' I said. ‘Six, maximum? And no cheating?'

‘Six,' he repeated. ‘No cheating, I promise.'

I stood there and awaited instructions. ‘Climb on the bed,' he said. I did.

‘Face the headboard and kneel down.' Again, I did.

‘Put the palms of your hands flat on the bed and stick your bum in the air.' For the third time, I did as I was told. ‘You can make as much noise as you like,' he said, ‘and you can wriggle about as much as you like, but after each stroke you have to return to this position. Okay?'

I nodded.

There was then a long wait. Moving only my head I tried to see what he was up to, but he was out of my line of sight. I waited again as I'm sure I was intended to. It would be easy, but wrong, to say that the wait was as agonising as the blow. It wasn't. When the belt landed I felt as people must have felt when being branded, as though something very hot had pressed into me. I screamed, straightened up and clutched my bottom. I wanted to say he could go now without waiting for three, but my pride wouldn't let me.

The second blow was just as hard and slightly lower. The result and my reaction were the same, and then I resumed my position and waited for the third blow. It was slightly less severe and I knew immediately that I wouldn't be quitting after the three. I remained in my humiliating position. Darren put his hand on my bruised flesh and stroked it lightly.

‘Can you take another three?' he asked, and I nodded. Then, without warning, he slid his hand down and between my legs; at that moment we both knew.

The next three blows were delivered almost without a pause and I took them without moving. Darren examined the weals again, stroked me again and slipped his hand between my legs again, this time in a slightly more exploratory fashion. He looked at me and I nodded.

‘Are you ready?' he asked, and I nodded again, not understanding what he was asking me but knowing I had never in my life wanted anything as much as I wanted him now. He climbed on the bed and lay on his back, pulling me across him so that my breasts dangled above his face. Then he took them in both hands and began to feel them, gently first and then harder and harder. I was about to cry out when he pulled me down towards him and took first one breast and then the other into his mouth, nuzzling them gently and licking my nipples. He played with my breasts for some considerable time, those same breasts which no mate had ever previously seen. Then he straightened up again.

‘I think I'm overdressed,' he said. Undoing his trousers was easy since he was no longer wearing a belt. He lifted himself just off the bed to allow me to ease them down and pull them off. Underneath he was wearing tiny briefs, stretched to the limit by the length and rigidity of his penis. I pulled them off, again registering his size without understanding what it would mean in a few seconds, and positioned myself above him, forgetting my maidenly status, forgetting everything I had ever read, forgetting even in my desperation to get him inside me that we were totally unprotected.

I felt his penis part my lips and move just inside me, but there was a resistance as he thrust. He frowned slightly and might have withdrawn but I wasn't having that. Easing myself upwards, I then drove hard downwards and screamed as he pierced me, not caring about blood on me or on the sheets which had been as pristine as I had. I remembered hearing university friends talking about their first time and making crude puns about feeling a bit of a prick, but I wanted so much more than that. What startled me most was how enormous he felt now he was inside me. I felt I was about to be stretched beyond any possible limit, if not actually split in half, a sensation both frightening and quite wonderful at the same time.

As he began to thrust more frantically inside me I reached for his hands and pulled them up to my breasts, urging him to squeeze me harder and harder, until I felt inside me something I'd never felt before, something volcanic, something primeval, something so fundamental that I knew I'd never be the same again. I would never again be Evie, neither to myself nor to Darren. I didn't then know that even my friends would somehow sense that my life had changed.

Eventually we cleaned ourselves up, I made a mental note about the morning-after pill and, for the first time, Darren kissed me. A man had never before properly kissed me and I sensed it was a demonstration of affection rather than lust, a recognition of a shared experience and perhaps a hint of what might lie ahead. When we were back in the kitchen, making arrangements for Darren's next visit, which would have been during term-time, I asked him to repeat what he'd first called me.

‘Do you really want to know?' he asked, and I nodded although I knew perfectly well what the words had been.

‘A fucking patronising bitch,' he said, ‘that's what I called you.'

‘So you did,' I said, ‘and now let's pretend that I'm your English teacher again. To start with, I'm not a bitch, so that's inaccurate. Secondly, I'll try to remember not to patronise you again.'

‘And thirdly?' he teased.

‘Yes, please,' I said.

 

 

 

Most of his friends thought he was mad to marry me, and several of them actually told him so.

‘She's only after your money,' they told him. It may have been an inducement but, with the agreement of his children, he and I had agreed a financial provision that suited everybody.

‘She wants an easy life,' they told him. Why not? It was no hardship to him to give me an easy life. A retired widower in his early sixties who could afford daily help with the more irksome of household chores, he could offer me a lifestyle that, without being sybaritic, suited us both.

‘She'll have a whole series of lovers,' they predicted. They were wrong there because our lifestyle allowed little time for lovers and, in any case, we were within close proximity of one another almost every hour of every day.

‘She'll wear you out,' they forecast. It seems unlikely but, even if I eventually did so, he'll have enjoyed his life and I'll be just as happy, as long as I can have my more esoteric needs also provided for occasionally.

We met by accident, literally, when he was witness to a road accident that left a lot of material damage but nobody seriously hurt. He ignored the threats of the offending driver and provided evidence for the non-offending driver - in other words, me. We met for coffee a few days later, then for dinner, and were married within three months, to the delight of his children who had thought he was becoming something of a recluse since his bereavement.

So we holidayed a lot, gave frequent but fairly sedate parties and enjoyed one another's company, particularly in one bizarre respect that, by another accident, we found we shared. He had intended to throw out some unusual and explicit magazines, showing men and women administering and receiving various forms of corporal punishment, from a gentle spanking to a full scale caning, but had overlooked the fact that there was a whole boxful hidden in a cupboard. Far from being outraged by this discovery, I found myself quite interested. I asked him about the magazines, laughed at his embarrassment and quickly made it clear that I was willing to move from the theoretical to the practical, as long as my introduction to the genre was a gradual one.

And so we invented scenarios, games and house rules to be enforced with absolute rigidity, not that there was ever any likelihood of their being called into question. We played these games whenever we felt like it, usually including the first Saturday of the month, if we were at home, when we took it in turns to be master - or mistress - of ceremonies. And now it was the first Saturday of the month and it was my turn to be in charge, to devise the pretext for the punishment to be administered, to determine the precise nature of the punishment, and to ensure that it had been understood and accepted.

We had dined, bathed (separately on this occasion) and made available the items of equipment most likely to be in demand, and here we were, in the drawing room with the curtains appropriately drawn, the telephone off the hook, a bottle of sparkling wine and two well-polished glasses on the coffee table, and nothing likely to disturb us.

He was already naked, a state he much enjoyed, and which I enjoyed too, as I looked at his body, glistening from its recent immersion and anointment. I thought how lucky I was and wondered how many of his so-called friends were privately envious. And they knew only half of it. I had the reputation of being a first-class cook, a good homemaker and an excellent hostess, in addition to which he frequently complimented me on my having a high level of cultivation and exquisite taste in everything I did. He looked at me and smiled, partly from complacency at reminding himself of everything he had to enjoy and partly in anticipation of what was shortly to come.

Over my slim body, which he seemed to find hugely voluptuous, I was wearing a thin towelling dressing gown that I thought lent a sufficient dignity to my front-of-house position for that evening. I smiled at him this time, and at last spoke.

‘You know,' I said, ‘that this is going to be painful, don't you? Very painful.'

‘Oh yes, Maddy,' he said, ‘I'm well aware of that.'

‘Are you sure you don't mind?' I asked him. ‘I don't want to force you into anything too demanding.'

‘No,' he assured me, ‘I don't mind. In fact, I've been looking forward to it for some time.'

‘That's good,' I said. ‘All the same, twelve strokes of the tawse followed by four from the crop, that's a pretty severe sentence. Are you sure you can cope?'

‘Yes,' came the quick reply, ‘I can cope all right.'

I smiled again, poured two glasses of wine, handed one to him and then picked up the two instruments I'd chosen. The tawse was beautifully crafted, about two feet long and a quarter of an inch thick, with the business end divided into five tongues that would separate, when applied with sufficient force, and leave five distinct marks. As for the crop, it was an ordinary riding-crop whose leather shaft covered a fibreglass core, and which had a long and vicious tongue, which reinforced the considerable impact of the shaft by flicking round at the end of each stroke and adding a painful after-lash to the general bruising.

I put down the crop, picked up my drink and sipped it slowly as I swished the tawse through the air, relishing the noise it made and the feeling of power it gave me as it bent and straightened. Then I changed weapons, still sipping my drink, and winced as I felt the barely flexible shaft and contemplated the damage which both it and the tongue were capable of inflicting. Then I put both weapons back in their place and removed my dressing gown.