Chapter 26
Valerie
By the time Chris got home the next evening, I had changed my clothes three times.
The first outfit—a modest blue dress with a Peter Pan collar—felt too prim, too much like armor.
The second—a soft knit wrap dress that cinched at the waist—felt like I was trying too hard, like I was trying to telegraph something I couldn’t admit.
I’d finally settled on a simple cotton sundress in pale yellow, one that Chris had complimented once, with a fitted bodice and a skirt that fell just below my knees.
Underneath, after a lot of red-faced hesitation, I had put on my regular modest white panties. Chris hadn’t told me what to wear, had he? I’d spent the entire day, nevertheless, thinking about how I looked under my skirt.
Dinner was ready. A roast chicken with rosemary and lemon, roasted potatoes, and green beans from Mrs. Patterson’s garden down the road—the matronly woman had given me some as a housewarming gift.
The table was set with the new dishes we’d gotten as wedding presents.
Candles. Cloth napkins. I’d even cut flowers from the front yard and arranged them in a mason jar.
The house smelled like home. Like the evidence of a wife who had spent the day preparing for her husband. And I had—but the preparation that consumed most of my thoughts had nothing to do with chicken or place settings.
I heard Chris’s truck pull into the driveway. My hands stilled over the salad I was tossing, and I felt my whole body go taut. I heard his boots on the porch steps, then the door to the garage opening.
“Val?” His voice carried from the entryway, and something in its tone made the hair on my arms stand up. Not anger. Something more deliberate than that. Something planned.
“In the kitchen,” I called, wiping my hands on a dish towel.
He appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was still in his work clothes—dusty jeans, a flannel with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, sawdust caught in the dark hair of his forearms. His eyes moved over me—over the sundress, the set table, the careful domesticity of it all—and something softened in his expression for just a moment before it hardened again into that other look.
The one that meant he’d made a decision and he would follow it through.
“I need you to do something for me,” he said. “Go to the kitchen and stay there. Face the fridge. Don’t turn around until I tell you.”
I blinked at him. “I… what?”
“You heard me, Valerie.” His voice was calm, but the authority in it was absolute. It was the voice that didn’t repeat itself, the one that preceded consequences. “Face the refrigerator. Keep your back turned. Don’t peek.”
My lips parted with a question I didn’t ask.
The look on his face told me that questions would not be welcome right now.
I set down the dish towel and walked to the far wall of the kitchen—past the stove, past the pantry door—and turned to face the gleaming fridge I’d picked out myself two months ago.
“Good girl,” Chris said from behind me, and then his boots retreated down the hallway.
I stood there with my hands at my sides, my heart already climbing into a faster rhythm.
I heard the front door open again. Then close.
Then open. A scraping sound… something heavy being dragged across the porch?
Chris’s soft grunt of effort. The thud of something being maneuvered through the doorframe, wood knocking against wood.
Whatever he was bringing inside was substantial.
Furniture-sized. I heard it scrape slightly along the hallway floor, heard him adjusting his grip, his breathing a little rough.
Then the bedroom door—our bedroom door—creaked wider on its hinges, and the sounds moved into that room.
More scraping. A heavy settling thump. Chris muttering something under his breath as he positioned whatever it was.
My pulse had become rapid, my breathing shallow. My blood pulsed in my throat and my wrists and between my legs. Furniture. He was putting some piece of furniture in our bedroom. The night he’d promised to take my bottom. The night he’d promised to make it ceremonial.
The bench? Oh, God. He’d built the bench.
I couldn’t help it. My head turned—just slightly, just enough to catch a glimpse down the hallway through the kitchen doorway. I saw Chris’s broad back disappearing into our bedroom, his hands gripping something made of dark wood and padded leather, something curved, something with—
I whipped my head back to the wall, my breath coming in sharp little pants.
My whole body seemed to have become electric.
I’d seen enough. The shape of it, the padded surface, the dark leather.
It was just like the bench in the video.
Just like the one Stacy had knelt on when Kevin had spread her open and trained her bottom.
“Valerie.”
I flinched. Chris’s voice came from the hallway, closer than I expected.
“Did you peek?”
The question hung in the air between us. I thought about lying. The impulse lasted exactly one second before the memory of last night—my soaked panties pressed against my face, the cold weight of Chris’s disappointment—crushed it flat.
“Yes, sir,” I whispered to the wall. “I’m sorry. I only saw… I mean… just for a second?”
“We’ll add that to your account.” His voice was matter-of-fact, the way a banker might note an additional charge. “Go take your clothes off and put on your training panties. The backless ones.”
My training panties. The only appropriate name for them. The underwear that framed my bottom cheeks in a lewd invitation. The panties that made me feel like exactly what I was: a wife who needed discipline.
“You’re going to serve me dinner wearing those and nothing else,” Chris added, his voice carrying that same even quality that undid me more thoroughly than shouting ever could. “I want to look at my wife’s adorable, naughty bottom while I eat the meal she prepared for me.”
My knees went liquid. “Yes, sir,” I managed, and my voice came out thin and reedy, barely a sound at all.
I walked past him toward the bedroom, my legs carrying me with the mechanical obedience of a body that had learned to comply even when the mind was spinning apart.
Chris stepped aside to let me pass, and I felt the heat of his gaze on my back—on the yellow sundress, on the modest white panties he must know lay beneath it.
I felt certain he was already picturing what I would look like in a moment, stripped down to nothing but those shameful backless panties, my breasts bare, my bottom exposed, serving him chicken and roasted potatoes like some kind of…
I couldn’t finish the thought. My face was already so hot I could feel my heartbeat in my cheekbones.
In the bedroom, I stopped short. The terrifying bench sat in the center of the room, but he’d draped it with a white sheet.
The fabric fell in clean lines over the shape beneath, concealing the details while revealing just enough of the silhouette to confirm what I already knew: the curve of the padded surface, the height of it, the kneeling shelves at one end and the handles at the other.
It looked like a ghost of the thing I’d seen on screen.
Like an altar covered for a ceremony that hadn’t begun yet.
My fingers twitched at my sides. I could lift the sheet. Just a corner. Just enough to see the leather, to touch the wood, to know exactly what I would be lying on when Chris… when he… when my husband opened me… that way.
I curled my fingers into fists and turned away.
No. He’d told me not to peek once already, and I’d failed that test. Whatever was under that sheet, I would see it when Chris decided I should see it. When the ceremony began.
I undressed with trembling hands. I stood for a moment in just my plain, old-fashioned white cotton little-girl panties and I felt a wave of something that lived in the space between grief and anticipation.
These panties represented the little girl I’d been.
The young woman who’d believed that enough cotton between her legs could keep the world at bay.
I pushed them down and stepped out of them.
The backless panties—the training panties—were in the top drawer of the dresser where Chris had told me to keep them.
I pulled them on with fingers that fumbled at the waistband, settling the fabric over my hips.
The front panel cupped my mound—snug and pretty, white lace against my pale skin.
But behind me, nothing. Just the elastic waistband riding my hips and then air.
Cool, devastating air against the bare curves of my bottom, against the cleft between my cheeks, against the tight little pucker of the virgin anus that Chris had promised to claim tonight.
I caught my sidelong reflection in the dresser mirror and had to look away.
The girl staring back at me—bare-breasted, her nipples stiff, her bottom completely exposed in those obscene panties—looked like someone I didn’t recognize.
Someone from a video on New Modesty Blue.
Someone whose husband was about to use every part of her body, whether she wanted his hardness inside her or not.
I walked back to the kitchen on legs that felt borrowed from someone else.
My bare feet whispered against the hardwood floor Chris had refinished, and I seemed hyperaware of every sensation—the cool air moving across my exposed breasts, the slight shift of the lace panel against my pussy with each step, the absolute nakedness of my bottom as the hallway air touched places that should never be touched by anything but fabric—or, my mind whispered, a husband’s good, firm hands.
As I turned the corner into the kitchen, I saw Chris standing at the pantry. His back was to me, and he was doing something at the wall—reaching up, adjusting something. I heard the small sound of a nail or a hook being set, and then he stepped aside.
My eyes went wide as I saw, and understood: a paddle hung on the pantry wall.
It was new. Not the Selecta paddle from Megan’s house—this one was different.
Handmade, clearly, from a rich, honey-colored hardwood that gleamed under the kitchen light.
The handle was shaped and smoothed with obvious care, and the face of it was broad and flat and sanded to a silky finish.
It was beautiful, the way all of Chris’s woodwork was beautiful—crafted with precision and attention.
He’d made it. He’d shaped this paddle with his own hands.
The same hands that had renovated our house, that had hung curtains and arranged furniture and cut the dovetail joints in our kitchen cabinets.
The same hands that had spanked me on my wedding day…
held my soaked panties against my face… cupped my pussy with devastating tenderness…
punished me when I was bad and rewarded me when I was good.
“The New Modesty Authority website,” Chris said, turning to face me, his eyes traveling down my body with an unhurried appreciation that made me want to cross my arms and also never cross my arms again, “has a lot of interesting material for husbands who are good with their hands.”
My pussy clenched—a sharp, involuntary contraction that I felt all the way to my spine.
Chris’s hands. His big, strong, callused carpenter’s hands that could build a bench for taking a wife’s bottom and sand a discipline paddle smooth enough to leave perfect, burning prints on her cheeks.
Hands that could break things down and build them up, that knew exactly how much force to apply and where.
I stood there in the kitchen doorway, topless in my shameful panties, staring at the paddle on the wall while my husband looked at me with eyes that held both the warmth of a man who loved his wife and the steady authority of a man who intended to use her exactly as she needed to be used.
“Dinner looks wonderful,” Chris said. He walked to the dining table and pulled out his chair—the one at the head—and sat down, settling back with the ease of a man who owned everything in front of him. Which, I supposed, he did. Including me. “Come serve your husband, Valerie.”