Chapter 27
Valerie
I moved to the stove on autopilot, my body performing the motions of a good wife while my mind spun in tighter and tighter circles.
I carved the chicken with hands that shook only slightly—I’d gotten better at hiding the trembling, or maybe I’d just gotten used to trembling—and arranged it on a plate alongside the roasted potatoes and green beans.
I brought the plate to the table and set it before Chris, leaning past his shoulder the way I’d seen my mother do countless times while serving my father.
The position put my bare breast inches from his face. I felt the warmth of his breath against my nipple and nearly dropped the plate.
“Beautiful,” Chris said, and I didn’t know if he meant the food or my breast or both. He picked up his fork and knife and began to eat with the methodical appreciation of a man who’d spent the day doing physical labor. “The rosemary is perfect. You’re becoming an excellent cook, Val.”
“Thank you, sir,” I whispered, standing beside his chair with my hands clasped in front of me, unsure what to do with myself. I felt like a… like a servant. Like a sexual servant.
Like a concubine in some historical drama, standing bare-breasted beside her master’s table, waiting to be told what to do next.
Like the naughtiest, most wanton version of a traditional wife that had ever existed—one who served dinner in nothing but backless panties, her soon-to-be-punished bottom on display, her nipples hard in the kitchen air, a brand-new handmade paddle hanging on the pantry wall as a shameful promise.
“You may eat, sweetheart,” Chris said, looking up at me as he cut another piece of chicken. “Have a seat.”
I shook my head. The thought of sitting down across from my husband—my bare bottom on the wooden chair, my breasts exposed over the cloth napkins and wedding-present dishes—while trying to eat roasted potatoes as if this were a normal dinner was so absurd it almost made me laugh.
My stomach was a tight knot of anticipation and terror and that dark, shameful arousal that had taken up permanent residence between my legs.
I couldn’t have swallowed a bite if my life depended on it.
“I’m not hungry, sir,” I said, chewing on my lower lip. “Not right now.”
Chris nodded, as if this were just what he’d expected. “Go ahead and clean up when I’m done, then. Put the leftovers in the fridge.” He took another bite, chewing thoughtfully. “I’m sure we’ll both be hungry later.”
The casual certainty in his voice—later, as if what was coming was just another part of the evening’s schedule, as natural as dinner and dishes—made my knees go weak. I gripped the back of the nearest chair to steady myself.
Chris finished his meal with unhurried enjoyment, pausing to compliment the green beans and the crispness of the potato skin.
I stood beside him the entire time, acutely aware of every inch of my exposed body, of the cool air on my bare bottom, of the paddle gleaming on the pantry wall in my peripheral vision.
When he set his fork down and pushed his plate forward, he looked up at me.
“That was delicious. Thank you, sweetheart.” He stood from the table, and his hand found the bare curve of my waist as he passed me—a casual, possessive touch that sent electricity racing across my skin. “When you’ve finished cleaning up, bring me the paddle. I’ll be in the living room.”
Then he was gone. His footsteps moved down the hallway, and I stood alone in the kitchen, nearly naked, with a sink full of dishes and a paddle on the wall. The knowledge of what was coming settled over me like a weight.
I cleaned up in a daze. Scraped the plates.
Wrapped the leftover chicken in foil and put it in the fridge alongside the potatoes and green beans.
Washed the dishes by hand because the rhythmic motion of it—soap, rinse, dry, stack—gave my trembling hands something to do besides shake.
I wiped down the counters. I folded the dish towel and hung it on its hook.
I was stalling, and I knew it. I felt my forehead crease as I stood drying my hands much too long on a soft dishtowel that seemed to comfort me a bit. With a helpless little noise in my throat, I made myself stop.
The paddle felt strangely warm under my fingers when I lifted it from its hook.
Warmer than I’d expected, as if the wood itself held some residual heat from Chris’s hands—from the hours he must have spent shaping it, sanding it, perfecting the curve of the handle and the flat of the face.
It was heavier than it looked, too. Solid.
The kind of weight that would carry real force behind a swing.
Another of those tiny, mortifying noises rose from my chest to my lips.
I carried the horrid thing to the living room the way a girl in a fairytale might carry a poisoned apple. My hands trembled. Then my heart started to race when I saw Chris sitting in his armchair.
The sight of him stopped me in the doorway.
He’d changed. The work clothes were gone.
In place of the dusty jeans and flannel, Chris wore a black bathrobe.
Just a robe—belted loosely at the waist, the collar open to show the broad plane of his chest, his bare legs visible below the hem.
Nothing else. No T-shirt peeking from the neckline.
No hint of boxers or briefs beneath the dark fabric.
Just skin and the robe and the quiet, devastating authority of a man who had prepared himself for what he intended to do.
My eyes went wide. The understanding hit me like a physical force—a wave of heat that started in my belly and radiated outward until my fingertips tingled and my knees threatened to buckle.
My husband must be naked under that robe.
He had readied himself. Prepared to enjoy me exactly as he wished, whenever the mood struck him, with nothing between his body and mine but a single knot of terrycloth.
Chris’s gaze dropped to the paddle in my trembling hands, then rose to my face. He didn’t smile. The look he gave me was something beyond a smile—something deeper, more solemn, like a man meditating on a promise he fully intended to keep.
“Bring me your paddle,” he said.
My paddle. Oh, God.
For a moment I thought I would run. I pictured myself darting to the door, getting it open, running into the woods and… and throwing my paddle down a well, or something. Burying it. Finding a bog to sink it in.
Then I realized I had started to wobble toward Chris, who had stood up, his hands in front of him to receive the implement with which he would correct my naughtiness.
My tummy kept doing flips, and I felt my need leaking into the gusset of the mortifying panties, but my feet kept moving until I had laid the awful wooden thing on my husband’s palms.
To my panicked confusion, he raised it until it rose just under my chin.
“Kiss it, Valerie.”
My jaw slackened and a little whimper emerged from my chest. I felt my head start to shake though I hadn’t consciously wanted to move it.
“No,” I whispered. “Please… sir? I… please…”
It seemed absurd, because surely it should be the paddling I had coming that should bring my refusal. But the idea of bestowing a reverent kiss on the surface of the horrid thing felt impossible.
“Kiss it,” Chris repeated. “If you refuse again, you’ll get ten more swats.”
“Oh, God,” I breathed. My hips jerked in the most shameful possible way, as my pussy clenched at the sound of the threat. I pursed my lips. A little whine made them hum as I bent to press them against the smooth, warm wood.
“Good girl,” Chris said, lowering the paddle and gripping its handle in his enormous right hand. “Now go ahead and lay yourself over the arm of the couch for your punishment.”
The words were so simple. So quiet.
I walked to the couch on legs that barely held me.
Its arm was broad and firm—Chris had reupholstered it himself, I remembered distantly, with dense foam and sturdy fabric.
The perfect height for a small young woman to bend over.
The perfect height for her husband to stand behind her and swing a paddle.
I draped myself across it, and the position immediately felt devastatingly familiar. My torso folded over the arm, my bare breasts pressing against the cushion on the other side, my feet barely touching the floor. Behind me, my bottom rose into the air—completely exposed by the backless panties.
To my distress, I could see it from above, somehow, in my feverish imagination: both cheeks round and bare and pale in the lamplight, offered up to my husband and his handmade paddle like a sacrifice on an altar.
My handmade paddle, a gift from the man who would discipline me with it whenever I misbehaved.
I heard the soft pad of Chris’s bare feet on the hardwood floor as he approached. Then I felt the cool, sanded face of my paddle rest against my right cheek—just resting there, letting me feel its weight, its breadth, the silky smoothness of the wood he’d shaped with such care.
“Thirty,” Chris said. “For touching yourself without permission, for lying about it, and for peeking when I told you not to. Count them, and thank me for each one.”
The paddle drew back. The air shifted. Then it connected.
The crack split the quiet of our living room like a gunshot, and the pain arrived a half-second later—a deep, blooming heat that spread across my right cheek and sank into the muscle beneath. I gasped, my fingers clawing at the couch cushion.
“One,” I managed. “Thank you, sir.”
The second stroke landed on my left cheek, and this time I cried out—a sharp, involuntary yelp that I tried to swallow and couldn’t.
The paddle was different from the Selecta-standard one at Megan’s house.
Heavier. The impact went deeper, a thudding warmth that seemed to reach all the way to my bones.
“Two! Thank you, sir!”
Chris worked methodically, alternating cheeks with a steady, unhurried rhythm that told me he could do this all night if he needed to.
Each stroke built on the last, layering heat upon heat until my entire bottom felt like it was glowing.
By five I was crying. By ten I was sobbing openly, tears dripping onto the couch cushion, my hips squirming involuntarily with each impact even though I knew—I knew—that squirming would only make it worse.
“Eleven! Th-thank you, sir!”
The paddle fell again. And again. The sound of it—that sharp, wooden crack followed by the meaty sensation of impact against my bare flesh—filled the room and seemed to echo off the walls.
Between strokes, I could hear my own ragged breathing, my hitching sobs, and beneath them the shameful wet sound of my arousal betraying me.
Because I was aroused. Despite the pain—because of the pain—my pussy had gone slick and swollen, the lace panel of my training panties growing damp against my pussy.
“Twenty! Thank you, sir! Please… oh, God… please—”
“Please what?” Chris asked, his voice steady as stone. The paddle rested against my burning cheek again, letting me feel its weight as a reminder.
“I don’t know,” I sobbed, and it was the truest thing I’d said all evening. “It hurts so much, sir.”
“Of course it does,” Chris replied. “This is what happens to naughty wives.”
The last ten strokes came harder. I screamed at twenty-three, bit down on the cushion for twenty-eight, and simply wailed through twenty-nine and thirty, my whole body shaking, my bottom a throbbing inferno of heat and pain and that dark, terrible pleasure that lived in the space between the two.
“Thirty,” I sobbed. “Thank you, sir.”
The paddle withdrew. I lay there draped over the couch arm, crying into the cushion, my punished bottom blazing in the cool air.
I heard Chris set the horrid thing down on the coffee table.
Then his hand—warm, dry, impossibly gentle after the brutality of what he’d just done—came to rest on the small of my back.
“Stay right there,” he said.
His footsteps moved away. I heard a zipper somewhere—the hallway closet?—and then he returned. Something touched the couch cushion beside my face, and I turned my tear-streaked head to see what he’d placed there.
A butt plug. I knew that was what it was, without having any idea how.
Maybe a friend had shown me a picture at school once.
I had learned enough about myself over the past week to understand that my mind had pushed down a lot of naughty things into the hot, dark depths I had pretended weren’t there.
It was smaller than I’d expected, though—definitely smaller than the flesh-colored dildo Kevin had used on Stacy, thank God—but unmistakable in its shape.
Tapered at the tip, widening to a bulge in the middle, then narrowing again before the flared base.
It was made of smooth, black silicone, and beside it sat a small tube of clear lubricant.
My stomach dropped. My anus clenched—a fierce, involuntary contraction that seemed to communicate directly with my throbbing, paddled cheeks. I stared at the plug with wide, wet eyes, and a sound left me that was half sob, half moan.
“This is going to help prepare your anus,” Chris said behind me. His voice was calm, instructional—the same tone Kevin had used with Stacy. The same ceremonial steadiness. “Your bottom needs to learn to open for something big before I take it with my cock.”