Chapter 18 #2
Her bottom was bright red and very warm under my hand and she was crying properly by the end. It was the real thing, unguarded, her face pressed into the cushion and her breath coming in the halting rhythm of someone who had simply run out of defenses.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she sobbed.
The second time, it sounded different. It sounded real.
I rested my palm on her lower back.
“I know,” I said.
Then I slid my hand down. She sucked in a breath.
The heat radiating from her punished skin was intense enough that I felt it against my palm before I touched her.
When I did touch her—when my fingers found the slick, devastating proof of everything her body had been doing throughout the spanking—she made a sound that I was going to remember for the rest of my life.
She was soaked.
I had known she would be. I had known it from the way her breathing had changed around the eighth smack, from the involuntary forward shift of her hips at the fifteenth, from the small, caught sound she had swallowed around the twentieth when I had paused and the absence of my hand had been, briefly, worse than the presence of it.
I had known and I had kept going because the knowing was not permission and her arousal did not change what she had earned.
But now… Now she was over my knee with her punished bottom in the air, her thighs slick, and her breath ragged, I was the man who had put her there, and the restraint required to move slowly was the most significant act of self-control I had performed in years.
I wanted to take her. Right then. I wanted her underneath me, her hands pinned, her back arched, every last bit of that brilliant controlling mind surrendered to nothing but sensation while I told her exactly whose she was.
I wanted to feel her come apart around my cock.
I wanted to hear my name in her mouth as she came.
I wanted all of it.
I moved my fingers slowly instead.
She was responsive in a way that made going slow very difficult.
Every small adjustment produced an immediate, honest reaction, the shift of her hips toward my hand, the change in her breathing, the small sounds she could not fully suppress and did not bother trying to once she understood I was not going to stop.
I had always believed that the most interesting information lived in the things people tried not to show. Kit, finally, was not trying.
“Please,” she said. “Please, please, Daddy—”
The word on her lips, the third time, in that context, with that particular desperation in her voice—I felt it everywhere.
“Good girl,” I said. “Now let go and come for Daddy. Unless you need Daddy to take his belt to your cute little ass first.”
I had not entirely planned to say that. Or rather, I had thought it, and thinking it had made my cock hard enough to be a physical problem, and the line between thinking and saying had been thinner than usual.
What I had not predicted was what it would do to her.
She came hard. Her entire body shook. Her thighs clenched around my hand. The pulse of her around my fingers was immediate and violent and prolonged, aftershock following aftershock while I held completely still and let her feel every second of it.
The image of my belt across that red, beautiful bottom had done more to her than every stroke of my palm combined.
I filed that away.
I filed it in the folder I had created for things about Kit that were going to require extended future attention.
That folder was getting large.
Afterward, I kept her right where she was because she needed a moment and I was not going to pretend otherwise by moving her too soon, and I also needed a moment, and I was not going to pretend otherwise either.
My hand rested on her lower back. She was still breathing hard.
Her backside radiated heat against the air, deeply flushed, the kind of red that would turn to pink by morning and be gone by the next day but would sit with her in every chair until then.
The thought of that produced a warmth in my chest that was entirely inappropriate and entirely real.
I had put that there.
She had earned it, I had put it there, she was over my knee with her face in the cushion and her body spent, and the thing I felt was not triumph.
It was quieter than that.
It was a feeling that sat right in my ribs rather than my head.
I drew her panties back up with care, smoothing the fabric over skin that made her hiss at the contact.
Then her leggings, slowly, working around the heat of her.
She did not help, which I suspected was partly because she was still catching her breath and partly because allowing me to dress her was its own kind of concession and she was not ready to examine it yet.
I helped her sit up.
She moved stiffly, too fast at first, then stopped when the fact that sitting hurt registered across her face.
Good.
She should remember.
“You actually spanked me,” she said.
Her voice was unsteady, which she was working very hard to hide by phrasing it as an accusation.
“Yes. But you and I both know you earned it, didn’t you, little girl?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, Daddy,” she whispered, biting her lip nervously.
“There’s my good girl.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were still wet at the edges, her face flushed, her mouth set in the specific pout of a woman who was furious and embarrassed and not entirely certain those were the only things she was feeling.
“I’m still mad.”
“I know.”
The two words came quietly, without the usual architecture of self-defense around them. I looked at her. She did not look away.
“I hate that you keep knowing things,” she muttered.
I lifted my hand and brushed one damp strand of hair from her cheek.
She stayed still.
“You were very brave, solnyshko,” I said.
“That is such a weird thing to say after spanking someone that hard,” she said, her lower lip pushing out in a delicious pout.
“No. It is accurate.”
Her throat moved and she looked away, toward the kitchen, toward the window, toward anything that was not my face at close range.
I let her.
There was no need to press. I had the thing I had needed, which was not her compliance.
I had never wanted her compliance, I had wanted her actual attention, which was different and harder to get and worth considerably more.
She had given me that. She had called me Daddy and meant it, which was not a small thing for a woman who treated every word as a resource to be managed.
She was mine. She did not know the full shape of that yet.
But she would.
Soon.
* * *
We went back to work.
Some men, in some stories, would have made the moment into something.
Would have required the softness to last, the vulnerability to be performed for longer than it had naturally run.
Kit was not built for extended softness, and I was not interested in manufacturing it.
What I was interested in was the two of us, shoulder to shoulder at the desk, her with the drive she had gone back for and me with the Orlov feed, working together.
She sat a bit gingerly, but she did not remark on it.
I did not remark on it either, but I was aware of the small, controlled way she shifted her weight when she reached for her coffee, the fractional adjustment when she settled deeper into the chair. I was aware of it the way I was aware of everything about her. Completely. Without comment.
She had pulled her hair back up before she sat down.
She hadn’t used a pen this time. Instead, she used a band she had found in her bag, which was practical and efficient and entirely her, and which meant something only in the specific context of a woman reassembling herself after having been carefully taken apart.
I watched her work.
I watched her the way I had always watched her—with the full weight of attention I had never had to pretend was professional—and now I did it openly, because she had named me, and the naming was a door that did not close again.
Once, she caught me.
She turned from the secondary monitor and found my eyes already on her, and for one second the air in the room thinned. Her jaw set. She looked back at the screen, but this time, she did not tell me to stop.
I deeply enjoyed that.