CHAPTER 18
Valerie
By myself, driving my parents’ car home from Megan’s house to theirs, I tried to sort through my thoughts and feelings. My bottom still throbbed from the paddling, each bump in the road sending fresh reminders through my punished flesh. The backless panties shifted with every movement, making me hyperaware of my nakedness beneath my skirt.
What had just happened? I’d watched another woman—a stranger on television—being taken in the most degrading way possible, and I’d come from it. I’d climaxed right there on the couch between our husbands, Megan gasping beside me, while Grace’s cries filled the room.
I tried to organize my thoughts into something coherent. To understand why my body responded the way it did. To figure out what it meant that I’d run away from Chris only to end up more confused than ever.
But the thoughts wouldn’t organize. They kept slipping away, fragmenting into images and sensations I couldn’t process.Chris’s hands on me. The paddle cracking down. Grace’s face as her husband used her bottom with his big, hard penis. The terrible, shameful pleasure that had rolled through me.
After a few minutes, I gave up trying to sort it out. For the last half mile to my parents’ driveway my mind simply went blank.
Then, just as I turned into the driveway, the realization hit me. I felt, well, okay. It seemed crazy, but I could see that I had given up trying to think it through because a big part of me—the biggest part of me, maybe—trusted Chris to sort it out for me. To decide what was best. To guide me through this confusion that I couldn’t navigate alone.
The idea of just handing over my wellbeing that way shouldn’t have felt okay. I should have kept driving—gotten as far away from Parker’s Bluffs as I possibly could, no matter how difficult it would be just to leave my whole life behind. Instead, the realization brought a strange sense of relief—followed immediately by more confusion. HowcouldI trust my husband when part of mefearedhim so much? When I’d literally run away from him just hours ago?
But… I was making some kind of… progress, I realized with a start. Something had begun to shift inside me, even if I didn’t fully understand it yet. The fact that I could recognize my own trust, even while feeling confused about it, had to mean that something was changing.
I pulled into my parents’ driveway and sat there for a moment, my hands gripping the steering wheel. Chris would be here soon to take me to our new house. Our home. The place where we would live as husband and wife.
The place where he would finally fuck me. Once he had carried me over the threshold, as I felt certain he would, I would truly belong to him, wouldn’t I? He had already given me much more time than I thought any other man as dominant as my husband would ever give, now that I understood the realities of a wife’s bedroom duties. I couldn’t imagine that Mark had given Megan anything like that much time to get used to the idea that a husband gets to fuck his wife whether she likes it or not.
The crude thought sent heat flooding through my body. For the first time, I found I could acknowledge the truth: I wanted it. I wanted him to take me. To claim my virginity. To do all the things he’d been promising to do since our wedding night.
But even as I recognized the desire, I knew I couldn’t tell him. Some part of me needed to be the modest, bashful bride who paradoxically became a naughty girl when her husband demanded his conjugal rights. I needed to show Chris that I had a will of my own, and I would earn correction if it meant I could keep my sense of self.
I would earn the kind of hard, dominant sex I’d seen in his eyes he meant to have with his submissive wife. If I just surrendered, if I begged him to take me, it wouldn’t be the same.
I needed to make him do it. To force his hand somehow.
The realization both thrilled and shamed me. I felt in the very joining of my body to my heart and my mind that I had started down a dark path, full of shadows through which I could nonetheless see my way—hot, red shadows, somehow… places where I could become both a modest good girl and a dirty little slut for my husband.
Five minutes later, Chris arrived. He took me and my overnight bag to his truck, his hand warm and possessive on the small of my back. The drive to our new house took only fifteen minutes, but the silence felt heavy with unspoken things.
To my surprise, he didn’t mention sex. Didn’t give any commands. Just asked how I was feeling, whether my bottom was still sore, if I wanted to stop for ice cream on the way.
The tenderness confused me more than discipline would have.
When we pulled up to the house—the charming two-story farmhouse with a wraparound porch that I hadn’t seen since Chris had started remodeling it—my breath caught. It was beautiful. Chris had been working on it for months, and now it was ready for us.
He took my hand as we walked up the front steps. “Let me show you what I’ve done.”
The tour should have been romantic. Chris had clearly put so much thought into every detail—the kitchen renovated with modern appliances but maintaining the home’s vintage charm, the living room with its stone fireplace, the guest bedroom painted in soft colors.
But all I could think about was sex. In the kitchen, I pictured him bending me over the counter to fuck me from behind. In the living room, I imagined being taken on the rug in front of the fireplace. The dining table made me think of being spread across it, my legs held wide.
By the time we reached the master bedroom, I could barely breathe. The bed was enormous, covered in a soft quilt. Chris had hung curtains, arranged furniture, even put fresh flowers on the dresser.
“What do you think?” he asked, watching my face.
“It’s perfect,” I managed, though my voice sounded strange to my own ears.
We ate dinner together—sandwiches Chris had picked up—and then it was bedtime. I waited for the commands to start. For him to tell me to undress, to display myself, to prepare for what was coming.
Instead, he just kissed my forehead. “You must be exhausted. Get ready for bed.”
I went to the enormous walk-in closet where Chris had carefully arranged all my clothes. My fingers trailed over hangers, touching fabrics without really seeing them.
