“I don’t,” I whispered into the damp cotton. My voice came out muffled, pathetic. “I don’t have anything to tell you, sir.”
The lie tasted like ash in my mouth. Or maybe that was just the salt of my own shameful wetness pressed against my lips.
Chris’s hand shifted. He gathered the panties more firmly in his fist and pushed them harder against my face, not painfully but with a deliberateness that made the scent impossible to escape. My own arousal coated my upper lip, my nose, the hollows of my cheeks. I whimpered, turning my head, but his other hand came up to hold my jaw, keeping me still.
“Try again,” he said. “These panties were in the hamper. Under a towel. And the television was still set to New Modesty Blue when I turned it on.” His thumb pressed into the hinge of my jaw—firm, possessive, inescapable. “I can smell what you did all over the living room, Valerie. All over these panties. So I’m going to ask you one more time, and you’re going to tell me the truth.”
A sob broke from my chest. The cotton muffled it, turning it into something small and wretched. Tears spilled from the corners of my eyes, running sideways into my hair, into the pillow, into the sodden fabric my husband held against my face.
“I played with myself,” I gasped. The words came out in a rush, tumbling over each other like they were trying to escape before I could swallow them back down. “I watched—I watched the channel—and I touched myself without permission. I’m sorry, sir. I’m sorry, I couldn’t stop, I tried not to but I couldn’t?—”
“What did you watch?” His voice hadn’t changed. Still calm. Still that terrible, measured quiet.
“Stacy’s—” I choked on the words. My face burned so hot I thought the dampness on my cheeks might actually steam. “Stacy’s first—her first?—”
“Say it.”
“Her first bottom-fucking,” I whispered, and the word sounded so much more obscene in my own voice, in the dark, with my wet panties crushed against my mouth.
Chris was quiet for a long moment. I could hear him breathing—slow and steady, nothing like my own ragged, hiccupping gasps. Finally, he pulled the panties away from my face. The cool air hit my damp skin and I shuddered.
“You know what confuses me, Val?” He set the panties on the nightstand, laying them out almost carefully, as if they were evidence being preserved. “You could have asked me.”
I let out a helpless sob.
“You could have texted me. Called me. Said, ‘Sir, I’m feeling needy, can I please have permission to touch myself.’ Threelines. That’s all it would have taken.” He paused, and I heard something shift in his voice—not anger, exactly, but a weight that made my stomach drop. “Would I have said yes? Maybe. Maybe I would have talked you through it on the phone. Maybe I would have told you to wait until I got home so I could take care of you myself. But at least you would have been honest with me.”
“I couldn’t,” I sobbed. “I couldn’t say those words to you, I was too embarrassed?—”
“But you weren’t too embarrassed to watch another woman… what? What did Kevin do? He must have gotten her ready, right? Did he put a butt plug in her ass?”
I swallowed hard, my forehead furrowing so deeply it hurt.
“He… it was… a…” The word, the new dirty word, rose into my mind. I wanted to say it, despite my moral, modest upbringing. I wanted to say it, because I wanted to be obedient and because it felt so naughty, and the paradox made me feel lightheaded. “Adildo,” I whispered.
I couldn’t quite see, but I thought maybe Chris’s eyebrows had gone up.
“Kevin put a dildo in Stacy’s ass,” he said slowly, “while you played with yourself until you came in your panties.”
His voice was still quiet, but the bluntness of the words made me flinch as if he’d struck me.
“You weren’t too embarrassed for that, were you?”
I had no answer. There was no answer. He was right, and the truth of it sat in my chest like a burning coal.
Chris let the silence stretch between us until it became its own kind of punishment. I lay there with my face wet from tears and the lingering dampness of my own shameful panties, unable to look at him, unable to speak, unable to do anything but exist in the terrible truth of what I’d done.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Chris said finally. His voice had that quality I’d come to recognize—the one that meant the decision had already been made somewhere deep inside him, in the place where his authority lived. There was no negotiating with that voice. There was only listening.
“Tomorrow evening, when I get home from work, you’re going to have dinner ready. You’re going to eat with me like a good wife. And after dinner, you’re going to go to our bedroom and take off all your clothes. Then, you’re going to be paddled.”
My breath came in tiny, shuddering gasps. I could already see it—could already feel the cool air on my exposed cheeks, hear the gunshot crack of the paddle against my backside.
“I’m going to paddle you hard,” Chris continued. “Harder than I paddled you at Mark and Megan’s, because this is the second time you’ve disobeyed me about touching yourself, and because you tried to hide it. You lied, even when I rubbed your nose in it.”
A whimper escaped me. My fingers twisted in the sheets.
“And after I paddle you—” He paused, and I heard him shift on the mattress. His hand found my hip through the covers and rested there, heavy and warm and impossibly steady. “After I paddle you, I’m going to fuck your bottom.”
