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—thetrainingpanties—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 unhurriedappreciation 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.”
