CHAPTER 29
Valerie
I straightened and turned toward him, the paddle in my hand, confusion creasing my brow. Chris set his glass on the side table and held out his hand. Not for the paddle. For me.
I went to him. I couldn’t not go to him. My feet carried me the few steps to his armchair as if drawn by something magnetic, something that lived in the space between his steady gaze and the desperate, aching center of my chest. When I was close enough, his hand caught the back of my neck—those callused carpenter’s fingers curling into my hair, exerting just enough strength to make me whimper—and he pulled me down.
His mouth found mine, and the world fell away.
The kiss was deep and consuming, his lips parting mine with an authority that matched everything else about him—unhurried but absolute, tender but demanding. His tongue swept against mine, and I heard myself moan into his mouth, a sound so raw and wanting that it would have humiliated me if I’d had any capacity left for humiliation.
My husband’s hand tightened on the back of my neck, tilting my head to the angle he wanted, and he kissed me harder. My head spun… the living room dissolved… there seemed to be nothing in the universe except his mouth and his hand and the plug in my bottom and the paddle in my grip and the devastating, annihilating tenderness of being kissed this thoroughly by a man who was about to take my final virginity—when he felt like it.
Then he broke the kiss. He pulled away gently, his lips leaving mine with a soft, wet sound that echoed in the sudden silence. I could practically see myself: my eyes glazed, my mouth still open, my body swaying toward him with my apparently insatiable need.
“Go hang up the paddle,” Chris said, his voice low and rough in a way that made me wonder whether the kiss had affected him too, no matter how composed he appeared. “Then go to the bedroom and get ready for me. I’ll use you when I decide the time is right.”
I floated to the kitchen, it felt like. That seemed like the only word for it—I floated, my bare feet barely registering the hardwood, the plug a distant, pulsing presence, the paddle warm in my hand. I felt like I had fallen under a spell. An enchantment. As if Chris’s kiss had worked some kind of magic on me, transforming the terror and shame into something luminous and strange—a trance state where obedience felt not like submission but like inevitability, like gravity, like the most natural thing in the world.
I hung the paddle on its hook. My fingers lingered on the smooth wood for just a moment, and I felt a ghost of the kiss still tingling on my lips. I looked at it for a long moment. It would stay here. I would see it every day, and I would…
I’ll have a choice to make, I thought, blinking at the excitement that suddenly filled me. I had thought, hadn’t I, that I likednothaving a choice.Right?
An answer came into my mind, clear as a bell.
I like having a choice, and thennothaving a choice.
To my astonishment I felt my pussy clench at that abstract idea, because it carried so many hot, dark little fantasies with it. All the times when I would choose naughtiness, and then… and thennothave a choice about the consequences, as Chris taught me my lessons. With the paddle, with his big hands, with his enormous cock.
I closed the pantry door, my breath starting to become labored as I remembered that I still had the most difficult, most shameful lesson coming.
The sheet-covered bench stood in the center of the bedroom like a veiled altar, waiting for me. The white sheet lay draped over it in clean, precise folds that Chris must have arranged with care, so as to make the moment of revelation that much more affecting. I could see the shape beneath—the curve of the leather padding, the kneeling shelves, the handles.
My fingers found the edge of the sheet. I pulled it away slowly, unveiling the bench the way a bride might lift her own veil, and the sight of the thing underneath made my breath catch in my throat.
It was beautiful, in its own distressing way. Of course it was beautiful, because Chris had made it. The wood was dark walnut, sanded to a satin finish that caught the lamplight and held it. The leather was a deep burgundy, exactly like the bench inStacy’s video, and it had been fitted over dense padding that gave slightly when I pressed my palm against it.
The curve of the surface was gentle but deliberate, designed to lift a woman’s hips to exactly the right angle. The kneeling shelves had upholstery in the same burgundy leather, set at a height that would keep my knees bent and my weight forward. And the handles—polished, smoothed, shaped to fit a woman’s gripping fingers—extended from the far end like an invitation to hold on to them, and to grip them hard when my husband’s rigid manhood proved painful for me to receive… when he fucked my ass so roughly I would need them to steady myself.
I folded the sheet. My hands moved with a compulsive precision that seemed like all I had left—square corners, crisp edges, the fabric pressed flat between my palms. I set it on the chair beside the dresser, on top of the nightgown and panties from earlier, and the little stack of folded things seemed like artifacts from a modest, innocent life I would leave behind the moment my husband claimed my most private place with his thrusting manhood.
I turned back to the bench.
I knelt on the shelves first, the way I’d watched Stacy do it. The leather was cool against my bare knees, and the padding gave just enough to be comfortable. I leaned forward, lowering my stomach onto the curved surface, and felt the leather press against my bare breasts as my body folded over the padding. The curve lifted my hips, tilting my bottom upward, and I felt the plug shift inside me with a deep, throbbing reminder that made me gasp.
My arms extended forward until my fingers found the handles. I gripped them. The wood was smooth and warm and perfectlyshaped for my small hands, and the moment I closed my fingers around them, something shifted inside me—not the plug, but something deeper. Something that settled into place with a quiet, devastating click, like a key turning in a lock I hadn’t known existed.
I was on the bench. The training bench. The bench my husband had built for me with his carpenter’s hands. The bench where he was going to take my last virginity. I lay there in nothing but my backless training panties, my punished bottom raised and exposed, the plug nestled between my spread cheeks, my breasts pressed against burgundy leather, and I waited.
The waiting was its own kind of torment. Every second seemed to stretch and to multiply. In the silence of our bedroom I felt like I could hear everything… too much: my own shallow breathing, the tick of the hallway clock, the distant murmur of the television still playing in the living room. Chris still sat watching his baseball game. He was sipping his drink while his wife lay draped over a discipline bench with a plug in her bottom, waiting to be used.
When I finally heard his footsteps in the hallway, my fingers tightened on the handles until I could literally see my knuckles had gone white.
I realized then that he had positioned the bench so that I couldn’t see his approach. I could feel him in the doorway, though, and I started to turn my head to look over my shoulder, but then my husband’s voice said, “No. Eyes front, you naughty little slut. I’ll inspect you as I please.”
“Oh, God,” I breathed, my face filling with heat as I obeyed his abrupt, obscene command.
Again I seemed to rise above myself, to see Chris standing there in his black robe, his eyes moving over me with an expression that made my stomach turn to liquid even to imagine it.
