Page 30 of Thwack!

This wasn’t so bad. Doggy style, basically—the position he got fucked in regularly except with Maddox under him instead of behind him. Now Maddox would smack his ass a few times and soon it would be over. He closed his eyes and waited.

And waited.

Finally he opened his eyes again and turned his head up to find Maddox regarding him with a flat expression.

“It’s not like you to be disobedient, Jack.”

“I’m not being disobedient.”

“Aren’t you? All right, never mind. If you can’t give me the experience I’m looking for, then we might as well not bother. You could’ve just called red.”

“I’m not calling red. I’m not being disobedient. I’m—” He choked to a halt, his eyes filling unexpectedly with tears. He couldn’t bear disappointing Maddox but he didn’t know if he could bear this either.

“Maddox…”

He wanted to say please, but that was hard too and it wouldn’t get him anywhere. Maddox had given him his choices, but they were such awful, awful choices.

Slowly he crawled his way forward until his legs were straight with only the tips of his toes on the ground and his ass stuck right up at the ceiling. He buried his head in his folded arms, uncomfortable, exposed, ridiculous. His legs trembled, and when Maddox stroked his thighs with a pleased “better,” the condescension stabbed through his heart like a knife.

“I should’ve had you over my knee a long time ago. Your ass is truly incredible in this position, practically begging for it.”

If Maddox had a paddle in his hand, Jack would beg for it. He craved the cleansing masculinity of true pain over this humble posture and the tender caresses, the sweet, approving words.

“Now remember that you’re supposed to count,” Maddox said. “Bad boys always count.”

He wanted to protest that he hadn’t been bad, that he adored Maddox so feverishly he never even considered defiance, but to protest would be to defy. Maddox had asked for an experience. This experience—the experience of him being a very good, very bad boy suffering Daddy’s discipline, so when Maddox brought a hand down on his right ass cheek with a hopelessly light thwack, he dutifully said, “One.”

“One what?”

“I don’t know.”

Sir? Daddy? God, he was going to kill Maddox in his sleep tonight.

“Maybe a little thank you?”

Thank you. Great. This scene was maximum cringe. Where was his fierce, sadistic Dom, his no-nonsense cop from Terminator 2, his ice-cold husband? Would he even still love Maddox when this was over? He expected different from Maddox—inventiveness, cruelty, pain.

“One, thank you.”

Maddox chortled and gave him another, barely harder than the first.

“Two, thank you.” If he weren’t so uncomfortable, he would be bored. He dug his toes into the floor and tried to rebalance himself, but Maddox smacked him again just then, causing his feet to skitter.

“Three, thank you.”

God, this was so awful. It was mean and horrible and nearly unbearable. The word red lodged in his throat, refusing to either come out or be swallowed down until he could barely force the required response out past it. He began to gasp, and the humiliation of reacting so dramatically to such mild punishment made his breathing even more labored until it started to sound like he was crying.

He wasn’t crying, damn it. What Maddox was doing to him barely hurt, though a low fire had started to build. He wished Maddox would vary his strokes instead of coming down over and over on the high, bony points of his ass. He could feel how red they were, how tender his skin had become, as if he himself were tender, and though he was trying to hold all that in, the continual need to open his mouth to count forced it out.

He shook his head, confused. What number were they on? Had he stopped responding? Maddox was spanking him faster now, the blows coming too quickly to be numbered, each of them a sharp sting on top of already-burning flesh. He squirmed, trying to shift Maddox’s hand to a new area, and Maddox chastised him like he was a child.

He wasn’t a child. He wasn’t, he wasn’t. He could take this. Only how much more was there to take? All the blood had rushed to his head and he really was crying now, though he didn’t understand why. He felt punished. Bad. He’d been grudging about giving Maddox what he wanted, and his penalty for that reluctance was that it would never stop.

Tears ran down his face and into his mouth—ridiculous, salty tears of pain and humiliation. His nose clogged and he began to struggle in earnest, trying to leverage himself off Maddox’s lap, refusing to say red but needing it to stop. But though Maddox was smaller than he was, he was no less strong, and he used his muscle now, wrapping a firm arm around Jack’s waist and hauling him closer, pulling Jack’s hip against his hard cock as he railed away with the other hand, always in the same spot, always with maximum force.

Jack’s cock was hard too, understanding its role in this scene even as he struggled against it. He kicked his feet like a child, trying to push up on his arms as incoherent sobs were beaten out of him. It hurt. God, it hurt. How could it hurt so much when it was nothing but a little tap, tap, tap? How could he be handling this so badly? How did Maddox always do this to him so effortlessly?

When he could fight no more, he surrendered. Maddox felt it—the moment he let his body go limp and his mind go silent.