Loving discipline: the heart of the matter

This will probably be my last excerpt from Old-Fashioned Values for the foreseeable future, since with any luck Stolen by Her Master, a very different sort of book (space opera BDSM) will be out in a few days. To mark the occasion, I've chosen a rather talky bit that nevertheless seems to me the closest I came in the book to stating flat-out what I was trying to get at in telling this story.

“Well, I suppose technically,” Mark said calmly. “I should call your dad and have him come spank you.”

“What?” Sally felt her face turn crimson.

“But I can tell, if you have a mouth like that, that you haven’t been spanked before. So even though I agree that it’s irregular, and a sort of modern adaptation of the traditional way of doing things, I’m going to accept the responsibility, and if we do go on with our courtship I’ll be the one to keep you in line.”

“In line?” Something about those words, or maybe about them coming out casually at this late point in the strangest conversation ever, struck Sally as the most extreme thing Mark had said yet.

“I think that’s a fair way to put it.”

“Fair?” Why wouldn’t her brain work? Sally knew herself to be a very intelligent woman, but Mark Weaver’s determined expression of this antique doctrine of loving discipline, as adapted by him to the necessities of his modern life, left her feeling completely bewildered. Not that it didn’t make sense. It just made too much sense for her to comprehend it, since it seemed so distant from anything she had ever known.

He wasn’t saying that he thought he had the right to spank any woman, just because women need spanking. He was saying that the woman with whom he chose to spend his life, whom he asked, in turn, to choose him to spend her life with, needed to understand that bare-bottom spankings would be part of that life henceforth, at her boyfriend’s discretion.

Sally definitely didn’t want a bare-bottom spanking, or any kind of spanking—with Mark’s hand, with Mark’s belt, or with anything else. So why did the thought that this guy who had expressed an interest in being her boyfriend planned to spank her regularly make that guy seem so attractive? Was she the crazy one here? Were they both crazy?

“Yes. Fair. To keep you in line with the way I want our lives to go.”

“Because you’re a guy and I’m a girl?”

“No—because I’m the guy I am, and, if you accept this spanking like a good girl, you’ll be my good girl.”

Good girl. When he said that, Sally knew that she would go back to his room and have a spanking.

Silently, he paid the check in cash, fixing Sally with his eyes through the whole process. Sally looked back as steadily as she could, her lips compressed into a tight line. Mark didn’t ask if she was coming, and she didn’t say she would, but when he put his arm around her waist as they left the burger joint, she snuggled into his chest and said softly, “Will it hurt a lot?”

Mark stopped walking, on a sidewalk slick from a chilly autumn fog, and turned Sally to face him. “When I punish you, Sally, it will hurt. Sometimes it will hurt a lot. But I promise that I will never harm you, or let anyone else harm you. Your bottom’s going to be sore tonight, but you’ll think twice before you use foul language again, won’t you?”

Sally felt her eyes grow wide. “Yes,” she whispered. Then a thought she couldn’t stop came to her, and she blurted out, “How many girls have you spanked before?”

“Well,” he replied, putting his arms around her waist. “That’s rather a long story.”

“Really?” Sally said in amazement. “Like, more than two?”

Mark laughed, hugged her for a moment, and then turned her around and began their progress toward his dorm again.

“No, you’re the first.”

“Oh. Then… um, how is it a long story?”

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