Confessions of a Kinky Wife (7 page)

But sex first, yeah? Why not?

Because the steak was burning – that was why not!

‘Ohhh,’ I wailed, running back into the kitchen, where flames had started leaping around the edge of the pan. I doused it with a damp cloth, but the steaks weren’t exactly as rare as Dan usually liked them.

Never mind. He made a valiant effort with his knife and fork and we laughed it all off. ‘How-was-your-day?’ took us through the meal to ice-cream, and that was where the road started to get rocky. (It was Rocky Road ice-cream too – appropriate.)

‘Oh, did you pick up that package?’ he asked.

He posed it as an afterthought but, in retrospect, I think he’d been building up to it, lulling me into a false sense of security before pouncing. There was a certain brightness to his eyes despite the casual tone.

‘Oh! Oh, God, no, sorry. I –’ I was so close to saying ‘forgot’‘– didn’t.’

He didn’t say anything, damn him. I needed him to throw me a lifeline, ask me if I had forgotten, say it didn’t matter and I could do it tomorrow.

‘I’ll do it tomorrow,’ I offered.

‘Yes.’ That was it. No more.

He dug his spoon into the ice-cream and left it there.

‘It was such a beautiful day,’ I said, half in defence, half as a change of subject.

‘Too beautiful for keeping promises.’

Oh, if he was just going to
sulk
instead of … the other thing …

‘It’s no big deal,’ I snapped. ‘I don’t suppose another day will make a difference.’

‘No, Pip, don’t take that tone with me. I’m not in the wrong here.’

‘In the wrong? It’s a stupid fucking parcel, that’s all. What’s in it? Explosives?’

‘Philippa.’ A low growl.

But somehow I couldn’t stop talking myself into trouble.

I stood up, eyeing the door to the hallway nervously, my fight-or-flight response signalling ‘flight’.

‘If it’s so important to you, why don’t you get it redelivered? You’ve got the day off on Friday. You can reschedule it online. That would have been the obvious thing to do anyway, but it wouldn’t occur to you, I suppose, when you’ve got Muggins here to run around after you.’ I started walking away.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

He sounded calm, but absolutely authoritative.

I halted in my tracks.

‘Nowhere.’

‘That’s right. You’re going nowhere.’

‘What? For God’s sake, forget it, Dan. You’re ruining what could be a lovely evening.’ I’d lost it by now, shouting and gesticulating like Basil Fawlty. I disliked myself for it, but how could I make myself stop?

‘
I’m
ruining it?’

‘You’re overreacting!’ I bawled.

He laughed at that, then pointed to the sofa in our open-plan lounge-diner.

‘All right, Philippa, overreact to this,’ he said, not raising his voice a decibel. ‘Go and bend over the arm.’

‘I …’

‘Now.’

Here I was, at a crossroads that felt enormously significant.

I could say no. He had no recourse, after all. I knew he wouldn’t force me. It would take just a few calm, reasonable words. Or, if I carried on shouting and screaming, he would probably just walk away, go to the pub, like he always used to.

But I didn’t want that. I hated those hours he spent at the pub while I paced the flat, full of rage, then full of remorse, then full of facepalm.

I hated having to apologise and have him wonder aloud what got into me.

Of course, I loved the make-up sex.

But perhaps we could have that too, without all the icky in-between stuff?

I looked at his face. It was resolute and stern. It was everything I had fantasised.

I went to the sofa.

I looked over my shoulder at him. He was watching me.

It was a giddy feeling. If I voluntarily put myself over the arm, I was making a profound statement.
I put myself in your hands. I accept your authority.

It was too hard. And I felt ridiculous, like a character in one of the hokey spanking stories I was always browsing online. And I felt
guilty
, as if I was dancing on the Pankhurst graves in hobnailed boots.

But, look, I had asked for this.

‘Philippa.’

His voice acted like a hand between my shoulder blades.

I bent, feeling the swishy hem of my dress rise up my bared thigh.

I listened to him walk up to me.

‘It’s not that you’ve done something terrible, Philippa,’ he said.

I flinched when he put a hand on my thigh, just where it met the dress, and stroked through the material.

‘Of course it’s not that. That’s trivial. It’s the way you behaved when I asked you. Defensive, straight away. Trying to blame me. Getting yourself wound up. This is what you want to change, isn’t it?’

I nodded, too embarrassed by my position to speak.

‘It’s like the divisional Christmas lunch. Remember that? You were too hungover to go. But that was
my
fault, apparently, because I should have somehow stopped you from drinking too much with your girlfriends the night before. I should have picked you up earlier. I should have called you to make sure you weren’t too legless. I should have done this, I should have done that. No, Philippa. I’m not having any more of it. You are going to take responsibility for your own behaviour, and if I have to make you, then so be it. It’s what you want, isn’t it?’

I nodded again, stung by his horribly accurate and relevant memory.

Not as stung as I was a moment later, when he lifted my dress to my waist and began to smack my bottom over my prettiest, laciest knickers.

He didn’t even comment on them, let alone allow them to distract him.

Instead, he spanked away until they felt tight and uncomfortable and prickly.

Once I started ouching and twitching under his hand, he stopped and pulled them down.

‘Stay right there,’ he said firmly. ‘Don’t move a muscle.’

I heard him walk through to the kitchen and scrabble in the drawers. How strange. What could he have in mind?

When he came back, he laid something flat and cool and made, I supposed, of wood against my warmed cheeks.

‘This might be painful,’ he warned me. ‘But you’re getting ten good hard ones. No excuses.’

He was right about the pain. There was some kind of fundamental antagonism between skin and wood. I kicked and gasped and earned two extras, but I managed to hold myself down for the full complement, working through the deep-seated soreness and heat, taking my medicine.

He lectured me throughout and, while I couldn’t have said I was listening very closely at the time, when I thought about it afterwards, I recalled every single word. It seemed that words plus spanks gave a much more lasting effect than words alone. This was a shaming realisation, but one I had to accept if I was going to make a success of the project.

Once he’d put down the wooden thing – a spatula, I noticed – I expected him to send me to the stupid corner, or the computer to write the stupid journal entry, but he didn’t. Instead, he let his hand linger on my bottom, stroking it, then one of his fingers drifted in between the cheeks, making me shiver.

I heard his breathing quicken. His hand slid down inside my thighs. I could almost feel his indecision, almost feel the unruly twitch of his pulse.

Finally, he said, ‘Ah, fuck it,’ in a rough-edged voice and I heard his trousers fall, with a clink of belt buckle, down to his ankles.

I felt a charge of victorious lust right between my legs. He had beaten me and now I had beaten him. His grip on my hips made me snarl with triumph and when he pushed into me, quickly and without finesse, I hissed.

Whoever wrote that book had better self-control than Dan.

Whoever wrote that book was able to look at his woman’s rosy-red upturned arse without the blood rushing to a certain part of his patriarchal anatomy. Or so he said. Personally, I think he was lying.

Dan definitely didn’t share his imperviousness. He thrust away, hard and fast, grunting with the effort of it. His pelvis slapped up against my too-warm cheeks, heating them even more, and he put a hand on the scruff of my neck and held me down until he heard the muffled, garbled beginnings of my orgasm.

That was all he needed to start pumping even faster, until he collapsed with all his weight on top of me so that the sofa arm pressed uncomfortably into my stomach.

‘Oh, God,’ he panted, his damp cheek sticking to mine. ‘Oh, God, Pip. I don’t think I’m up to this.’

‘Hey,’ I wheezed, barely able to get the breath out of my severely compressed lungs.

He took the hint, heaved himself off me and landed with a thud on the sofa. He grabbed my hands and drew me on to his lap – not over it, this time. The deep-seated tenderness from the spatula-spanking made me gasp a little, but I liked the feel of it, right inside me, a living
aide-mémoire
.

He wrapped his arms tightly around me and buried his face in my shoulder for a few moments. When he withdrew it, he looked sheepish.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘It really hurt,’ I said, ‘but that was what I needed. Don’t be sorry.’

‘No, not that,’ he said with a little snuffle of a laugh. ‘I’d have given you twice as many strokes if you’d given me a hint of defiance. No, I mean … afterwards.’

‘Oh, you shouldn’t be sorry about that. I’m certainly not.’

His lips twisted in a quick smile but his eyes were troubled.

‘I feel like I’ve fucked up. No, don’t make some silly joke, I’m serious. You want this and I want to help you. If I turn it into a kinky sex game because I can’t control my, uh, urges, then …’

‘Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself, love.’

‘Well, that’s it. It’s
you
I’m supposed to be hard on.’

‘But it gives you a hard-on.’

‘Oh, shut
up
, Pip.’

I buttoned my lip. He sounded on the verge of tears, bless him.

‘I mean, if I’m going to do this, I want to do it right.’

That’s very Dan, that is. He’s not a man to do anything by halves, and he doesn’t shirk the difficult bits.

‘Yes, but that book … it’s only one way of doing things. One guy’s way. We don’t have to follow it to the letter, do we? We can tailor our own version.’

‘Yeah, I know, I agree. But it’s too soon for that. I’m feeling my way … yes, yes, I know, literally. Don’t say it. I need the book, just while I’m establishing my own rules and routines.’

‘It’s like a hand to hold?’

‘Yeah.’

‘While the other hand is busy … elsewhere.’

‘Pip, you seem remarkably cheerful for somebody who’s just been soundly punished. Why is that?’

I nuzzled his neck and kissed him. I felt madly, blissfully, hormonally in love with him. I mean, more than usually. It was weird.

‘Because it makes me feel loved. How upside-down is that? I can’t really explain it any better. And I don’t mean I didn’t already feel loved – because I did. But it makes me feel really deep-down cared for.’

He blinked at me a few times in rapid succession.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘That’s funny. It’s something the book mentioned, but it also said I had to be careful afterwards, to make sure you realised I didn’t dislike you or, or, you know, wasn’t doing it to … Well, the thing is, I’m supposed to cheer
you
up afterwards. I’m supposed to tell you everything’s OK and I love you and everything’s forgotten and forgiven. But … it’s like … you’re doing that. I’m confused.’

‘It’s early days, darling. It’s a learning curve, for both of us.’

I had to smother the desire to make some pathetic joke about how he was learning about my curves. Perhaps I should add that to the sin list. Inappropriate punning will be punished. God, I really can’t help myself.

‘I’m sorry, love. I don’t mean to be a dithering plank. I want to be all manly and firm-chinned and resolute and all that. I feel I’m failing in that.’

‘You’re the manliest, most resolute and firmest-chinned man on the planet, Daniel Wheatley. Don’t let anyone tell you different.’

He seemed happy with that.

I was optimistic about the direction all this was taking. And then I took a look at Book 2 of The Book.

I wasn’t supposed to look at it.

Dan has been guarding it with his life since I brought it back from the sorting office. He wrestled it off me within seconds and disappeared into the bedroom with it.

When I followed him, he clutched it to his chest and ordered me out.

‘Can’t I see? It’s my business, surely.’

‘No, it isn’t. I need to inwardly digest it before I can share it. Pip, don’t. If you come any closer, I’ll have to, to spank you.’

He sounded too anxious to be convincing, but I thought I’d let him have his way in this precisely because of that. Poor Dan. I wanted to make this easier for him.

But would making it easier for him make it harder for me?

I had to know.

So, having two hours before he was expected home from his shift, I went on a book hunt.

The obvious place to look was the bedroom, but Dan was a police officer with ambitions to be a detective, so I supposed he’d eschew the obvious. Or maybe a double bluff? I started in the bedroom.

I looked in his sock drawer, wardrobe, under the bed, in the box where he keeps the sex toys … nada.

I had a similar lack of success in the cutlery drawer, the bathroom cabinet, behind the PlayStation, inside the tumble dryer. This book had vanished.

Had he taken it to work with him? Surely not. Imagine the furore, should he be caught with it in the locker room.

I had to try and think outside the box. Where would I never look in a million years?

It took a while for inspiration to strike, but when it did it was harder and more exquisite than any of Dan’s belt licks.

The box file in which I kept all details of my tax affairs and investments.

I took it off the top bookshelf and laughed with fiendish delight to find it several times heavier than I expected. When I opened the spring clip, there it lay.
Advanced Discipline Techniques: A Handbook for Marital Harmony
.

The cover was very plain and it was spiral-bound like someone’s dissertation – but it was obviously cheaply self-published, by necessity, so this wasn’t too surprising.