Performance Review

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

“I think this is going quite well,” Jeremy said conversationally as he laid the paddle across her bare ass for the first time. She responded with a strangled gasp. The wooden paddle was thin but broad enough to cover a lot of area. The belt, as bad as it had been, had stung concentrated areas, creating a feeling that she could somehow squirm away from the pain a little. This paddle seemed to punish all of her at once. She thought of the belt falling four times on the same strip of skin this morning and how she’d known that she couldn’t bear any more. How could she possibly tolerate thirty hard swats landing in the same place, one after the other, falling on well-punished skin, still welted from yesterday’s encounter with Jeremy’s belt?

“I see a big improvement in your house already,” Jeremy continued cheerfully. “I think this is really going to work out for both of us.”

Had she been upright she might have cried out in indignation, but it hadn’t taken Judith long to learn that back talking a man who was standing over your bare ass with a paddle and a leather belt wasn’t good planning.

She’d taken five swats when he said, “I’m going to slow down, Judith.”

Relief flashed through her for a bare instant before he said, “It isn’t going to make this any easier on you.”

He glanced at the clock on the wall and landed a hard blow solidly in the middle of her ass. She grunted, but he continued to talk as if she hadn’t made a sound.

“I want to give you time to really experience this. Thirty swats could be over in three or four minutes if I weren’t careful.”

“Like this,” he demonstrated, dropping four burning strokes in rapid succession exactly where he’d placed the one before. Judith began to kick and squirm involuntarily. She knew that she looked ridiculous, and that it wouldn’t help her to escape the paddle, but she couldn’t stop myself. The pain was simply too much to absorb.

She imagined him continuing that way, landing the remaining twenty blows one after the other, seconds apart, perfectly centered. She was quite certain that she couldn’t bear it. And yet, he’d said slowing down wasn’t going to make it easier. She wanted desperately to be up off that couch. She wanted desperately to back up and erase all of the problems of the past few months.

“What I’m going to do,” he explained, “is give you one swat per minute for the next twenty minutes. There will, of course, be some benefit to you in having time to recover between strokes, so they will be very hard. Much harder than the ten you’ve received so far.”

Her mind seemed frozen. She understood that he was promising harder spanks, but she didn’t really comprehend. She’d thought that he was already spanking her full force.

As if hearing her thoughts, he chuckled. “Oh, no, Judith. It gets a lot harder than what you’ve felt so far. And you will be feeling more aggressive spankings as time goes on.”

“Anyway,” he continued as if she had interrupted him, “I want you to fully experience this. Have time not only to really feel the pain but to really experience the humiliation and to think about how you got into this position. I don’t want these spankings to be a minor inconvenience in your day that you get through and then get back to business as usual. I want them to define your days. If necessary, we will extend them, but for now half an hour per spanking will do. This morning, of course, we have only twenty minutes remaining. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she managed. It was very difficult to converse intelligently while draped half-naked over the back of her couch, but that was almost certainly what Jeremy had intended. After months of doing what she wanted to when she wanted to with increasing lack of responsibility, it was suddenly looking like a great luxury to be allowed to stand up and cover her bottom.

“Good.” He landed a hard blow at the bottom of her ass, overlapping the tops of her thighs and striking the welts left when the belt had covered that same stripe again and again. She yelped and squirmed and might have gasped out “please,” but Jeremy did not respond.

He must have noticed the impact of the stroke, though, because he landed the next one in precisely the same spot, causing her to cry out louder and then beg, clearly, “Please!”

“Please what?” he asked calmly.

“Please…please…don’t…oh, please…”

“Please WHAT?” he asked, still calmly but more firmly this time.

“Please don’t…oh! I can’t stand…”

She was interrupted by another blow placed precisely on top of the previous two. She howled. “THAT! Please don’t do that! Not in that same place. It’s too much. I can’t take it!”

She was still squirming, feeling as if somehow she might be able to wriggle out some of the pain, shake it away.

“It’s too much, hm?” he asked.

“Yes,” she pleaded, near tears again. “I can’t stand it.”

She couldn’t see him, but she felt that he nodded curtly as he’d done the day before when she’d told him she’d leave her job before accepting punishment from him. “Good,” he said mildly, “you’re not supposed to be enjoying this.”

With those words he landed yet another blow on that same swollen flesh. Each time she thought that the pain was more than she could bear, that she couldn’t possibly take another like it, but each successive blow hurt worse than the one before, moving beyond any pain that she had imagined.

“It will be far worse before it’s over,” he said again as she lay over the couch, crying softly, waiting for the twentieth blow to fall.

She didn’t know whether he meant this spanking would get worse or that there would be worse days to come, but in either case she couldn’t imagine it. Each stroke, as it fell, was somehow more painful, stung more deeply, seemed to fall on more thoroughly punished flesh than she had imagined possible only a moment before.

“Ten more,” he said cheerfully. “I really hope you’re benefiting from this, Judith.”

She couldn’t help it. A snort of indignation escaped her lips. Benefiting?? She was in more pain, and more deeply humiliated, than she could remember having been in her life. She was facing nearly a month of this demeaning treatment, not to mention the impact of thirty consecutive beatings on her poor buttocks. Benefiting?? She might have snorted again except that the twenty-first stroke fell then and she had to yelp instead.

Immediately after the last stroke he told her to stand and she did so slowly and carefully. Even her soft skirt was painful on her swollen bottom.

He handed her the paddle. “Since you were so concerned about my carrying this in from the car, I’ll let you put it away.”

She stared at him, uncertain as to his meaning, and then he handed her his car keys. “Put it in the trunk, please.”

She hurried out toward his car, thinking that at least by taking the paddle out herself she could do it quickly, but when she arrived at the car she realized that she didn’t know which of the keys on the crowded ring opened the trunk. She looked back toward the house, but Jeremy had closed the door behind her and so she had no choice except to begin trying each of the keys in turn, hoping to find the right one quickly.

While she stood there struggling, paddle tucked under her arm, moving from key to key, her neighbor’s college-age son, Joey, came out of the house. “Morning, Judith,” he called out.

“Good morning,” she responded, trying to sound light and cheerful. Apparently she didn’t pull it off, because her voice made him turn and look at her again, and when he did, he changed his direction and headed toward her.

“Having trouble?” he asked.

“No,” she explained, straining to sound casual. “Just a friend’s car and I don’t know which one is the right key.”

“Gotta be this one,” he said, pointing. “This kind of car always has that shape for the trunk key.”

“Okay, thanks,” she said quickly, struggling to hide the paddle, but he took the keys from her hand and opened the trunk for her.

“Here, let me help you,” he said, smiling, as he took the paddle from her and placed it in the trunk. As it left her hands she noticed that its surface was still warm and prayed that he wouldn’t feel it.

He laid his hand flat on the surface and said, “Wicked,” before placing it in the trunk and slamming it shut. He handed the keys back to Judith with a grin while her face burned. She searched her mind for some explanation but could produce nothing plausible. Joey turned back toward his house with a wave while she walked toward her door awash in humiliation. What could he think? He probably wouldn’t guess at the truth, so what other conclusion could he draw? Probably that she was playing s*x games involving paddles.

She shuddered. Jeremy was an extremely attractive man, and more than once during the years that they’d worked together they had flirted around the edges of becoming involved, but there was definitely nothing sexy about being upended over her couch and whipped.