Chapter 13

Cal

The alert that popped up on my handheld caught me by surprise.

New Modesty match alert!

I put down the wrench I had in my hand and wiped my palms and fingers clean of grease before I picked up the device from on top of the tool cabinet where I always left it while working on a car or a tractor. I had only signed up for the New Modesty courtship program a few days before, but I had forgotten all about it.

Really, I hadn't expected anything to come of my application for ‘verified suitor status.' My buddy Dave had signed up last year, though, and he had just married Rachel, a sweet, gorgeous girl who had come to Grasskiln as part of the program. At the reception—to which I had come stag, since my last girlfriend and I had broken up a month ago—he had told me to sign up.

"What's the worst that could happen?" he had asked, before Rachel called him away to cut the cake.

When I opened the New Modesty app on my handheld, I wondered whether I had thought hard enough about that question.

Non-violent offender Grace F. just checked in for her gynecological exam. New Modesty algorithms suggest she's a great match for you. Watch exam?

I frowned. Dave had mentioned that the particular approach of the New Modesty to matchmaking would probably surprise me. But Rachel definitely wasn't a ‘non-violent offender,' and I didn't think Dave had had the opportunity to watch her at the doctor's office. I noticed that ‘great match' had a link attached, and I tapped the words.

A pop-up window appeared.

Our data on you and Grace F. tells us that your interests align and that your dominant masculine inclinations harmonize with her emerging submissive sexuality. Her status as a non-violent offender, remanded to the supervision of the New Modesty Authority and the foster care of a local couple, may suit your inclination to discipline your romantic partner and eventual bride.

I remembered the questionnaire I had filled out when I had signed up for the program. I hadn't taken the questions about traditional discipline very seriously, I supposed, but I had definitely answered them honestly. At twenty-six, I had had two serious girlfriends so far, and in both those relationships I had felt restrained by the rules of modern society. Several times, in each of their cases, I had felt a strong urge to take my romantic partner (as the app called it) over my knee for a well-deserved attitude adjustment. In the end, both relationships had ended because despite being lovely girls on the inside, they had hidden that essential sweetness behind a bratty facade that they lacked the ability to see for what it was: simple immaturity.

So I had checked the Agree box on the question that read, I intend to use corporal punishment to correct my wife's behavior as necessary.

I had also checked Agree on two other questions that I realized probably had led to this unexpected alert. I intend to take charge of my wife's sexuality, and I intend to train my wife to please me sexually.

And I did agree, wholeheartedly.

I tapped Yes, and I got my first look at Grace just as she pulled her panties down.

Grace

"Tell me about your masturbation habits," Nurse Cathy said as I put on the gown, feeling how the opening down the back seemed to reveal just as much of my body as the garment hid. Above all, I could feel how the nurse had an almost unimpeded view of the bruises Jake had left on my backside with the family strap.

I started to turn around, willing myself not to put my hands behind me in an attempt to cover the open back of the gown but desperate not to have the nurse's judgmental eyes on my whipped bottom. I turned very slowly, because I didn't want to have to face front, either, so that she could see my scarlet face—and really I just wanted to pretend she hadn't made the humiliating demand.

"Grace," Shelly said sharply. "Cathy here is a nurse. She and Doctor Simmons have a duty to take care of you. You have a responsibility to yourself—and to those who care about you. Don't make their job more difficult because you have some idea of modesty. Modesty is important when you're courting, and then in public after you're married, but it's not appropriate here in the doctor's office."

I could hear the tummy-churning threat in Shelly's voice: the arm of Jake's easy chair, the baring of my bottom, the family strap across my upturned cheeks, barely healed from my last whipping. I finished turning around, my eyes on Nurse Cathy's white leather shoes.

"I don't," I told her, letting a sulky note infuse my tone. I guessed I should have felt defiant—good, even—about being able to deny that I had done the thing I couldn't help thinking of as naughty and shameful. But I could tell somehow that from the perspective of the nurse and my foster mother—the viewpoint, it seemed like, of this strange town where the government had sent me—no answer I could give would prove satisfactory.

"Hmm," was all Nurse Cathy said as she tapped her tablet. Then she said, "And you said she climaxed several times after she was punished, Mrs. Carpenter?"

"That's right," Shelly said, nodding. "Mr. Carpenter… well, he's, you know, very good at that."

I glanced over at her, where she sat in the chair with her handbag in her lap. To my surprise, her cheeks had turned red, the way they had in the department store when she had confided to me the way that Jake punished her for playing with herself without permission.

I thought about what she had just told me, about modesty, and I wondered for the first time what it all really meant. The memory of Jake fucking her so very hard from behind as she bent over her chair with her panties down and her bottom up rose vividly into my mind. I bit my lip so that I wouldn't let out a little whimper as I felt myself clench, down there. My face blazed up with heat like an inferno. Shelly somehow still had her modesty, even though her husband fucked her like that, in front of the young woman he had just whipped.

"Is that right, Grace?" the nurse asked. "Did you have more than one orgasm?"

I had my hands out in front of me, clenched into fists as if I meant to fight Nurse Cathy, or the doctor, or maybe the whole town. I flicked my eyes over from the nurse's shoes to look at Shelly in the chair, sure that she would prompt me again, with another threat of Jake's strap across my backside. My foster mother just sat there, though, looking at me. She had a little furrow between her eyebrows, and I understood that she must actually be feeling concern for me. Shelly wanted me to tell the truth, and, more important, to admit not just to her and Nurse Cathy but to myself that I had needed the degrading ‘training' she and Jake had given me last night.

My forehead working and my heart pounding, I returned my attention to the nurse's white shoes.

"Yes," I whispered.

Nurse Cathy tapped on her tablet.

"Alright," she said after four or five more taps. "Go ahead and get on the scale for me."

She noted my weight, took my temperature, had me sit on the exam chair with its crinkly paper cover so that she could read my blood pressure.

"I'll let the doctor know you're ready," she told me, and left the room.

Shelly and I sat in uncomfortable silence for about five minutes. A couple of times I thought she might be about to say something—with my eyes on my hands, curled atop the blue fabric of the shapeless gown, I could see her shift in her chair out of the corner of my eye. Once she cleared her throat and I felt sure she might even be getting ready to apologize, but nothing else emerged. On my side, I had a zillion questions, but I didn't know how to put them into words. Plus, they were all mortifying, and I had no intention of asking Shelly any of them and giving her the satisfaction of having satisfied my curiosity.

A knock came at the door, and the door opened, almost simultaneously with the knock. The doctor came in, a middle-aged man with silver at the temples of his dark brown hair. Nurse Cathy came in after him, pushing a wheeled tray with stuff on top that looked very medical and thus naturally scary. I recognized a clear plastic speculum, which the nurse unwrapped as the doctor pulled on blue latex gloves.

"Grace," he said, in a voice that I could tell he intended to sound reassuring though really he couldn't keep the brusqueness out of it, "I'm Doctor Simmons."

He picked up something from the tray and started to put it on his head. He clicked something on it, and a bright light came on, held on the doctor's forehead by an elastic band.

"Let's have you go ahead and sit back in the chair. Cathy, could you get the stirrups into position?"

I had forgotten about that part—repressed it in my memory, I felt certain, from my first gynecological appointment. As the doctor wheeled a stool over from underneath the counter, Nurse Cathy pulled the horrid metal knee stirrups out from the sides of the exam chair.

I stayed frozen in place, seated on the edge of the chair.

"Grace, dear," the nurse said, her voice impatient despite the dear. "Please do what Doctor Simmons asked."

"She's a little… dreamy," Shelly said, an apologetic tone in her words. I blinked. It didn't really represent a defense of my failure to obey as much as a relatively harmless explanation for it, but my foster mother seemed to care how I came across.

"Dreamy?" the doctor asked, his patience clearly already worn thin. "Or is she just badly behaved? Grace, we can restrain you if we have to."

That idea sent a jolt through my nervous system, and the effect of it down below my tummy troubled me so much that I complied simply to avoid even thinking about the possibility of ‘restraint.' I pushed backwards on the paper and reclined against the back of the chair.

"There we go," the nurse said, instantly taking hold of my right leg and swinging it up and over into the stirrup. I bit my lip to keep from protesting, feeling panic rise in my chest.

"Just breathe easily," Doctor Simmons instructed. "Nice and deep, in through your nose, out through your mouth."

I looked up at him, to find his eyes locked on my face and his expression mild, as if by complying I had won him over to my side at least a little. To my confusion, I suddenly felt a sort of answering mildness—a pathetic eagerness to please, even. I took a deep breath, through my nostrils as he had instructed, and let it out slowly through my pursed lips.

"Good girl," the doctor said, nodding. "We'll get this over with nice and quick."

Nurse Cathy put my other knee in its stirrup. The doctor sat on his stool. It happened so quickly I barely had time to yell inwardly at myself for once again responding to good girl like a puppy who's been punished with a rolled-up newspaper and then forgiven with a scratch behind the ears.

That reaction, though, gave way instantly to the all-over blush that accompanied the doctor fixing his attention between my knees and his nurse smearing lube over the beak of the speculum before she handed it to him.

"We're going to take a look at your hymen first, Grace," he told me. "We just want to be sure that when the time comes with your first accepted suitor, he'll be able to penetrate you without too much discomfort for either of you."