Chapter 26

Grace

Cal kept his eyes on the road for a few seconds after I had made my sarcastic demand for information. I watched his brows knit and then relax, and I thought maybe I saw him, for the second time, control his temper. That made me angry, so angry that when he turned to look at me with a sort of evaluating expression, as if he felt the need to figure out what had gotten into me, I snapped at him.

"Well?"

"I think," Cal said slowly, as if he were talking to a child, "we're going to see what happens in the way of intimacy."

In the way of intimacy. The way you would talk about it with a child. The anger rose higher in me. Again, I understood—somewhere—that my reaction wasn't fair. Really he hadn't spoken to me like a child at all; he had spoken the way a careful, considerate man would speak to a woman he's interested in getting close to, emotionally and physically. A girl he'd kissed, and who had kissed him back.

A girl whose bottom hole he'd put his thumb in, and made her come, over and over. As a punishment, for her negative attitude and her bad language.

I shifted in my seat, trying to dispel the mortifying memory of that sensation: the helplessness, the unwelcome pleasure that was really unwelcome only because I couldn't help actually, deep down welcoming it. Wanting it.

The way I want it now. I felt my forehead crease. Squirming in my seat that way hadn't helped at all; it had made the problem much worse instead.

"I think you should take me straight home," I said. "To… I mean, take me to the Carpenters' house."

Not home. Jake and Shelly's house of shame and insanity. Grasskiln would never feel like home.

Except that it did. I had said home.

"I'll take you home to Jake and Shelly's if that's what you really want," Cal said, speaking slowly and carefully once again. The words were straightforward. They should have made me feel better. They absolutely didn't; I told myself that I could hear in them Cal's disdain for my immaturity alongside his frustration with not getting what he wanted.

He's the one who's acting like a child. He wants to get in my pants… do all that weird-ass ‘training' shit these people are always talking about. He wants to take my virginity and make me his obedient fuck toy fiancée or some shit.

I had started down this track and I had no way of stopping the runaway train of my negative thoughts. The fact that underneath my anger I could feel how much I wanted, insanely, to have Cal train me to make him feel good, teach me to take his rigid cock exactly as he chose to give it to me, in all my holes, until I could hardly walk… that only made it worse.

"Are you saying you think I don't know what I want, you fucking asshole?" I demanded. The words spilled out of me before I could even think about what they meant.

I watched his chest rise and fall. He had his gaze fixed straight ahead, on the road ahead of us. I felt my eyes widen as I saw how tightly he seemed suddenly to have gripped the steering wheel. My heart, already beating a good deal faster than normal, started to seem like it would thud its way out of my chest.

"I… I…" I stammered, the fear of the consequences of my behavior finally penetrating my mind. "I… sir… I didn't…"

I tried desperately to persuade myself it wasn't true, but to my horror, I felt the need between my thighs growing like wildfire as I watched Cal struggle with his temper. I had done it now, I understood. I shrank back in the car seat, toward the passenger door. I put my hands out in front of me, as if he would lunge across the cab, with complete disregard for keeping the truck on the road, and rip me apart. The surge of arousal in my training panties at the idea of those strong hands on my body, doing whatever their owner chose with me, brought a whimper to my lips, of fear and need so closely intertwined that I could never have separated them.

"I'll take you home to Jake and Shelly's," Cal said, giving me one icy look before he returned his eyes to the windshield, "after I punish you for your disrespect, Grace Franklin."

My lips opened. I couldn't believe he had just called me by my full name. I couldn't believe how infuriating it felt, and at the same time how terribly arousing. Also, even worse, how absolutely terrifying.

"Wait…" I said. "Wait… sir… I… I… I didn't mean it!"

"I think that's probably partly true," Cal said, his voice calm now, as if having decided what he meant to do about my lunatic behavior made his temper well in check, and I wouldn't be able to get him riled up no matter what I did. "But that just means you need the lesson I'm going to give you even more."

Lesson. The last lesson he had given me hadn't really been so bad. I bit my lip. Maybe this one would be like that one?

"Wh-what are you… I mean, how are you going to…" I felt the need to choose my next word very carefully, as if I had to keep from giving him any ideas. The observing part of me, which had just broken off and soared high into the sky, almost laughed at that. "How are you going to… you know, teach… me?"

"I'm going to paddle you," he said, with that awful calmness.

My eyes went so wide they felt completely round. My whole body started to tremble.

"With… with, like… a… a paddle?" What a stupid question, but how else could I ask it?

"Yes, Grace," he said. Suddenly I felt desperate for him to call me darlin' again. I hadn't really thought about it until then, but at that moment I realized that I had liked it, without even noticing. I had liked it a lot—definitely a lot more than I liked him just saying my name. "I got one from Mrs. Brown today."

My heart rate and my breathing both sped up so much I started to think I might faint.

"Wh-what… what's it made out of?" I asked. Again the words emerged with what seemed like zero thought behind them. Why did I want to know that? Why did it even matter, since I absolutely planned not to feel the horrid thing no matter what material some lunatic had crafted it from.

"Wood," Cal answered shortly, turning to give me a brief look, with the same assessing expression in his eyes that I'd seen many times before. A stab of appreciation pushed into my chest, that the man who had undertaken to be responsible for me—for the shoplifting, foulmouthed handful called Grace Franklin—had the ability and the inclination to pay such careful attention to my behavior and my state of mind. Then the rebellious part of me shouted back, He has no fucking right to assess you, or whatever. No fucking right, any more than he has the right to… to get a wooden paddle and… and teach you a lesson with it.

"Oh, hell, no," I said. "No no no. Take me home… I mean, to Jake and Shelly's." Fuck. I had done it again. "Jake can do whatever the fuck he wants, I guess, but… but…"

Something about the idea of a wooden thing—an implement my ‘accepted' suitor had obtained from the horrid Mrs. Brown for the purpose of disciplining me when I misbehaved—a paddle… a word whose sound I hadn't realized could have such a distressing effect on my mind, my heart, and my body… somehow the thought of it combined with my deeply conflicted feelings about Cal and the way he treated me, and I just suddenly wanted none of it, no matter how another part of me might feel about him—about his handsome face, his hard body, his basic kindness and decency. I felt at that moment like I would much, much sooner go over the arm of Jake's easy chair and get the family strap than go over Cal's knee to receive some ‘lesson' from his new paddle.

"Listen," Cal said. "Darlin', you need to make up your mind to submit tonight, even if it's only to the paddling I'm going to give you. You're not going to get out of it, even if I have to yank you, screaming, out of the truck, and I have to tear your clothes off you to give you what you've got coming."

I blinked at him, my jaw slack, as I thought about it.

"You're going over my knee for a hand spanking. Then you're going to have some corner time. Then you're going to take off all your clothes and bend over the side of the bed for the paddle. All that is going to happen, and there's nothing you can do to keep it from happening."

I gazed at him, thunderstruck, as he delivered all this news, calmly but with so much authority that I had to work very hard, mentally, to generate any doubt about the terrible ‘facts' my suitor had just imparted.

"You… you…" The word can't tried to come out of my mouth, but it died on my lips, because Cal had turned to look at me. The expression on his face utterly denied the idea that he couldn't. To my surprise and disgust, I burst into tears.

"Please… please… Cal… sir… I'll…" I gulped for air, and swallowed hard. "Please don't… don't paddle me… sir… I'll be good… I'm sorry I disrespected you. Please?"

To my astonishment—or at least to the astonishment of the part of me that had fought so hard for my ‘independence,' as I'd been thinking of it—I did feel sorry. Somehow the threat of the horrible paddle had done that, had gotten me to see that I had made a bad mistake in the way I had spoken to the man who I knew, deep down, really just wanted to care for me, and to get close to me… as close as two humans could get.

That thought, of what could have been if I hadn't fucked up, of the kissing and the touching and the getting out of our clothes, and the… the thing I needed so, so much, when I let myself think about Cal doing it to me… brought a fresh burst of sobbing out of my chest.

He gave another glance over at me from the driver's seat, and then he reached out his hand, so slowly that I didn't mistake it for anything forceful, let alone violent. I just watched it, so big and so firm, the fingers long and thick but also somehow graceful and clearly skilled at working with engines and sparkplugs and whatever else a mechanic did. It moved toward me, and then it settled on my thigh and gave a gentle squeeze.

I heard a whimper come from my throat, and the seeming distance of that sound from me told me how very thoroughly I had detached from myself, how far I floated above the truck as it sped down the dark rural highway toward my horrible appointment with Cal's new paddle.

"Hey," he said. "It's going to hurt, but it's not the end of the world."

I blinked again, raising my eyes to his calm face, then lowering them to look at his hand. His right hand, the one that would spank me… the one whose thumb had taught me such a lewd, ambiguous lesson a few nights ago… the one that would wield the wooden paddle. I tried to stop myself, but I couldn't: I laid my own hand on top of his, so that I could feel its strength.

"You were a naughty girl, and you're going to get paddled for it, so that you can learn. Your butt is going to hurt for a day or two, because you disrespected me. That's what you need, and it's what I'm going to give you, but afterwards… clean slate."