Chapter 4

Jake

Grace tried to plead with me on the way to the truck, twisting around to try to look me in the face as I marched her to the passenger door.

"Please… Mr.… I mean…" She swallowed visibly. She didn't want to say sir; I could see it in her pretty green eyes. I reached out and opened the door of the trusty old F150.

Grace got a little frantic, trying to pull her elbow out of my grip. She'd started to tremble, too.

"Sir… please…"

I thought I could already tell that everything Mrs. Brown had told me about the girls the New Modesty Authority had sent to Grasskiln was pretty much on target. Grace Franklin had a tough exterior, but on the inside lay a sweet young woman badly in need of guidance from good people like Shelly and me.

Grace's reaction to the knowledge that she'd soon get what seemed very likely the first whipping of her life definitely indicated that the other part—the sexual part—of Mrs. Brown's description was also accurate. From my long experience of disciplining my wife the old-fashioned way, I could tell that Grace, like Shelly, had a complicated but highly sexual relationship with corporal punishment.

Grace Franklin had, that is, come to the right town to finish growing up, and to find a husband who could take her in hand and care for her properly.

"Get in the car, Grace," I told her. "Don't make it worse for yourself."

"But—"

"What did I just say, girl? Did you not hear me?"

Another hard swallow. Tears had started to form in the corners of her pretty eyes.

"B-but?—"

I cut her off again, squeezing her elbow more firmly and starting to push her, with my grip on her arm, up the step into the passenger compartment of the truck.

"Every time you say but, girl, it gets a little worse for yours. Don't make me whip you right here in the street."

That drew a cry of fear from Grace. She hopped up into the seat, looking around from side to side as if she thought she might be able to find some way to escape.

"Fasten your seatbelt," I told her, and then I closed the door and started around to the driver's side. When I got there and opened my own door, I saw that Grace hadn't in fact fastened her seatbelt, and that her little hands hovered in front of her, reaching just an inch or two toward the handle of the door. She had obviously had the impulse to try to get out of the truck and run away, but she apparently also had a lick of sense, so she had ended up frozen in that position, clearly trying very hard to control herself.

I saw a chance to teach her a little something about me, and how things would be living with me and Shelly. I pretended not to notice that she had almost made a very foolish attempt to get away, and I started to sit down in the driver's seat, taking my time to climb in.

As soon as Grace felt my weight on the bench seat, she turned to look at me with wide eyes. At the same time, she reached for the seatbelt and started to pull it across her shoulder.

"Good girl," I told her. She had turned to find the buckle of the seatbelt, but now she turned back, her eyes going even rounder. I didn't have the slightest doubt, from the expression on her pretty face, that the words had the same kind of effect they'd always had on Shelly: the sense of solid, benevolent, old-fashioned masculine dominance and the rightness of a strong woman submitting to a stronger, caring man.

Grace

I looked away from Mr. Carpenter quickly, my cheeks burning. I didn't like how my body had reacted to him saying good girl like that, and I didn't know what it meant.

I wasn't a good girl. Hadn't I pretty much proven that? I had shoplifted. I had gotten arrested. I wasn't completely sure what had happened in the hearing room with the judge, if I had to be honest, but it definitely meant the government thought of me as a criminal, didn't it?

I tried to tell myself that I had in fact chosen to become a bad girl. I knew deep down that I hadn't actually chosen it at all—really I had just kind of wanted to see what it felt like. But that didn't mean that I had any interest in playing the part of a well-behaved young lady for this asshole who some ‘authority' had designated as my foster father.

My body, though, seemed to have a different idea. My chest, in particular, where a treasonous warmth seemed to have arisen, something like pride, however much I tried to deny it—but also, horrifyingly, down below my belt, where the notion of being a good girl seemed to become so complicated that I simply refused to think about it.

Thankfully I had a good excuse for looking away, because I had to obey his instruction to fasten the seatbelt, didn't I? I managed to spend long enough on it that Mr. Carpenter had started the car and pulled out into Main Street before I had to turn back toward the windshield.

I looked out at the tiny town of Grasskiln. I saw we were actually about to leave the built-up part of it completely and drive out into the gently rolling farmland that seemed to surround the town on all sides. I felt for a moment like I had somehow, despite everything, managed to find my way out. I had grown up in a grimy suburb and moved to a grimier city, with no prospect of finding anything softer, or greener, or just better. Here I was in the heartland, apparently with a roof over my head—or at least in the cab of an old, but clearly well-loved, pickup truck.

When I remembered what Mr. Carpenter had promised would happen once I got under his roof, though, the warmth of those few seconds of something like contentment drained out of my body in an instant. I had my hands on my knees, half-consciously trying to cover up the fashionable rips in my jeans. At the recollection of what the big, bearded man had said when I had stupidly talked back to him, and he had grabbed my arm—that's nothing compared to how much your butt is going to hurt by the time you go to bed tonight—I clutched so hard at my legs that I forced a little cry of pain from my throat.

"Grace, honey?" Mr. Carpenter asked, startling me as much by his attentiveness as by the surprisingly gentle tone he used. He turned to look at me briefly, then returned his attention to the twilit road, then looked at me again. "You okay?"

My jaw dropped. I had absolutely no idea how to answer. Of course I wasn't okay. How could I possibly be okay, when he had told me he meant to do to me what the guard on the bus had done to Frannie? And maybe even worse—I had the distinct feeling, though without any exact knowledge, that a whipping would differ from a whuppin' in some important and painful way. Mr. Garrison spanking Frannie with his hand had apparently represented a whuppin'. Mr. Carpenter had threatened to whip me right there in the street. What my ‘foster father' planned to do to me seemed like it could well involve something worse than his farm-callused hand.

As these desperate, terrifying, pseudo-logical thoughts ran through my head, another voice, somewhere off in the distance of my mind, started to scream. Crazy. Fucking insane. Lunacy. What the ever-loving fuck are you even thinking about? Stop trying to figure out exactly what this fucked-up nonsense means and start trying to get the fuck out of here.

He had called me honey. That part hadn't really sunk in at first—probably because I had not the slightest idea what to make of it. Apparently a man like Mr. Carpenter could call a girl honey despite having every intention of baring her ass and whipping her until she couldn't sit down.

Yes, the screaming voice continued. He's insane.

I turned my eyes to the truck door. If I managed to slip out of my seatbelt quickly enough, I might be able to open it and jump out. Mr. Carpenter wasn't driving more than thirty-five; I could probably roll with the impact and not get hurt. The sky might have gotten dark enough that I could slip into the cornfield, where the stalks seemed about as high as my head, and conceal myself as I ran in a direction he wouldn't see.

Thankfully the screaming in my head found that plan almost as crazy as my situation.

No, idiot, the voice said, changing its tone from disapproval to disgust and seeming to soften a little. Just don't think you've somehow landed in a midwestern paradise.

"Grace?" he asked again. I turned back to look at him, and saw an apparently genuine look of concern on his face.

He's probably getting some sort of subsidy to ‘care' for you, the disgusted observer in my brain told me. He doesn't want his cash payment to suffer because you got sick or anything.

"I'm fine," I told him. Then I remembered about what he had told me to call him, and I added, "sir," with what felt like just enough emphasis to leave a bit of doubt about whether I intended it to sound sarcastic.

Mr. Carpenter turned off the paved main road—it couldn't be Main Street, at this point, and probably had a number rather than a name—onto a dirt one. Up ahead, a few hundred yards away, I saw a house. I almost rubbed my eyes, because at first it looked way too much like a farmhouse in a picture book to be real. Porch, check. Porch swing, check. Glow in the windows, check. Next to it, an honest-to-God weathervane. I thought I could even see a pump handle. Farther off, of course, lay a barn, which seemed like the most modern part of the place. It was red, but it was also much bigger than a picture-book barn, and clearly made of stronger, newer materials—aluminum, if I had to guess.

"You didn't sound fine a moment ago," Mr. Carpenter commented, his voice neutral, his eyes fixed ahead of us at what was obviously his home, the place where the faceless megacorp executives who ran the world these days had sent me to live, for my crime. "You sounded like you needed help."

The disgusted observer tried to stop them, but the tears seemed to burst out of my eyes. I hated that this tiniest possible bit of kindness from a man who meant to teach me an old-fashioned lesson or some bullshit made me cry, but some part of me simply responded that way out of sheer emotional reflex.

"What the fuck?" I sobbed, just as the truck pulled into the little parking area next to the farmhouse. "How can you even ask me that, when… when…"

I covered my face in my hands, completely losing it and not minding anymore. At least for the moment I didn't have to try to keep it together, or to think at all, really.

I felt his big, warm hand on my shoulder.

"Hey, honey," he said. "I know you've been through a lot. Today, and probably before today, too, if you ended up on the wrong end of the law that way."

The hand squeezed gently, and the soothing feeling brought another heaving sob from my chest. I took my hands away from my face and clasped them in front of my chest. I looked at Mr. Carpenter with teary eyes and pleaded with him.

"Please… please, sir?" I begged, looking into his dark eyes.

He nodded slowly.

"It's about your punishment for sassing me?" he asked. "You're scared of the family strap?"

I felt my breathing speed up in my chest. There, said one of the many voices in my head, that's why he said whip. I nodded frantically.

"Well," he said, "you earned a whipping, and you're going to get a whipping, but I'm going to let you choose whether you'll have it tonight or tomorrow morning."