Chapter 8

Grace

If I had thought the last time Jake had called me a good girl had roused complicated thoughts and feelings, it didn't hold a candle to this time. When his hand descended onto my waist, working its way up underneath my t-shirt, my whole body seemed to seethe with an impossible mixture of rebellion and need, fear and arousal and even—because of the good girl—an irresistible glow of… pride? Gratitude?

The question of what the fuck was wrong with me began to seem terribly, terribly important—more important even than the matter of what was wrong with Jake and Shelly. They seemed to know what they were doing, when it came to making me feel like my entire world, my very identity, had to change. I, on the other hand, didn't have the slightest clue what to do with the part of me that wanted their help—the glow in my chest to have received that tiny bit of praise, good girl, from the man about to whip me with his family strap.

All of it, mixed together, seemed to come out in the way my body responded when I felt his big, strong hand on the bare skin of my back. I started to struggle, writhing over the arm of the chair. Jake increased the pressure on my back, pinioning me in place.

"That's alright, honey," he said. "I know you're scared, just like your foster mama said."

For a moment, despite the way he had clamped down on my waist, I thought he meant that he had decided not to whip me. Then I heard the strap whistle through the air, and I heard the crack of it across my bottom. A split second later, more quickly than I had felt it through my jeans, I felt a line of fire on my rear end. I felt my body try to rise up, to get up and run away, but Jake kept me precisely where I was, and brought the leather down again.

I screamed, as much out of fear of the pain to come as from the atrocious agony my foster father had already meted out to my poor butt. I kicked out, trying to make it more difficult for him to whip my backside. My jeans, still around my knees, restrained me so that I couldn't do anything but flail my feet in the air, much too conscious of how the movement of my thighs lewdly exposed my privates to Jake's eyes.

"No, Grace," he said, and for the first time I heard what Jake sounded like when he put the full weight of his authority behind it. The no made my tummy flip all by itself, but then he reinforced it by whipping my upper thighs, hard and fast, until I put my feet back on the floor, sobbing.

"Those don't count, honey," Shelly commented from her chair.

I had closed my eyes the moment Jake's hand had come to rest on my back, but I opened them to see, through the film of my tears, that Shelly had her attention on her knitting, a crease in her forehead and her lower lip caught between her teeth. Somehow I had time to wonder, even through the agony in my backside, just how it made Shelly feel to watch me get a whipping: did her expression just mean she was focused on her knitting? Or did she experience the same kind of conflict I'd felt watching Frannie get her spanking from the guard at the gas station?

"There we go," Jake said in satisfaction, and started to punish me in earnest.

All thoughts about Shelly or Frannie or the trip to Grasskiln or anything at all, except the fiery agony in my ass, flew away. My body bucked with each lash, and suddenly I had only enough control over my limbs to try, as hard as I could, not to struggle; all that mattered was that Jake stop whipping me.

I screamed and screamed. I kept my eyes closed, my fists curled up against my face, my tears flowing onto the leather cushion. My bottom felt like my foster father had applied a sizzling hot iron to it, and each new application of the strap seemed to raise the temperature, its individual pain fading into the terrible inferno.

The screams became pitiful wails, rising with each crescendo of pain, and then I seemed to go limp over the arm of the chair. Each new lash only brought a jerk of my hips and a humiliating squirm of my ass as I tried to ease the agony just a bit.

"That's it," I heard Jake say from high above me. "Good girl. You're learning. Three more, now."

A storm of sobs burst from my chest. How could he? Didn't he know that made it so much worse, those final three?

Of course he knows it, the distant, detached voice in my mind said. He knows how to whip a girl like you. That's why he said it, so you'll think about it.

Jake gave me the first, and I cried out, my back arching.

"Are you going to sass me again, honey?" he asked, his voice very grave, as if the question were a request for a solemn vow.

In the moment after he asked, I felt, to my astonishment, like I didn't want to say yes, let alone yes, sir. Somehow, even with two lashes from the strap remaining, the fact that the end had come in sight had brought a spark of defiance back into my chest.

Jake's right hand, with the strap in it, took hold of my bottom and squeezed gently.

I cried out pitifully, though I could hear in the sound that the terrible complexity of my thoughts and feelings and fantasies had risen again to the surface of my body and my mind. The very idea of my foster father touching me that way seemed to send the fire from his strap shooting everywhere in my body—but above all, mortifyingly, to my pussy.

I had to say it. I had to end this, so that at the very least I could think about what it meant, and what the fuck I intended to do about it—if I could do anything at all. Even as I sobbed out the words, though, I knew I told a lie.

"Yes, sir."

His hand moved, and I whimpered at the softness of his firm hand's touch. The fingers moved downward, began to rub lightly, much too close to the place I both desperately wanted them and deeply feared they would go. I moaned, despite my best efforts; I simply couldn't keep the sound down. I turned my face, moved my fist, opened my eyes to look at Shelly as I felt my cheek dip into the pool of tears I had made on the cushion.

To my astonishment, her eyes gazed straight back into mine. Her knitting lay on her lap, with her hands folded over it, but all her attention had focused on me. Her expression didn't contain the horror I'd expected. Instead, she had a little smile on her face, though her cheeks seemed to have more color than they'd had when she had first sat down in her chair. I blinked, distracted for the moment from the pain in my rear end, as I noticed that her chest seemed to have begun rising and falling in a more rapid rhythm than her relaxed, seated position seemed to warrant.

Could she see where her husband had his hand? I felt my eyes go wide as I realized that she must see it. I bit my lip to keep it back, but a low moan came from my chest.

"Naughty girl," Jake said in an impossibly deep voice, from much closer to my ear than I had expected him to be. He had bent down, to speak the words to me in an intimate way that sent fire through my veins. The sheer physical presence of the handsome, older farmer, looming over me, controlling my body with his hands, made me lightheaded.

Then he took his hand away from my ass, and I sensed him straightening up. His left hand gripped my back a little tighter, and I knew what would happen next. I tried to suppress my cry of fear, but it came out anyway, and then it became a wail of agony as the strap came down hard across my bottom cheeks.

"Is there anything else you'd like to say, Grace?" Jake asked.

I had closed my eyes again as the leather had whistled through the air, and squeezed them shut even more tightly as the pain had built in my backside. I opened them to look at Shelly. My lips parted when I saw that her hands, in her lap, weren't motionless any longer—nor had she started to knit again. No: through her modest blue cotton skirt her fingers had begun to push against what lay hidden there. Rhythmically, steadily, Shelly had begun to touch herself as she watched the end of my punishment.

My eyes traveled upward to her face as my own cheeks went burning hot in an instant, to match the terrible heat in my backside. Shelly had her lower lip between her teeth. Her nostrils flared a little with each breath. Her gaze didn't meet mine; I saw that instead she had focused her attention on my bottom, and maybe on the sight of Jake looming over me with the strap in his hand.

As I looked into her face, humiliation mingled inside me with an urgent jolt of need, dark fantasies and shameful desires unfolding unbidden in my mind. Her eyes returned to mine, and her forehead creased very deeply. The pink in her cheeks got brighter, but she didn't stop moving her fingers over her concealed private parts, and she didn't look away.

"Tell your foster daddy that you're sorry, honey," she told me in a husky voice that only made the conflicting thoughts and feelings inside my head more troubling. "Once you apologize, he'll touch your little pussy for you and make you feel good."

I felt my lips part, as if it were happening to a different girl, another young woman who had somehow arrived in the very same humiliating position I had. I sensed my breath coming in and out, raggedly, from the other girl's lungs and back into them, out the other girl's mouth and back into it. My eyes traveled down again, to watch Shelly play with herself through her modest skirt, because the other Grace Franklin couldn't help it—couldn't stop herself from seeing the naughty thing her foster mama did, at the sight of me getting my bare-bottom whipping.

I felt my own hips move, as if in sympathy with Shelly's naughtiness. They bucked over the arm of the chair, desperate to find a little friction.

"Oh, no, you don't," Jake said, his voice severe. His left hand moved from the small of my back to seize my right hip and haul me backwards, so that my pussy couldn't reach the surface of the upholstery. "Your foster mama has permission to play with herself. You don't, honey."

"Oh… oh, God…" I sobbed. "I… I…"

I tried to turn my head back over my shoulder to get a look at Jake's face, but all I could see was the flannel of his shirt over his muscular back.

"Say you're sorry, honey," Shelly said in that same thick voice—the sound even huskier now, as if watching my punishment had brought her close to a climax.

"I'm sorry, sir," I wailed. "Please…"

The answer to that please was a hard lash from the strap, while Jake held me securely in place to take it exactly as he chose to give it to me: full across my butt, low down where it hurt the most. I cried out in anguish, but then I felt his hand return, with the strap still in it but my foster father's fingers in the place I needed them the most, rubbing my clit firmly, making my body explode with sudden pleasure.

"That's it, Grace," he murmured in my ear, stooping over me. "I bet you've never come before. Is that right?"