Chapter 3
Janet awoke the next morning to find herself alone in bed. She looked at the alarm clock, and saw that it was ten-thirty. Phil had already left for work. There was a note on the pillow next to her. Janet picked it up and read it. "Darling," it began. "I have had to leave you alone as I do not want to be late for work. There is an important case coming up today, and I want to make sure that I get to the office in time to assemble all of the material that I need. I made myself breakfast, and did kiss you goodbye, although you were fast asleep at the time, and probably did not notice. I figured that you could use the rest if you had slept through the alarm, and I didn't want to go and disturb you unnecessarily.
"I hope that the events that occurred last night didn't cause you to leave me or in any way come to hate me. I could not explain exactly what happened at the time, and cannot hope to do so in a letter. I feel terribly ashamed of myself, and hope that there is some way that I can make this up to you. I love you very much, and wish that I could do something to wipe this incident out of our life together. I can very well understand that you may be furious with me, and you have every right to be, but even if this is the case, please hear me out. I ask you only to remain at home until I have a chance to talk to you. If nothing else, I can explain all of this to you, and we will hopefully be able to reach some satisfactory middle-ground that we can inhabit without damaging ourselves. Remember that I love you. Please give a very disturbed man a chance to explain things to you before you cut him. The note had been written in a very shaky hand, and there were several splotches where a tear had obviously smeared the ink about. Janet was very surprised by the tone and by the content. Phil was obviously ashamed of his conduct, and wanted, he said, a chance to explain himself before she left him forever. His certainty that she was about to do this was what puzzled her the most.
Janet, at this point, had no intention of leaving her husband. Far from it. She had every hope and expectation that their love was about to grow and expand into areas it had not yet been able to reach. She was still possessed by it all, loved it, wanted more. She rushed to the bathroom, the first thing, and grabbed up her hand mirror. She then stood with her back to the full length mirror, and held the smaller glass up so that she could see the marks of her spanking in all their glory. Shivers of delight coursed through her as she spotted the red welts and splotches that appeared intermittently on the surface of her ass. She ran a hand to them, and rubbed the sensitive, sore areas. They hurt to touch, but what a marvelous hurt it was, sending more sensations through her. She touched her wounds, and remembered the excitement of her helplessness, of the way the belt had landed on her, and of the way that Phil had taken her and broken her, making her submit totally to his desires. She closed her eyes and it all came back to her.
She remembered her helpless screams finally being drawn out of her as he rammed his finger into her asshole. She remembered going over his knee, her utter disbelief that he was going to do this to her in the first place. The furious beating with the whip was the most vivid of the punishments. She could feel once more the pounding her tail received, and the way she had gradually come to love each blow from the leather belt, and she recalled how she had begun to move her buttocks up to meet each swing of the arm so that every stroke would register its full possible impact.
She went into the bathroom, and cleaned out the tub so that she could take herself a bath. The hot water would probably sting, she thought. She could imagine how she would feel, and thought of how sitting down would become something of a chore. She relished the thought that she would be reminded of her beating every time she went into a restaurant, or sat on a bus or train. The flashbacks to her humiliation would take her to it countless times a day, and she would finally remember the way that he had parted the lips of her snatch, and driven into her with passionate fury, turning her on as she had never been turned on before.
The skin of her battered behind did indeed hurt just a bit, but she got herself into a reasonably comfortable position. The bottom of the tub still irritated her just slightly, but she concentrated on the pleasant memories that this stirred, and lay back, and began to finger her pussy as she felt what little tension there was in her body leave with the gentle caresses of the warm water.
So, she thought to herself, Phil was ashamed of his actions. That was puzzling. He had suddenly come out of his shell, breaking down whatever it was that had kept him from wanting to fuck his wife. He had been so secretive about his past that she realized that it must be something that was back in the past that he didn't want to get in touch with. She had inadvertently hit it on a number of occasions, she realized now. Every time that he had gone into that nasty shell, where he would stare until he had come up with some stupid quip, she had caused him to act that way by somehow hitting him in very tender psychological areas. Last night had been the worst, because she had driven him totally out of control. What had she said to him? The answer came after several minutes of hard thought. She had told him that he was impotent, and had made several remarks to the effect that he was less of a man than the norm for the average American male. She had concentrated very hard on his apparent inability to have intercourse with her, and this had set off a totally unexpected and violent reaction that led to his giving her exactly what she had wanted all along. What did this indicate?
Well, it indicated that by giving vent to his hostility, he had been able to break down his resistance to having more conventional kinds of sex. Therefore, something about masochism has a connection in his mind with sexual relations between husband and wife. This was most likely a matter of how he was raised, and how his parents behaved towards one another. This was among the things that she was going to have to find out.
She thought of all this as she lay back in the tub and drove her fingers against her moist mound of pleasure. She rubbed the out sides of her pussy, and then parted the folds of skin, running her fingers inside, flicking them against her clitoris. She shoved them up her pussy, thrusting the fingers into the vagina, and feeling the walls inside her that had been so nicely scraped the night before. She could feel traces of his jism still inside her, and rubbed the stickiness between her fingers. This turned her on, as the flexing of the digits stimulated the still excited membranes inside her. She began thrusting them in in a regular rhythm, adding fingers as the time went on, parting the walls further and further, trying to reach something like the state of ecstasy she had known the night previous to this, closing her eyes and seeing her husband's form over her.
They were screwing in the missionary position now, and Phil was again the only lover she could conjure up in her mind. There was something different from the way she had seen it the night before. Then, there had been a sense of desperation to her activities. She had tried to imagine a lover, any lover, and she had only been able to see him. She had even been trying not to, but nonetheless he had popped into her head, quiet uninvited, but there nonetheless. She had felt that she had failed herself at that point, because she had been trying to drive him out of her life, and instead she had seen that Phil was the only man that meant anything to her, whose touch she desired, whose prick would fill her up to the required level Now, however, things were quite different. Now it was Phil that she wanted to see. She wanted once more to experience the driving force of his hot shaft penetrating the tender lips of her love tunnel, wanted to experience the hulk of his body, the force with which it plowed against hers, the wonderful feeling that shot through her thighs as she felt him ram against the bruised parts of her anatomy. She wanted to feel this again, and while masturbating was no substitute for the real thing, it managed to approximate enough of the feeling so that she could almost believe it was really happening to her again.
She used one hand on her clit, and thrust the other inside herself as deep as she could manage. She was moving them in and out very rapidly and she called his name over and over, seeing him so distinctly that she began to feel his flesh against hers, began to feel the rate of his breath, began to become aware of a powerful presence that she could not ignore. She came now, and as she did she felt her insides jump as though hit by a jet of hot sperm, and as it reached the end of her pussy wall, she felt it dripping down, cooling off as it slid towards the opening between her thighs.
The sensations of her climax resounded through her body, and she allowed them to slowly seep out, fading into the water and the air that surrounded her nude presence. She felt that she had been somehow transformed, that she was another person and that she had begun a new life. She was, at the very least, at the point of this happening, but first she had to get through to Phil. He was going to be very depressed when he got home, and she would have to see to it that he got himself into a better frame of mind. She would have to get him to talk, and tell her everything about his past, in the hope that his dark secret would be uncovered.
She began to think of her introduction to this sort of practice, and while she still thought to herself that it was rather bizarre, and that it was totally unlike anything she had experienced previously, she was most certainly not shocked, nor was she repulsed by what had happened. She had quite enjoyed it. It was not merely that it had been a prelude to sex. She had come just from the spanking, so obviously there was something in the spanking that appealed to her.
Her own father had never spanked her. That sort of discipline had been left to her mother, and there was not much of it coming from that quarter. She had grown up without having to have been punished much at all, and she had never developed any kinky thrills from her own experience. She did now remember an occurrence, however, that was probably at the root of her taste for what had happened.
When she was eleven, she had been over at a friend's house playing dolls. They had gotten kind of excited, and had removed their clothes to see if they looked like the dolls. Janet and Karen, her friend, were more or less satisfied with their own similarities to the toys, but were puzzled by the fact that the boy doll had no penis. One thing had lead to another, and they had decided they felt cheated. They wanted to see what a boy had looked like without his clothes on. Karen had gotten dressed, and had her brother Michael come into the room where they were playing.
Michael, who was thirteen, was surprised when he saw Janet sitting there naked, but had gotten over his embarrassments as Karen stripped nude again herself. They showed him little undeveloped slits, and had him put his fingers there, discovering that this felt rather nice. Janet then got dressed, and Karen had her brother strip, remaining nude herself, and laughing at Janet's fear that Karen's mommy might come into the room.
Michael had already begun to mature. His voice was changing, and pubic hair surrounded the slowly maturing testicles. Karen reached up and felt the hairs, and as she did so, her brother's cock began to grow and stand straight up. Michael was getting very excited, and his breath rate increased considerably. He gave little starts and jumps every time his sister made a movement with her hands that excited him. He and Karen now sat opposite each other and began to play with each other, giggling and grunting as their still not matured genitals thrilled to the touch of each other's inexperienced hands.
Suddenly, the door swung open, and their mother came in. Mother was, needless to say, very astounded by the sight of her darlings diddling each other, and ordered them to stand there and wait until she returned. Janet had been unable to decide what to do, but she was told to remain by the angry mother, who carried a broken wooden yardstick in her hand. A very cruel looking yardstick!
"I want you two to bend over the bed," she commanded her offspring. "Janet, I want you to stand over there and watch what happens to two naughty children are found doing something that they know they shouldn't do. You two are going to learn a lesson, and you're going to have it taught to you in front of your friend who doesn't go around doing piggy things that she has been told not to do."
"But mommy," Karen cried, "Janet had her clothes off too."
"Be quiet," Mrs. Harris yelled. "That's an easy thing for you to say right now, and even if it is true, I have no right to punish her since I'm not her mommy. But I hope that if she was doing anything, she will tell her mommy, and get whatever punishment that she thinks is right. In the meantime, she'll get an idea of what happens to naughty boys and girls, and maybe this will deter her from anything like this."
Karen looked at Janet as though she was really mad at her for not admitting that she had been naked too, but Janet just stood there. She wanted very much to be able to run out of the room, but was afraid that Mrs. Harris might tell her mommy that she had done something bad, and she wouldn't be able to play with Karen anymore.
Mrs. Harris used the wooden stick on both Karen and Michael, raising it and bringing it down on Karen first. She hit her ten times. Karen let out little yelps of pain, and by the sixth hit, there were tears rolling out of her eyes. She next began spanking her son, who looked much more embarrassed than his sister by the punishment. He hadn't minded showing his young manhood to a girl, but to be spanked on the bare backside was something entirely different. She shouted out every time the ruler struck his ample behind, and began to cry as soon as he was hit. The flesh on his ass bounced up and down, for he was a rather heavy boy, always being put on some kind of special diet by the family doctor.
Mrs. Harris gave her daughter twenty-five smacks in all, and the same number for her son. Their behinds were now quite pink, and before she let them stand up and get dressed, Mrs. Harris gave them a resounding crack with the back of her hand, the final touch to a scene of humiliation and degradation. She had them get themselves back into their clothing, and told Janet to say goodbye to them very quickly. Karen still looked mad at her friend, and Michael just took his clothes, covered his face with them, and ran off into the corner, hiding his shame, although his sore ass was still visible for all the world to see.
Janet walked home slowly after that. She had been excited by the sight of Michael's cock, and had enjoyed watching Janet make it hard. Her mother had begun telling her the facts of life, and she was happy to have seen an example of it, but at the same time, felt sorry that her friend and her brother had been so embarrassed in front of her.
Yet even in spite of this feeling, Janet had enjoyed watching it. She had felt this funny tingle inside her, somewhere above her crotch and below her belly that was totally new to her. She had felt embarrassed herself, and yet she had felt envious of Janet and Michael, as though she had been naughty too, and the three of them deserved to be punished together, so that they could have shared their shame as well as their joy. She felt cheated and guilty, cheated because she had wanted to feel the pain and redemption of punishment, and guilt because she had remained silent about her part in the action.
When she got home, she told her mother what had happened. She said she was sorry, that she knew she had done something that was wicked and bad, and that she would never do it again. She had been expecting some kind of spanking, but none was forthcoming. She told her mother that that was what she had anticipated, and wondered why not. Her mother just told her that she had been honest, that she had told the truth and confessed that she had done something bad and that as long as this was the case, there was no reason for further punishment. Janet went to her room after that, feeling very cheated.
That's the answer, she said to herself, that's why I enjoyed what Phil did to me last night. All my life I've been looking for someone to punish me, beat me so as to cause pain after I've done something wrong. She had always felt a thrill go through her on the rare occasions she had witnessed any kind of punishment scene, a whipping in a spy movie, or even the artfully posed S & M scenes the slick sex magazines sometimes ran. She had never before actively pursued this quirk in her personality, but since it had bitten her on the ass, so to speak, she was going to find out more about it. If it meant that her sex life would liven up a little bit, it was well worth it.
She went out to the supermarket once again, and made a point of buying all the foods that she had purchased the night before. She was going to make that dinner for him again, and she was going to see to it this time that nothing marred the occasion the way it had the night before. She again got the champagne, and set things up so that the lighting of the room would be as romantic as possible. This time, however, she bought no plastic wrap. There was going to be nothing that even hinted at defiance or threats this time around. There'd only be an atmosphere of trust, of harmony, and of affection between two people who were really just getting to know each other.
Janet had everything ready, and ran to the door, dressed in one of her nicest outfits. Phil, to her surprise, had cleaned up the mess of the night before previous to his leaving for work He left a note once again apologizing for his behavior of the night before. He had gone so out of his way to be apologetic and accommodating that she wondered what he would be like upon arriving home. She would find out in just a second.
She threw her arms around his neck as he walked in the front door. She surprised him, and his mouth was at first unyielding as she stuck her tongue as far into his mouth as she could, searching around, seeking out his tongue, and gradually getting him to follow her lead in having the tongues run circles around each other. He dropped his briefcase, and gently pulled her away.
"Thank you," he told her. "I'm sorry, but I just can't kiss or do any of that right now. I have this problem ... well, let's talk about it. The food smells good. It's the same stuff that we had last night, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is," she said, feeling mixed emotions about his mood.
"That's good. I'm glad you're giving things a second chance. That's much more than I have a right to expect. It's really very kind of you. You have more champagne?"
"Yes, a bottle left over from last night, and another one that I bought today."
"That's good," he said. "I could use a drink. And I'm starved, too."
They went to the kitchen, and ate the meal rather quickly. They didn't talk about very much. Phil had asked her about what kind of day she had had, and he told her in turn about the case and the way it had gone that afternoon. He seemed distracted by something most of the time, as if there was something preying on his mind that he was unable or unwilling to divulge, but Janet figured that she would let it pass, and let him talk about whatever seemed to be uppermost in his mind. The rest would take care of itself.
By the time that they finished dinner, they had finished an entire bottle of the champagne, and they opened the second one. Phil seemed to be in a merry frame of mind at the moment, and began telling some anecdotes concerning the sex lives of some of the other men in the office. They were constantly making life miserable with regards to the female employees of the office, whether they were secretaries or young law clerks looking to get themselves started in the firm. They were constantly getting into trouble and turning to Phil to make excuses for them. He had placed them in the most inventive of places, often making up terribly complicated excuses for them that they would call in to get from him, cursing him all the time for the kinds of tales that he would spin. "The craziest thing is," he would chortle, "the wives think that I'm the one responsible for leading them astray. What a laugh! They usually call me the virtuous virgin, or the counselor of maidenhead." There was more than just a twinge of bitterness to his voice as he said these words, and Janet could see that in his eyes.
"They usually tell me," he went on, "that I'm pretty damn lucky to have a wife who's so wonderful that I don't ever want to screw around on her. They say they wish that they were in my shoes. If only they knew, I always say to myself, that I'm incapable of screwing you."
Janet felt her heart sink. Phil looked near tears, and he hung his head in shame. "You mean that you haven't told anyone about this?" she asked him. He shook his head.
"How the hell could I? It's just so embarrassing. I've always been like this."
"Do you want to tell me about it, darling?" She sat over near him in an attempt to comfort him with the proximity of her body.
"Yes, and I'm going to," he said. "I just need some time to get all my thoughts together." He poured himself a fresh glass of champagne, and drained it out of the glass as fast as he could.
The problem, as Phil told it, had started when he was very young. He had always liked going naked as an infant and one winter he had gone for a long time without doing it thanks to the cold weather. That spring, when he was just a few months short of his third birthday, he had gone outside to play on a very warm day, and had taken his clothes off, running around the backyard in his birthday suit. Suddenly, as he was running in the large field that stood behind his parents' house, he heard his mother calling his name. He turned, saw her coming toward him as fast as she could. She grabbed him by the arm, and leaving his clothes in the yard, had dragged him back into the house.
"Once inside," he went on to tell her, "she made me go over her knee. She began to spank me. This was the first spanking that I ever had. My parents had both hit me before, but I had never been put over the knee and punished in this way. Once she had hit me a couple of times, I began to cry, because her hand hurt me so much. She just kept smacking me until her hand hurt too much, I suppose, and then she stood me up, grabbed me by the hair, and told me that every time I went outside naked, I was going to get a spanking, and that I had left clothing outside that I was going to have to retrieve right now, and that since that was the case, I was going to be going outside naked again, and would be punished for it."
"Of course you don't mean that?" Janet broke in.
"I sure do," he said. "She meant every word of it. She made me run outside and pick up my clothes. I was feeling very embarrassed here, because I thought that now I was doing something that was sinful, and that if I got caught everyone who saw me would punish me and say that I was bad. This is a pretty heavy thing for a kid of that age. So I just ran inside as soon as I got everything together, and hoped that there was no one around. Which wasn't very likely since we live on a large piece of property that no one could see into."
He poured himself another glass of champagne before Janet wondered how anyone could consume so much of it so quickly, but she figured that the liquor must be helping to jog his memory, and that it was okay as long as he seemed to be comfortable drinking that much. She wanted nothing but his comfort.
"Once I got back into the house, she had taken out that wooden spoon. She made me bend over a chair, and spanked the living daylights out of my ass, telling me what a bad little boy I was. I remember being very frightened, because I hadn't done anything that I thought was wrong, but I was being punished. I knew that bad people were supposed to go to hell, in a very childish way, of course, and I was afraid that I was going to go to hell now. I was crying, the tears were streaming down my face, and my ass was really on fire. Every stroke of that spoon hurt so much that I thought it would break across me, just like I had seen happen in cartoons.
"When she finished with me, she asked if I knew why I had been punished. I was crying very hard, so I guess I must have just shook my head. She told me that I was being punished because I had been a very bad boy. I had run around without my clothes on, and that was a bad thing to do. I said that she had let me do that before, and she told me that that was different, that at that time I had been a baby, and babies are allowed to, but once you reach a certain age, you keep your clothes on all through the day, and that you only take them off to take a bath or get undressed, and that it was a sin if you" even took off your clothes and sat around all by yourself naked. She told me to go to my room, and stay there until supper time.
"That was my first spanking. I received a lot after that. Every time that I did something that was wrong, my father would always punish me. I remember that one morning my brother, my sister and I were playing with each other the way that little kids do, and we were making so much noise that my father came in and saw what we were doing. Boy, did we get it! First of all, he made the three of us march outside in our pajamas. Then when we were out there, he made the three of us, including my sister, take off all of our clothes. He took a stick that he had taken from a birch tree, and swung it against us really hard. He always used that to punish us, and it really hurt a hell of a lot. It was even worse than the wooden spoon, because it stung also. He beat us all about thirty times, to the point where we were practically screaming. My brother began to cover his ass with his hands, and my father hit his hands until he let them down at his side, then gave him another fifteen because of the ones that had just hit his arms. This went on all throughout our childhood. Eventually, it was told to us that Adam and Eve had committed the first sin, and that since then, it was wrong for anyone to commit sins of the flesh, sins of lust. We had to remember this and keep our bodies and minds pure.
"I would still take my clothes off, and even started playing with myself when I was about five. I would always get spanked whenever I would get caught at it. So I was really guilty about my body, and really thought that it was bad. This was all through my childhood. I just grew up believing that the body was ugly, and that you weren't supposed to let anybody see you, or you would go to hell.
"I learned about sex when I was thirteen. I was starting to get hair around my genitals, and I had started to have sexual fantasies when I was about eleven. I would often have them when I was in church, praying with all of my classmates. I would have the fantasies about being tortured while I was naked, and these women who were dressed up as nuns, only mostly naked, with just the shawls over their heads, would whip me on the ass, and spank me, make me piss in front of them. I had developed a funny thing about this whenever I went to the doctor, too. I used to pretend to not be able to pee into the bottle, and one of them would give me a lot of water, and then "help me to pee." This kind of stopped when I was twelve, because I figured that I couldn't get away with it anymore."
He finished talking for a few minutes. He leaned back in the chair, and took a deep breath. He asked Janet to get him another drink. He drained off about half of the scotch and water she brought for him, and then he went on with the story.
"My sister was two years older than I was, and when I was thirteen, she'd already pretty much matured. She was a good looking girl, and I used to try to watch her get dressed. One time, she caught me looking at her. I was petrified that she was going to call our mother and tell her, but instead, she told me to come in and sit down on the bed. She had her skirt on, and her bra. She took the bra off, and sat next to me. She asked me if I liked her titties, that was her word, and I said yes, they looked really nice. Then she took off her dress, and asked me if I liked that too. I told her yes again, and by this time I had a bulge in my pants. Both of our parents were out at this point, so she had me take down my pants for a look at my prick. I was pretty well hung for a guy my age, and I was at full mast. She smiled at me, and came up close to me, and began to jerk me off. She told me to play with her nipples, and not to be too rough, because they were sensitive. She had really lovely tits, and I liked the way they felt, kind of squishy. She kept pumping me, and I felt excited. After a long time, I began to get this feeling that I had never had before, like a fire that started down in my balls, and went through my whole body. The sensation was centered in my cock, and before I knew it, I was coming. I shot my cream all over her belly, and she directed it on to herself, and rubbed it into her tits and belly. She then bent down, and began kissing my prick.
"I was really shocked at this. I was afraid of the sensation that I had just felt. I had had a couple of wet dreams already, but I had never felt anything like this, and I was afraid that something awful had happened, because I felt such strange things running all through my body.
"We never mentioned the incident again. My sister went on to have a really wild adolescence. She would sneak out of the house to meet her boyfriends, which she wasn't supposed to have, would stay after school saying she was going to try out for a play or something, and then she would go off and have sex with somebody. She kept up a really wild life, and she got pregnant. My father was furious when he found that out, and he sent her to a convent school, where she had the baby and it was put up for adoption. After that, they tried to keep her under lock and key, but on her eighteenth birthday, she ran away from home, and hasn't been heard from since.
"I and my brother weren't allowed on dates until we were seventeen. That was really a drag, and they used to bad mouth every girl that I ever brought home. They were all tramps and sluts, and they were all just going to lead us astray. My mother used to talk about sex as though it were some kind of a burden, and I always got the impression that neither she nor my father had much interest in it. But I found out that I was mistaken."
"You saw them screwing?" Janet asked.
"More than that," he replied. "On night, when they thought that I was asleep, I heard this noise coming from downstairs. I went down, and looked behind this door that lead to a party room that my parents would use whenever they had company over. They would often go down at night, and the room was soundproof, but tonight they had forgotten to shut the door all the way, and I could peek inside. And there I saw my father beating my mother on the bare ass with the birch rod."
"What!" Janet exclaimed.
"She was stark naked, and strapped to this table that was made up of two wooden saw horses, and a piece of wood that was running over the top. He was getting her to confess to all of her ... sins. Things like playing with herself when she went to the bathroom, and looking at us when we were in the bathroom. For everything that she confessed, she got five strokes with the rod. I watched the whole thing. I was really fascinated. Then, when he has really whipped her ass raw, he untied her, and made her go down on her knees, and suck his cock. He did it pretty violently, too. He'd take it out and slap her face, telling her she was a filthy whore who didn't even deserve to be allowed to suck him. She just nodded dumbly and called him a fuck and all kinds of stuff like that. When he had been sucked enough, he put her down with her hands tied behind her back, and fucked her. He did it very violently, and she got incredibly turned on by it.
"I got up to my bed. I hid under the covers and when they came by the room, I was convinced that they were really going to severely punish me. I was sure that they knew, but they just went to bed, and didn't even look in on me like they would normally do. They just walked right on by, and went off to sleep. I guess that they had really satisfied each other."
"How old were you then?"
"I was fourteen. I didn't kiss a girl that I took out anyplace until I was eighteen, and when that happened, I was sure that I had done something really wrong. I felt so guilty about it. I went into that religious order figuring that I could get completely away from sex there. I had been plagued by these fantasies all through my adolescence, and every time a girl gave any indication that she wanted me to kiss her, suddenly I would be overcome by this sense of revulsion, and I would have this urge to whip her for being so bad, and for trying to corrupt me. I wanted to get away from all of that, because I couldn't even hold hands with anyone and not feel that way. But going into the monastery wasn't any kind of answer either. Things just got worse there, and I would have these really violent fantasies where I would whip the shit out of these women, and I almost had a nervous breakdown because I was becoming more and more sinful. Luckily, there was this really sympathetic abbot there, and I could talk to him. He listened to everything that I had to say, and he told me that he had known all along that I wasn't cut out for that sort of life, that I wasn't a bad person, that I was just troubled, and that the answer was to go back to try lead a normal life, and to see a psychiatrist. I did go back to the outside world, but I didn't go to a shrink."
"Why not?"
"Because we had always been told that only crazy people went to psychiatrists, and I was so desperate that I felt that any kind of admission like that meant there was something wrong with me would end with my breaking up completely. So I lead an almost entirely celibate life. I've sometimes been to prostitutes, but every time, I always go to the bizarre types, the ones that let you whip them, and then I would always just have them suck me off. I could never have intercourse with them because I was too afraid. Afraid that I would catch something, that is."
"Were you a virgin when we married?" Janet inquired, wondering if that were possible.
"No," he said. "I got in touch with this submissive woman through this ad in a magazine. She would let me beat her, then afterwards, I would rape her very violently. I would even put it up her ass. That went on for only a few months, because she wanted to get me into an orgy, and I didn't like the idea, so we stopped seeing each other."
"Phil," Janet interposed, "I ask you this not to hurt you, but because I am generally curious, and I want to know the truthful answer. Why did you marry me?" He stared at the floor before answering in a surprisingly calm and easy tone.
"Why?" he answered. "Because you're pretty. Because you were very sexy, and because I have this image of the perfect woman that I got from a picture of Saint Theresa when I was a young kid, and you look a hell of a lot like that picture. You were gentle and funny, and you made me feel really good just by being the very sweet and precious person that you are. I was finally starting to overcome my problems, and I thought that you would be a good person to overcome them with, but then following our love making, there would always be that terrible, gnawing guilt that I could never shake off. So I did it as seldom as I possibly could. I felt really bad, as though I had cheated you, and I suppose that I had. But absolutely nothing that I told myself seemed to make any kind of difference. I was stuck with these miserable guilt trips that were laid on me when I was a little kid, and there just wasn't a thing that I could do. I did start seeing a shrink three weeks ago on my lunch hour, but we're just scratching the surface, and I haven't even gotten around to telling him the way I feel about these things."
"Phil," she said. "I want you to understand that I love you very much, and that I don't mind what you did to me last night. Just the opposite, in fact. I liked it. I got off on it. I had been waiting all these months for you to just sweep me up like that and I hadn't realized until you did. I knew that I wanted your body, but I didn't have any idea at the depth of my need for that spanking. It took you to show me that, and I'm grateful."
"But how can you even stand to look at me?" he suddenly cried, burying his hands in his face. "I'm a rotten, miserable sadist, and I'll never be able to enjoy a normal sex life!"
"Phil, Phil, my silly darling," she said, rushing over to his side. "What is a normal sex life? Is it just screwing in the missionary position, and doing it just to make babies? As long as the act is simply between two consenting adults, what on earth can be wrong with it?"
"But I beat you!" he sobbed. "And I loved it! It turned me on more than anything that's ever been done to me. I loved it, and all day I've been feeling the marks on my ass, and thinking of how helplessly, hopelessly trapped I was, and how sexy it made me feel. I came just from your beating me, did you know that?" He shook his head. He seemed to be pleased by this bit of information. But then he looked at her again with very sad eyes.
"But that's the only way that I can have sex," he told her. "Do you want to spend the rest of your life with a man who has to beat you before he can make love to you?"
She stared him in the eyes, and then smiled bitchily. "Why don't you come up and find out, you helpless little wimp?"
An icy glance shot over his face, disappearing quickly when he realized what she was saying was a gag meant to entice him. He smiled sheepishly.
"Okay," Phil told her. "Now just listen to me, you lousy tramp. I've had enough of that goddam lip of yours. You're going to march upstairs right now, and get what's coming to you, understand?"
She quickly obeyed, scurrying up the stairs. She ducked into the bedroom and stood there waiting for him to go about some kind of business that she couldn't figure out from only the sounds, and her heart skipped a beat when she finally heard him walking up the stairs.