To call him dear seemed a misnomer, but that was how she thought of Reggie. He was so peacefully sleeping. Her sleep had been fitful.
She drank coffee and ate a pastry at mid-morning in a street side cafe. The sun was just beginning to warm the old city, the picture-book loveliness of the cobblestone streets and slightly sagging ancient buildings around her made her smile. An old man bicycled by and tipped his hat, his craggy face opening into a broad grin as he passed. Children in the tiny park across the street shouted while they played some game. It made it difficult to brood.
She roamed the streets for several hours, and was enormously hungry by four that afternoon. She stopped long enough to buy a feast in the market; and taking that and a half dozen bags in her hand, she found a small hotel overlooking the river to her liking. She checked into a single room, planning to extend the tranquility a few more hours.
***
The meeting had already begun by the time Jocelyn arrived the next morning. She could have kicked herself for being late. But would ten minutes matter? She straightened her blue skirt at the front of the door, pulled down on the white tunic blouse, and gave her hair one last flounce. She hated dressing in a hurry, but this day it was unavoidable. It was regretful that Reggie wasn’t in the room when she returned to the hotel.
“Miss Killian, it’s nice of you to join us,” Reggie said, looking very much relieved when he saw her attempt to slip into the conference room unnoticed. Making a display of her tardiness however, the room of fifteen businessmen turned to stare.
“I apologize, please don’t let me disturb you,” she said smiling.
“We hadn’t really begun,” Reggie acknowledged. “Gentlemen, I’d like a moment to confer with my assistant before we begin.”
Reggie quickly exited with Jocelyn on his arm.
“Where the hell have you been?” He turned to her with a scowling face when they were at a safe distance from the conference room.
“I left a note,” she reminded him.
“Twenty-four hours!”
“You’re angry, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m not angry. Furious, enraged, violently mad…” he considered them all aloud. “They don’t begin to touch the feeling I have for you right now.”
“I worried you?”
“Twenty-four hours?” He was moving easily between hot-fired rage, and cold-fired fury.
“When I need to think, I disappear,” she explained. “I guess I never told you.”
“You don’t have to now. Your demonstration makes it perfectly clear. You realize that I’ve called hotel security and the police to find you.”
“No, Reg,” she looked chagrined that he would take such measures so readily. “The police are looking for me?”
“They wouldn’t be doing anything about your missing until this morning.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t cover it.”
“The door of the conference room cracked an inch or two, and a young lieutenant belonging to some businessman peeked out the door.
“Hadn’t we better get back to the meeting?” she asked.
“I’ll be getting back to the meeting, you go to our room and stay there till I’m done.”
“But you need me in there.”
“I sure as hell don’t need you at my side when I’m so fucking furious with you I could whip your behind bloody! Now get to the room and don’t go anywhere, nowhere. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
***
It was the penance she was paying for being thoughtless, being banned from the business meeting, imprisoned in the hotel room by Reggie’s decree, and made to wait for hours to find out the fate of this latest scene in the bizarre drama of their relationship.
When Reggie finally came through the door, it was nearly five o’clock, and Jocelyn was munching a cracker she’d ordered from room service. She popped up expectantly, trying to get a glimpse of his mood.
All the hot fires had ceased to burn, or at least they were well away from the surface. He was as cool and calm as the typical Reggie. He was functional and businesslike walking into the room, depositing his briefcases on the table where they belonged. Going into the dressing room, he removed his tie. After that, he took off his suit coat and hung it in the closet. He hadn’t said a word.
Returning to the room, he stood for a second looking the place over as if he’d never seen it before. Scrutinizing the bed, the sitting area, and even her. The purpose of his cursory glance was unknown. She assumed he was merely thinking.
“I’m sorry,” she offered the apology.
“Damn right you’ll be sorry.”
“I had to have some time away, we’ve been so close.”
“I thought you wanted close,” he replied.
She took a deep breath.
“I do.”
He allowed himself to look perplexed so she’d explain.
“Occasionally, when things get too hot for me to handle in a relationship, I disappear for a while. It’s just time off. I thought you might be able to use it, too.”
“To worry?”
“I did leave the note.” It seemed as if she was repeating a conversation they’d had just hours before. At least this time he wasn’t so irrationally furious.
“That was good for about two hours. Vague as it was, I expected you back mid-morning. I’d have given you time away, Jocelyn. Hell, I need it too. But I don’t need it worrying like crazy every moment, wondering if you’re safe in a city you know nothing about. Dammit!” he blared. Cold was turning hot again. Though his eyes remained steely, she felt the flood of hot emotion rising in him.
“Perhaps you need to punish me?” she offered in a halting admission, the guilt that was claiming her was beginning to demand some kind of retribution. Anything to alleviate the uproar.
“You’re damn right. I’ve just spent the last couple of hours trying to decide just how.”
“You’ve spent hours?” she wondered aloud. “The meetings were over two hours ago?”
“Yes. I needed the break from you,” he said accusingly.
“I suppose you did.”
She sat in a chair by the window, he stood several feet away in the open room, his eyes glaring. She was screaming to herself, “do something, do something, do something!”
“Let’s just make this simple,” he finally said.
Not knowing what that meant, Jocelyn watched as Reggie undid cuff-links on his starched white shirt, and carefully rolled up the sleeves. It was serious business he was about to begin, and it terrified her wondering how he’d punish her this time. So clever, so devious, so harsh. The forms this chastisement could take might be the most alarming of anything she endured at his hand.
“I suppose you were testing me,” Reggie said, as he approached her.
“Testing?”
“Wondering if I would be angry with you for disappearing.”
“I don’t think so,” she answered, not having thought of that at all.
“C’mon Jocelyn, you think I’m testing you, why wouldn’t you do the same with me?”
“But…”
“I read women well.”
“Okay, maybe I was testing,” she conceded. “But I never thought about it consciously.”
“Well you can think about it while I’m spanking you.”
He sat down in the chair opposite her, and reached out for her arm and pulled her over his lap. Lifting the waistband of her sweat pants, he pulled them down to reveal her naked rear, not a stitch, her flesh all pink and waiting, any marks he’d made there before had already vanished. That was good, he thought. A nice clean slate. Pulling the pants off completely, he threw them off out of his way, and surrounding her waist with his arm, he aimed for her jiggling buttocks.
Her cheeks clenched and relaxed and then clenched while she waited in breathless silence for him to begin. Thankfully, she didn’t have to wait long. He began with his hand, laying sharp stinging old fashioned smacks on the surface of her skin.
She was surprised how much it hurt.
Old fashioned it was for an inventive disciplinarian, simple and sweet, it had its own message. Over the knee, the palm of his hand, spanked like she was a little child who’d run away from home.
“Oh Reg, my god, this hurts!” she cried, after a good dozen smacks were making her bottom very warm.
His hand came down over and over so he could see the imprint of his fingers right over top of the rising red blush. He focused the treatment on the center of her bottom cheeks, going back to that fleshy spot again and again, until it was hot, and she was trying to squirm away from the next smack. Giving her a reprieve from that tender place, he peppered her all over, catching her ass on the sides and dropping to the tops of her thighs, where she squealed even more. And still, he returned to the center of her ass cheeks where it burned the worst.
“Ouch, oh no, ouch please, ouch ouch!” She wiggled and cried and felt the sting as the most appalling thing she’d ever felt, though it was not the most painful. The leather could be painful. Wood seemed more painful still. This was something that demanded more from her than she expected.
The warmth of his body, the fresh emotions, the way he held her, the attitude of anger, hurt, worry and care mixing into a concoction of rare quality. The intimacy was alarming her. She’d need another twenty four hours alone to figure this out. She certainly wouldn’t over his lap with him smacking her bottom.
She started to cry, though the spanking didn’t cease. If anything Reggie was more determined with his task. Her bottom crimson, he’d take it beyond any previous punishment. If he had to keep it up an hour he would, until all the tension between them was exhausted, and the blank slate was really a blank slate again.
“Pleeeese, Reg,” she wailed between her nonsensical cries, “C’mon, please!”
“You’re a woeful penitent,” he remarked, even as his hand continued coming down.
At least he was beginning to slow what had been an awesome pace.
“Oh, I am, please.”
Finally, giving her one last quick flurry of smacks, the spanking was over, and he pushed her off his lap, where she collapsed to the floor.
“Get up!” he ordered immediately.
He was obviously still angry, but the fire in his eyes had dimmed, and there was a calmer man appearing.
“I really worried you, didn’t I?” Jocelyn said, as she rose, and looked at him with tear stained eyes.
“Sit down.”
“You wouldn’t want to…” her eyes glimmered as seductively as her body was moving. She was thinking sex, the sexual heat inside her was on a rampage.
“No, I don’t want to make love now. I’m not done with you.”
“You mean you’re going to punish me more?” she jumped on the idea.
“That depends.”
“On what?” She looked terribly forlorn.
“On what you say to me in the next sixty seconds. And if you don’t sit down right now, I’ll take you over my knee and wallop you again.”
She sat down across from him, feeling righteously humbled when her sore bottom reminded her how hard he’d laid in to her.
“Now, suppose you tell me why you had to disappear. If you have doubts about our relationship. You’d better spell them out now.”
She hesitated only for a second, he would never tolerate her stalling.
“Doubts? It wasn’t like that,” she began. “But my head was so cluttered with stuff, I needed time to sort it out.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I had nothing to tell you.”
“You could have told me that your head was ‘cluttered with stuff,’ and you needed time to sort it out. I understand that kind of move.”
She looked up through a lock of hair that fallen over her eyes. “I didn’t think our relationship was that open,” she said.
“Well then, maybe it should be, if we have this kind of messy result to look forward to.”
“And what would you have said, if I had talked to you?”
“I’d have told you to take all the time you needed. Remember, I haven’t been the one encouraging this relationship.”
“And that’s what worries me,” she replied.
“Oh? What else worries you?”
“That you’ll try to take me places I can’t go.”
“The other night?” he speculated. “What disturbed you about that?”
“That you’d put me on stage the way those women were.”
“I’ve done that with my submissives,” he conceded.
“I know. And you talked like I was a submissive in training.”
“I’m not sure of that,” he said.
“That’s what I mean, Reg. I worry that I’m not going to live up to your expectations, and at the same time, I’m not sure if I want to anyway. Your world fascinates me, but I don’t know if I have a place there. What I really want is you.”
He listened carefully. He’d never had a conversation like this one, never been close enough to any woman to speak this way. “You know what worries me, Jocelyn? I wonder if suddenly you’ll take off on me, leaving me with all these emotions I’ve resurrected for you hanging out all over the place.”
“Then this is difficult for both of us,” she acknowledged.