Spanking & Chastening: Relativity

Naked and tired, I curled up on my side atop of the covers of my bed. My bottom pulsed with heat and tenderness from a day filled with too many spankings and here at the end of the day, deserved or not, it all felt incredibly unfair. I hugged my pillow to my chest seeking comfort from its soft, cool silkiness against my bare skin, but my thoughts kept wandering back to Patrick Hughes and the auditorium on the 18th floor. The humbling embarrassment from being disciplined before strangers should have been foremost in my mind and under almost any other circumstances it would have. Why did he have to say my name?

He said it only once making me wonder if I had heard it at all or if my mind was playing some trick on me. In every other way he was professional, courteous even, allowing me to dress after the meeting and before helping him collect and file the various paperwork left behind on empty seats. If only he had not used my name, my real name, I would have thought well of him, fondly perhaps, but instead his soft whisper of a voice echoed in my ears and raged in my mind.

"Did you discover him?" My mysterious little friend asked, suddenly appearing cross legged on the bed next to me.

"I don't know," I said, closing my eyes and wishing the girl would leave me alone.

"You have," She said, "I can see it in your mood."

"Maybe. Or maybe I'm just crazy," I said.

"You're not," She said.

"I'm lying on my bed talking to a ghost," I said, propping myself up on my elbow to stare at her properly. "That sounds pretty craze to me."

"I'm not a ghost," She said.

"Aren't you?" I said, hoping the annoyance I felt was coming through in my tone, "You fade in and out of reality, know things you can't possibly know and don't know things you should. If you aren't a ghost, what are you?"

She shook her head at me and said, "The explanation would do neither of us any good and it is in fact irrelevant to the problems at hand. It will suffice for you to accept I am neither a ghost nor a figment of your imagination. Now you need to focus on the issue at hand. You know the identity of the man betraying you and it is imperative you reveal him to the others before he is able to do more damage than he has already done."

I glanced bemusedly at my backside and the near glowing redness emanating from it, wondering if she was making yet another crack about the spankings I had recently received. The confused look on her face in response to my wry smile reminded me she no more knew the identity of our corporate spy than I knew hers. Her typical smug confidence and superiority had left me with the false impression she knew everything, but confronted with a void in her knowledge I began to reevaluate her. It was entirely possible her knowledge in other things, things which she seemed more certain of her accuracy, could be flawed and incomplete. If so, it was just possible there was another explanation for Patrick Hughes' slip of my name. Rushing in blindly with accusations and nothing for proof would only turn a bad situation worse.

"I'm not certain he's the one," I said.

She frowned at me and said, "Don't be ridiculous. He made himself obvious to you did he not?"

"In a manner, but I have no proof," I said.

"If he made himself known to you, he is the one and the proof will be found once you tell the others," She said.

"Without proof why would anyone listen? He was charged with disciplining me today and an unfounded accusation will cast more doubt on me than on him," I said.

"Maybe you have learned something," She said and abruptly disappeared as my bedroom door flung open.

Mom stomped her way into my bedroom, her gaze quickly darting around the room as if she were looking for something. I stared up at her from the bed, blood rushing to my face like I had been caught doing something I should not have been doing. She scowled, suspicion in her eyes, and said, "Who were you talking to?"

"No one," I replied, innocently.

"Don't lie to me. I heard you talking in here. Where's your phone?" Mom said, still glancing around the room.

"I was thinking about things, probably talking out loud to myself and I didn't realize it," I said.

"Where's your phone?" Mom asked, her tone changing just enough to let me know she would not be asking a third time.

"In my purse," I said, trying to keep from sounding angry, "Probably still in the kitchen unless you or Dad moved it."

Obviously not believing me, she marched to the bed and ripped the pillow from my arms. Her hands patted it down quickly, not finding the phone she suspected it of holding, she dropped it to the floor. Shooting a glare of suspicion at me, she tossed aside the layers of covers on my bed and found nothing once again. For a moment I thought she was leaving when she turned her back to me and marched back to my bedroom door, but she paused just within reach of it and slammed it closed. I twitched at the sound as an irrational fear gripped hold of my heart, making it skip a beat.

She turned back toward me, coming to stand at the foot of my bed with an angry glare in her eyes doing nothing to calm my fear. Her eyes were looking at me, but it felt like they were looking right through me as she said, "You've always reminded me of her. Even when you were a little girl, you had her eyes and that mischievous smile she often wore."

I wanted to ask who she was talking about, but the glare in her eyes kept my silent. She seemed to be recalling something, someone, but whatever it was, the memory was not a happy one or so it seemed. I waited through the silence in the wake of her angry words and wondered if she would explain herself or if I was meant to read her thoughts and know what she expected from me. The quiet dragged on until Mom huffed in apparent disappointment and said, "She was a dreamer. She had big plans for her life. She was always going somewhere. The only problem was she was never here. Everything was always around the next corner, the next bend, but when you spend your life chasing dreams you never actually live."

"Mom," I said, hoping to find a way to ask what she was talking about without angering her further. She stared at me, almost daring me to say another word with her eyes and so I fell silent, waiting for her to continue.

She said, "Maybe you think someday you'll be a big shot at that company or maybe you think you'll make connections with people who will hire you for a bigger and better job someplace else, I don't know, but what I do know is the odds are against it. You are my daughter and you will always be special to me, but out there," She pointed out my bedroom window, "Out there, you are just another pretty face in a sea of pretty faces. It hurts the first time the real world slaps you in the face, trust me I know Allison, but the sooner you deal with the pain of the real world and start living in it, the better."

"Mom," I said, intending to protest, but once again her angry eyes silenced me before I could utter another syllable. Resuming her rant she said, "I watched my mother waste her life chasing fairy tales and dreams until they dropped her in an early grave and I will be damned if I am going to watch you do the same. Whatever life you think it is you are supposed to have and whatever fantasies she has planted in your brain, it is time for you to let it all go and start living the life you have. It doesn't have to be that bad, you can still find happiness in the real world."

"What are you talking about?" I asked, blurting the words out before she could stop me.

She said, "Don't play dumb Allison. I don't know how long she's been filling your head with her silliness, but I can guess it all started around the time you got this awful job."

I blinked as my mind ripped the pieces of the puzzle apart and reassembled then into a new picture that sent a cold shiver down my spine. There were a million questions to ask, but only one I needed for it all to make sense. I asked, "You mean your mother?"

Mom tilted her head at me as if I had just asked the dumbest question in the history of the world and said, "If you want to pretend you don't know what I'm talking about, that's your choice, but one way or another I'm putting an end to this business. Like it or not the fantasies are over, you aren't going to be a millionaire by the time you're thirty, you aren't going to win the heart of the married executive you serve, and anything else she has made you believe in won't be happening either."

I said, "You can't—

Mom said, "Your father and I have already discussed it and as soon as this disgraceful disciplinary action is concluded, you are going to quit that ridiculous job of yours and go to work at your father's old company. He's already arranged a position for you in bookkeeping and while it's not glamorous, at least you won't be fetching coffee and taking dictation in a dead end job."

I bit down on my tongue, holding the angry words of protest inside because I knew she would never let me utter more than a sentence uninterrupted. My blood boiled at the audaciousness of my parents, assuming they had the right to decide where I worked and the field I would work within. I was tempted to spill everything, the real job, the dual identities, the salary, the condo, but something inside held me back. She would call it fantasy in any regard and I had very little in the way of evidence to prove the truth to her. There was more though and it was rooted between the things she knew and did not know.

"I can tell you're angry," Mom said moving back toward the door, "That's okay because eventually you'll understand everything we've done is for the best," She opened the door and rested her hand on the light switch beside it, "Get some sleep, you've got another busy day tomorrow," She flicked the lights off and closed the door, leaving me alone in the dark.

I rolled to the side of my bed and picked up my pillow from the floor, where Mom had dropped it. My thoughts roiled over the conversation with Mom as I slipped beneath the covers. Sleep was a futile effort and I knew it even before I closed my eyes. Suddenly, the only parts of my life which made any sense were the parts I had come to think I would never understand.

"She wasn't always like this," My grandmother said, her youthful voice penetrating the quiet darkness. "In a way it's all my fault. She was far too young for the responsibilities I left her. It jaded her, made her give up on dreams and dreaming and settle for a life she never really wanted."

I opened my eyes and stared in the direction of her voice. There was only the slightest hint of a shimmer, but I focused on it and hoped she could see me better than I saw her. I said, "Is she right about you? Are you filling my head with foolish fantasies?"

"Is she right about your job?" She said.

"Why won't you ever just answer a question?" I said.

"The only answers that really matter are the ones we find for ourselves. If I simply told you everything you wanted to know, you wouldn't really know anything," She said.

"You could have told me who you were," I said.

"What difference would it have made?" She said.

"At the very least my mother wouldn't have blindsided me with it," I said.

"Yes, but the look on your face was priceless," She said with a giggle.

"How am I supposed to trust you when you keep playing these silly games?" I said.

"You aren't," She said, "I would have thought you'd have figured that much out by now. You can't really trust anyone, not completely anyway."

"Oh, I'm sorry. I guess I'm a little new to paranoia," I said, hoping she would catch the sarcasm for a change.

"It's quite alright. I'm sure you'll do just fine in the end," She said, "The issue at hand remains the spy and you should focus your attention on what to do about him."

I sighed realizing it was just one more battle lost in a day filled with defeats. I said, "There are many issues at hand and you are avoiding most of them."

"I have made my share of mistakes Allison," She said, "The biggest of them landed me where I am now, but I've learned a few things since then. You and I are enough alike that I know the more I tell you, the less you'll listen."

"Is that why you chose me?" I asked.

"If I had a choice, it would not have been you," She said coldly, "Everything depends on you and I still don't know what you will do," Her glimmer disappeared from the darkness and I knew I was alone again. Maybe to my mother it seemed I was chasing dreams, but as I laid beneath the covers in darkness I could only see the nightmare looming ever closer and forever masked in shadows.