Chapter 4

“Sorry, I mean, yes! I understand, always answer you, yes, I understand, Madam!” Things seemed to be going from bad to worse and I didn’t know why. She made me feel like a student in class, being informed by a teacher that my behavior was not acceptable to her. Whether she had intended to create that feeling in me I didn’t know then, but I sort of began to think that she had. Anyway she smiled one of her special smiles, the type that was easily comparable to a thousand candle power spotlight, it blasted out at you. Clearing away any annoyance or doubt, there was no way you could ever mistake the smiles meaning for anything but pleasure, or perhaps satisfaction on her part.

I found myself smiling back, not with the same radiance, but with genuine affection showing through. She reached under the table rubbing my leg, I could feel her fingers as they crept spider like up my thighs. At that rate her fingers would be groping my trousers front and there she would discover the erection I had growing beneath those trousers. Why or what exactly had turned me on I didn’t know, but something had and it wasn’t the smile. The more I thought about it the more I realized that I quite liked the way she sometimes spoke to me, using her authority filled voice, the demanding one and with her face held blank and her eyes sparkling to drive her words home.

“There are things I want to talk about, important things to me anyway, things that will affect the rest of our time together.” She sounded serious, which returned the confusion to my thoughts.

“There are things that you need to both understand and accept, if we are to move on as a couple!”

“Ok.” I answered without hesitation though my guts churned at the thought of losing her. “Shoot!” I had added.

“I want you to listen.” I looked up intending to speak, only to be silenced by her raised hand.

“I said listen, don’t speak, just sit there and listen, and do try to understand and not fidget!”

I nodded, wondering what was going to happen, what she was going to tell me, wondering if she was going to dump me, fearing that she was! She took a deep breath and then told me a story.

"I was in the last but one year at my private school, I told you my parents, well especially my step-father really, insisted that I go away to be educated. What daddy wants, daddy gets, so there I was an almost senior girl, just one amidst hundreds of other girls. Don’t get me wrong I loved my school, but by that time I was beginning to think that perhaps I was an adult.”

She chuckled as she looked back over her memory seeing herself in a more established light with more wisdom and age available. “I was soon going to find out that I wasn’t half as grown up as I liked to think myself.”

“Anyway three of us decided to sneak out of the play-ground as it was still called even by the seniors like me, into the bike sheds of all places!” She held her hand up to silence me again whilst looking into my face seeing the half smirk her story elicited from me by its contradictions.

“Don’t you dare laugh; I know how ridiculous it sounds but at the time it felt so, well, adult, especially as we went there to smoke illicit cigarettes. Inevitably we were caught, which meant being summoned to the Headmistress's office for a jolly good lecture.”

I suppressed my desire to smirk again at the tone she had used to say ‘jolly good lecture’, it was so out of character for the young woman that I was falling in love with. I realized that I had thought those dreaded three little words, the three words, thankfully in my head but still I had thought them. ‘In love with’, I thought that they were true, even accurate, but I was not experienced enough to know for sure, what I did know was that they felt right to me. I was falling in love with her, I repeated through my mind, yep it still felt right. She was talking again.

“So there I was, two weeks from the end of term, a senior and standing in front of Miss Hope’s desk, getting royally told off; just like a first year! Humiliated isn’t the word for how I felt right then and I didn’t like the feeling! I liked it even less when she opened her desk draw and removed a three foot long, twin tailed leather strap called a tawse. I accepted that I had broken the school rules, but I had never thought that I would get beaten for doing so, but obviously that was her intent as she stood up rounding the desk, letting that instrument dangle in front of me.”

“Six strokes of the tawse she told me, six the number burned through my mind, six strokes! Hold out you left had Janice, trembling I did as I was told, although the desire to race from her presence exploded in my mind. I held out my hand, extending it palm uppermost, gritting my teeth in anticipation of my pain to come. The strap whistled through the air, it came very fast and very hard and with an incredibly accurate stoke. The leather tips lashed against my offered up palm setting it on fire, I clutched the injured hand with my other, tears forming, I could not help myself, the pain was indescribable and there were five more to come!