(Author's note: This is a revised posting.)
My defacto Ky had just laid out a rubber sheet on the bed and I was lying prostrate on it in submission to the after-bath ritual of having him examine my body. I passed his inspection as always.
Ky then took the peroxide-soaked Q-tip and started cleaning out the week-old lint clogging my navel. I was born with what people called an 'innie' which I often found a nuisance to clean because time consuming. So I left the task to Ky. Believing that the body was a shrine holy unto God, Ky would be incensed at my abuse of my own body. At one time he had been so fervent to impose his brand of asceticism on a stubborn lint lodged inside a crease that he perforated my skin and left my belly button a bleeding pool. I fainted.
But this evening, I was being subject to Ky's preening ceremony for a reason. It was my nineteenth birthday.
"Be back by eight," Ky reminded me. "We have dinner reservations at that hip spanking restaurant you've been pestering me to take you for months and after that ..." Ky waved the new spanking video in my face and winked seductively.
I should be on cloud nine but I was depressed. I felt about as tall as a pygmy as I covered with snail's pace the length of the gravel driveway, so incongruous in this neighborhood of cluttered tenements, to the gate where Ky's French cousin, from the distaff side of his family, was waiting in the borrowed Buick. I pulled my collar up to my chin and my Chicago Bulls cap down my brows and wanted to cry. I had led Ky to believe I was celebrating my birthday with friends. Instead I was on my way to a drug score.
It was a downright stupid idea to steal from the medical facility where Ky's cousin Luc worked as research assistant. But as Luc said, he had the keys to the labs and where else could he get the diazepam I so desperately needed?
We almost made it out of the building except that the night watchman had to choose that exact moment to do his rounds of the labs. Cousin Luc managed to dodge behind a pillar unseen but I fell back into the lab and barely managed to duck the light of the torch nosing the livid darkness just above my head. I thought nervously about Luc while I cowered in the shadows, my knees drawn up to my chest. Later I heard the watchman clear his throat before closing the door and locking it from without. As soon as I felt I could, I crawled to the door. But it was futile to get it to open.
Hours passed while I waited for Luc to come back for me. He never did. I resigned myself to the gloomy prospect of spending the night in the lab. It was past my bedtime, so I stretched out on the floor to try to sleep. But the floor reeked of disinfectant and my sinus played up. I took out the packet of stolen Valium, popped about 30 mg. into my mouth, swallowed it and lay back on the floor. My mind worked overtime to reel off plausible explanations I would have to offer the people who found me the next day. Then I thought of Ky and an awful despondency swept over me. How angry he must be, or worse, worried and disappointed. I nursed the hope that somehow Luc would deliver me before Ky had to find out. It would be my miracle.
Sometime later I thought I saw in my sleep Ky's beneficent face smiling at me. I thought I felt the floor disappear from beneath me and then I drifted into darkness once more.
I was nauseated the next day. I was reeling from the side-effects of the Valium abuse and because my olfactory mechanism had been tempered, I retched at the dinner table. And Ky was raging - his face was scarlet.
I did not get my miracle.
I buried my face in my hands and burst into tears when I realized that it was Ky who had had to come for me and carry me home last night. Ky left me to my self-loathing and later abandoned me to David, a close doctor friend, to examine my condition.
Then I heard the door bell ring. Ky went to answer it. All day it had been a daunting task to cope with him in the mood he was in. Each time I started to open my mouth to say something to pacify his mood, he merely kissed me and said, "Later." But now while I watched Ky admitting first Cousin Luc and then Nick, David's boyfriend, I realized that 'later' had arrived. Finally, I thought to myself, and almost wept in sheer relief. The burden of the guilt of what I had done had been so heavy.
Ky took my hand in his and led me to the living room where he seated me down on the sofa beside Luc to whom I accorded a perfunctory greeting. David and Nick were invited to take the two-seater opposite us and Ky took the chair next to them.
"What you two did was beyond stupid," Ky began immediately, trying to provoke an issue on the moral grounds. "The dope, the theft, the break-in. All of it. You really could not have acted more stupidly. It was fortunate that David knew the security guard who bought his story about what you were doing there at such an unearthly hour. Otherwise you'd be in jail right now, the both of you. Luc, you have put your career as a scientist in jeopardy. As for you, my beloved Han, you almost ruined your life. What have you two to say about this?"
"I'm sorry," I said, on the verge of tears again.
"It won't happen again," Luc promised, his body slumped on the sofa in awkward hopeless defensiveness.
"You're _d_a_m_n_ed right it won't," Ky said calmly, "because you're going to be so severely punished in a moment that you're going to remember it for a long time and you'll ensure it never happens again."
Ky rose from his chair and ordered us up. He then made Luc raise his arms. Luc's arms shook above his head as Ky went on to remove his sweater, followed by his T-shirt and undershirt. Next, Ky undid the top button of Luc's jeans and unzipped the fly. Realizing what was in store for him, Luc protested but quickly conceded when Ky asked if he preferred that his parents were told. Ky then peeled down both the jeans and Luc's white briefs at the same time. Luc kicked off his shoes, his face blushing for his penis was slightly hard from Ky's stripping process. Except for his white socks, Luc was absolutely naked.
Turning now to me, Ky hooked one finger into the elastic band of my Kool Katz shorts and towed me forward. He remained as solemn as an acolyte, at once at odds and duty-bound to perform the rites, while he quickly lifted up my T-shirt to my chest and tied the opposite ends of the hem into a knot so that the shirt would stay secured above my nipples. Then he took hold of the waistband of my shorts again and swiftly pulled my shorts down to my knees, leaving them there for the time being. I had no underwear and was naked from my nipples.
Next he gripped my wrists in his hands and raised my arms to my head, depositing my hands on top of my head. "Stand and wait like this," he ordered me.
I did, and Ky had Nick take polaroids of me like this. He had since posted the shots on the fridge door and our bedroom wall to remind me of my foray into intellectual decay. I wanted to put my hands over my crotch. My penis, my once pride and joy, unlike Luc's resembled a wrinkled up yellow raisin. I panicked. It had always been able to stand erect when Ky would strip me for a spanking. Oh wicked clever Ky: if there was a reason never to touch dope again, this was it - to be exposed with a baby-sized weenie.
Turning back to Luc, Ky pulled his startled sandy blond-haired cousin over his lap. "I don't care how your father would deal with you in such a situation," Ky said, "but since you came to me and for the trouble you caused David, it is right that I should handle your punishment. You are a student of medicine; you are already 21 years old. You should know better than to help Han obtain the Valium. For this you will receive 50 hand spanks and 100 lashes with my belt."
I heard Luc gulp in terror, and from the appearance of his porcelain-smooth buttocks I inferred that Luc had not been spanked before, or at least for a while. Then while the rest of us watched, Ky proceeded to fulfill his decree. This was the first time I was witnessing my own boyfriend spanking someone other than me, and I knew I was not worthy to feel it, but a wave of jealousy hit me to see him give Luc what was my place on his lap. This was not right. I ought to be the one now getting spanked. I had waited all evening for it.
Luc was tenacious enough to take his punishment like a man but he was bawling long before Ky's belt had the chance to further teach his exposed buttocks. It seemed unreal to see an almost grown up man like Luc cry. It did not seem to cohere with my mental pictures of him in leather and cruising the city on his Harley-Davidson when he was not in his lab coat and peering into his petri dish during the week. Still, it was _s_e_x_y to be privy to his naked rear end with all his genitalia exposed to me. But I felt resentment and hurt also that Ky would want to spank Luc first. Did Ky not care about me? Was he so insensitive to how much I was hurting from shouldering all that guilt and his silent treatment all day? I was not even being spanked yet but already I was sobbing.
Finally I heard through my sobs Ky sending Luc to take corner time to contemplate the circumstances that had led him to this contemptible place at our living room. Luc slid off the back of the sofa where he had been put over for the belting and parked himself beside the television. He was whimpering, obviously from the pain and humiliation of having been spanked, and watched spanked, by someone not much older than himself.
Ministering to my needs now, Ky brought down my hands and led me to his chair. He sat me on his lap. I had been on my feet for well over an hour and was grateful to be able to get off them. I was also now too frail to put up any resistance to how Ky was to handle me.
"Okay, baby, it's your turn now," Ky said tenderly. "You've been waiting a long time for it, haven't you?"
I nodded, somewhat amazed by the depth of his perception.
"Well, I wanted you to wait," he pursued, still sounding too tender to augur positively for the mood I was in. "It was part of your punishment. The shame and guilt could only do you good. You'll remember for a long time what it feels like. But you're getting your spanking now. I know you feel quite sick from the effects of the Valium you took last night. It serves you right and you're being punished for it already. But that does not mean I'll go light on you. You have put your life at risk, you caused me immeasurable anxiety all night and you inconvenienced David who was in the midst of some hard-earned quality time with Nick. Your punishment is going to be nothing like you'd ever had before, do you understand me?"
Oh God, I thought, squeezing my shrunken little pee-pee making device and trying to hide it from Ky's view. But Ky could not be more disappointed and patient with me, a deadly combination. I hated myself all the more and so I threw my head on his shoulder and wailed. But he drew me quickly away before he changed his mind about spanking me.
"Over my lap. Now," he ordered.
In spite of my frailty, I eagerly arranged myself over his waiting lap. It was time. I needed to be spanked. I needed to cry for a long, long time. I needed to have my pride and self-respect restored to me, to be forgiven, to know that Ky forgave me.
And so I cried long and I cried hard while Ky furiously battered my bottom for the next hour. All too soon he stopped. No, not yet, not enough, I wanted to cry out.
But Ky had only stopped to take my sweat-soaked T-shirt and shorts completely off. Now I was truly and fully naked as a little boy being spanked ought to be. Then before David's and Nick's eyes, I was led naked and in mortal shame to a dining chair. Because it had a high and straight back, Ky had to help drape me over it. He spread my legs apart. This was a frightening position to be in. I felt helpless and insecure with only my hands supporting my weight over the back of the chair, and my feet completely off the floor.
Ky disappeared into the bedroom but soon re-emerged from it. He was brandishing what looked like a new cane in his hand. I gasped. I had never seen it or even known he had acquired one. The sight of it transported me from my shaky anchorage on the chair to a familiar world of longing and dread I had thought was lost and forgotten when I departed from my motherland. I looked up uneasily at Ky. No, I pleaded with my eyes. But he only bent and kissed me on my head. The Judas kiss, I thought. Then I heard him beckon David over and direct him to hold my wrists. He did, very firmly, while Ky disappeared behind me.
And then it came, as if to tear the air apart.
CRACK! The cane slammed against both my bottom cheeks. I cried aloud and shuddered from the pain. Ky gave me a total of twelve lashes, not all of equal force, thankfully, and I promised as many times never to take drugs, or steal or break into any building again. Ever. Then it started to become vertiginous to be looking at the room in all its skewed perspective and if Ky did not stop the caning soon, I was going to pass out.
But he did stop, tossing aside the cane with a little too much maudlinity for one who had been so relentless in using it. David loosened his hold, both men helped me down, my legs went into sleep mode and I collapsed into Ky's arms. He carried me screaming, crying and swearing profanities to our bed.
When I had calmed down substantially to be able to speak with any coherence, Ky was able to get to the root of my problem.
"I'm flunking writing class," I muttered tiredly into Ky's perfumed T-shirt. "I can't get anything onto paper. I can't find a subject, my expression is embarrassing. I'm worse than a toddler still at words with one syllable."
Ky enfolded me with his arms and listened patiently to the tearful confessions of my incompetencies. When I was done, he offered me two suggestions: that I stuck it out or I changed my major.
"You're only nineteen, for crying out loud," he said. "You're not the first to be tempted to give up, and you won't be the last. But I know you'll make the right decision, and either way, I'm behind you a hundred per cent."
My punishment however did not end with my caning. Ky dressed me in a little T-shirt and then parked me bare-bottomed beside a much-relaxed Luc. Then he invited a few friends over to watch the new spanking video, which was supposed to be my birthday treat last night. _d_a_m_n_! I had been looking forward to snuggling up to him while we watched it together alone. Just the same Ky left precise instructions that none of them were to touch my very sore bottom during the video no matter how aroused by it (or by my bottom) they got.
I did some serious thinking while I stood in the corner to take stock of my present and future. I imagined that the guys, especially Ky, were watching my naked bottom more than the video. I certainly hoped so.
This was my miracle after all. I had been tempted, I had strayed, but I had been given my pride back. My spanking had seen to it.
And as for making the right decision that Ky hoped I would, well, that was the stuff of fairy-tale endings. I long gave those up. But how is this for another miracle - my penis was standing erect again. Phew!
THE END