BROOKE STERN
AN UNEXPECTED LOVE STORY
A LOVE STORY SHOULD BEGIN WITH A CRIME, but when they busted me for shoplifting cheese from an uppity gourmet shop, I only expected a little bit of trouble—a fine or something—not love. How could I have foreseen someone like Tom?
In spite of an on-again, off-again case of kleptomania, I had never been arrested before. But on that night, my arrogance got the best of me and the way I slipped the cheese under my sweatshirt was just lazy. After a long evening and all the indignities of the legal system, I finally reconciled myself to calling the 1-800-GET-BAIL guy, read the numbers of my one credit card that wasn’t maxed out, and walked out of the police station, hungry, tired and only slightly more hopeless than I had been the day before. I went to a grocery store and stole breakfast. I had cereal and milk at home, but at least walking out into the dawn with their most expensive prosciutto in my jeans made me feel more alive.
Then I went to a bookstore and stole a bunch of books on representing yourself in court. To make a long story short, I spent the time before my court date studying the law, falling another month behind on my rent, and maxing out my last credit card on an outfit for court. The judge, unfortunately, wasn’t interested in my newfound enthusiasm for litigation and slapped me with a fine that I couldn’t pay. Unsatisfied by my day in court, I decided it was a good time to file for bankruptcy. I studied even harder for the court date, this time at the law school library (it turns out legal books are hard to steal). I thought all of this would help, but the judge treated me like the other bottom-feeders in the courtroom. I was sitting on a bench in the hall crying when I met Tom and that’s when the trouble really started.
He was next up to be called into court for a case he was prosecuting, and he sat down next to me on the bench to wait. The tissues I was using to dry my tears and blow my nose were piling up at my side. I first noticed him because he had grabbed the wastepaper basket from his side of the bench and held it in front of the bench where my used tissues lay. He waited patiently for me to see him, realize what he was doing, and brush the tissues off the bench and into the waiting receptacle.
“When’s the execution?” he asked.
It took me a minute to get that he was joking.
“It’s not that,” I said, sniffling and straightening my hair. I tried to laugh, but it came out as a half cry, half sniffle.
“I know. I was watching you. You’re not bad, but the mock trials in the first year of law school aren’t going to help you defend yourself in bankruptcy court.”
“I guess I should have seen it coming.”
“A week after your shoplifting conviction? What were you thinking?”
“How did you know?”
“I work in the prosecutor’s office. A friend of mine told me about the cute law school dropout who nearly got away with it.”
“I nearly got away with it?”
“Yeah, he said you were great. But don’t let it slip that I told you. It’s our policy not to encourage criminals.”
Impulsively, I hugged him, and I felt him go a little stiff as I pulled him into my sloppy embrace. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me since…well, I don’t know when.”
“How about you give me another chance to say nice things to you over dinner tonight?”
I knew, according to the latest slew of dating guides, that I wasn’t supposed to accept last-minute requests, but who was I trying to fool? He already knew I was a broke kleptomaniac; I didn’t have to hide that there weren’t men lining up at my door.
“Sure.”
“Stay here. I’ll be done in an hour.”
I grew fidgety and wanted to get up, go steal a coffee or at least go to the bathroom to fix my makeup, but something about the way he said “stay here” made me sit tight. Exactly an hour later, he emerged.
“Did you drive?”
“No.” (I didn’t tell him that I didn’t even have a car.)
“I’ll drive. Is Italian okay?”
“You mean a Ferrari or a Maserati?”
“No, I mean spaghetti or linguini.”
“Oh. Okay.”
The date was amazing. Sometimes a man can take you away from everything; he can make you forget your nerves, your insecurities, your worries and your failures. Tom made me feel beautiful and smart. For the first time in a long time, I felt loveable. For a while, it even seemed as if he was the insecure one. He warned me that he was the weirdo, the one who was hopelessly controlling and needed everything just so. While I suppose I should have been able to foresee the downside of all this, I found his honesty totally charming. Not only was he funny about his quirks, mocking his own craziness, but the order of his world also offered a welcome contrast to the chaos of my own life.
Finally, he looked me in the eye, reached across the table to clasp my hand and asked if I thought I might be able to accept him the way he was. He tried to make it a joke, but I could tell it really wasn’t.
“Of course, Tom. Like I’m one to judge.”
“Thank you, Nicole. It’s such a relief to hear you say that.”
“Can you accept me the way I am, Tom?” I asked, more out of a sense of parallelism than anything else. I figured it would be nice to be reassured, especially after I had gotten myself into so much trouble.
“Not a chance.”
“What?”
“I warned you that I was rigid and needed things a certain way.”
“But I can accept that.”
“Good. Then I need you to stop stealing and get out of debt.”
“But what if I need you to accept me the way I am?”
“Nicole, sweetheart, you don’t even accept yourself the way you are.”
Touché.
“And you propose to fix me?”
“Come back to my place and I’ll tell you what I propose.”
I could have been offended, or gotten scared, or mistrusted his motives, but instead I just let him pay the check, got in the passenger seat of his car, and went agreeably to his house. Tom made me very obedient.
His place was even neater than I had imagined it; totally modernist, black and white, and minimal. I expected the glass of wine and the awkward sitting next to each other on the couch and the fumbling first kiss, but instead we had hardly gotten in the door when Tom turned to me, looked me in the eye, and gave me the first of many thousands of direct orders.
“Take a shower. There’s a clean robe hanging on a hook on the door that you can put on afterward.”
I looked at him. Was he serious? Did he think I was dirty? Was this his way of bypassing the fumbling scene on the couch? Was he taking me for granted?
“Nicole, I’ll never tell you to do something if I think you might regret it. You can always do whatever you want, but I think we’ll be happiest if you do what I say.”
He sounded both kind and menacing. I liked kind, but menacing felt electric. I turned and headed toward the shower, swaying my hips to whet his appetite.
The rest of the night went better than I dared expect. I got pretty hot with anticipation while I was in the shower. I emerged, still wet, in his robe and we began kissing. I wasn’t even dry when he made me come for the first time, licking my clit right through my first orgasm and clear to my third. I had to pull him by the hair to make him stop and kiss me.
I ended up straddling him that first time. The second time he lasted longer and really had to fuck me hard to come at all. I don’t come from fucking very often, but he gave me plenty of time to come twice more. He was behind me and I touched myself while he was doing it. Afterward, we cuddled until our sweaty bodies got chilly, and then we pulled up the covers and went to sleep. I’ve always thought that if you pay attention to how he fucks, you can tell whether a guy likes you or just likes fucking.
Tom liked me. I had no doubt.
The alarm went off frighteningly early the next morning. By the time I had stumbled into the bathroom and put on his robe, he had set a place for me at his table and made me an omelet. It was the first time I’d had anything but Pop-Tarts or cereal for breakfast since I stole that prosciutto.
“What are you going to do today, Nicole?”
It was an innocent enough question, but I don’t think he meant it that way. He knew that bankrupt shoplifters don’t usually make the right choices. It was his way of cutting to the chase. I was too scared to go where I knew he was going to take it, though, so I lied.
“I’ve got a job interview coming up. I’m going to go home and prepare.”
I tried to be vague and ambitious, in hopes it would discourage further inquiry.
“Nicole, I’m a prosecutor. I spend my whole life taking apart people’s lies. But I don’t start work for another two hours. Just tell me the truth. What are you going to do today?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s better.”
“I need to figure out what I’m going to do about repaying my debt.”
“You should get a job.”
“Duh.”
“No, I mean you should get a job today.”
“It’s not that easy, Tom.”
“I’m pretty sure that it is that easy, Nicole.”
“Come on, Tom. I was thinking I really should go back to law school. Anyway, I haven’t even updated my resume in eight months. Plus, I need to get resume paper and envelopes before I can even send any off.”
“You mean steal resume paper and envelopes?”
It sounds like he was being mean, but he wasn’t. He said it with a bit of a smile because he knew he was right, and I didn’t deny it.
“Get a job by the end of the day and I’ll buy you dinner and make you come twice as many times as I did last night.”
“And if I don’t get a job today?”
“Then I’ll spank you and send you home without dinner or sex.”
“But…”
“But what, Nicole? You didn’t expect me to be so true to my word? Or is it the spanking thing?”
“It’s… Well, it’s both. It’s everything.”
“So, you know what you have to do, then?”
“Yeah.”
How did he do that to me?
Then the most amazing thing happened: I got a job. Actually, I got three jobs and was scheduled to begin the following day at whichever of the three I decided to show up for. All three sucked, but at least I would end the day in less debt than I began it. I had imagined that I would be ashamed to grovel for work that was so below me, but I created a persona for each job who was better suited for groveling than I was. Besides, Tom’s spanking remark gave me something else to think about.
The truth was, I kind of obsessed about it. I had always assumed that fetish was all kind of a joke, like French maid outfits or S/M dungeons. Something about it turned me on, but the fact that Tom had mentioned the concept worried me, too. How far was he willing to take things? I wouldn’t find out that night, because his doorman buzzed me in at 6:55 with three job offers in my purse, in case he required proof. Dinner and many orgasms arrived as promised and I went to work at two of the three jobs the next day.
All went smoothly for a few weeks and I wondered if I might avert a spanking altogether until I lost both jobs in a single day. At that point, I realized I was certainly in for it. He hadn’t named any specific punishment for getting fired twice in a day, but I was pretty sure it would be bad. Worse still, having been late, bitchy, petulant, and attitudinal with everyone else that day, I found that I couldn’t turn off my attitude. I couldn’t stop being bad, arriving late back at Tom’s even though I could have arrived on time and adding a few additional misdemeanors to my accumulation of transgressions.
I was under the mistaken impression that these additional fuck-ups wouldn’t really make a difference. I was going to get a spanking. What use was there in trying? Was I ever wrong.
It began with the looks of disappointment and him preparing to punish me while I waited, panties unceremoniously lowered around my ankles and hands behind my back holding my skirt up. Then, after hearing what he had in store for me but without any frame of reference to know what it would be like, I had to go into the bedroom and wait in the corner. Even alone, I was utterly humiliated. Who the hell was he to make me do this? I thought about leaving, but I knew I wouldn’t. Something needed to put a stop to behavior that even I knew was ridiculous. If this could put a stop to it, it would be worth it, no matter how much it hurt.
I had always been bad with pain. As a child, I had begged off of even the most mild ordeals. Being special came naturally to me, but lying ass-up on Tom’s lap didn’t make me feel very special at all. I wondered how many asses had been there before mine. The spanks hurt like hell—was it any wonder that my thoughts were getting bleaker? My ego was getting as bruised as my butt. He was just doing his job—prosecuting the accused, holding the guilty accountable, and administering clear, immediate feedback. He was a prosecutor, through and through, and I knew how prosecutors felt about people like me. He was just getting his perverted kicks.
Tom was all about swift and clear reinforcement, of the painfully memorable kind. He was doing a good job, too. It was quite horrible. I had forgotten the way that one part of your body could be so possessed by agony that everything else disappeared. Spank. Spank. Spank. The blows just kept coming, delivered mercilessly; each worse than the last. I imagined his point of view. He saw nothing of the agony, of the way my face contorted, the way my breath stopped, the way I felt like I would explode with pain and fear. All he saw was my fleshy ass bouncing and reddening as he brought his hand down on it over and over again. It was so unfair that it made me cry.
From that day on, I would always be on my best behavior after a spanking offense, knowing it was essential not to make things worse. Every little bit of behavior, whether good or bad, made a difference come spanking time. But I wished I hadn’t had to learn that lesson the hard way.
“You don’t understand how much it hurts, Tom!” I finally cried. “You don’t understand. It’s not fair.”
“None of it’s really fair, is it? Most shoplifters get away with it. Lots of girls have daddies who pay off their credit cards. None of it’s your fault, is it?”
“Why do you have to hit me so hard? It’s only making it worse.”
“If you still think so afterward, then I’ll never spank you again. But you’ll thank me for it, Nicole. You really will.”
“No, I won’t. Never!”
I said it more in despair than denial. I would thank him for it because he cared. The more it hurt, the more I knew he cared. As if to emphasize the point, the spanking got harder until I couldn’t talk or think or even cry. I saved up all the tears for after it was over, when they finally poured out because I hadn’t gotten away with it. God, why did life always have to be so hard for me? Then Tom held me, and suddenly I felt as if maybe the next year wouldn’t be as hard as the last one.
That’s not to say the next few months weren’t hard on my backside. I hated the spankings; loathed them, feared them, and avoided them every way I could, including behaving myself. But spanking also began to turn me on.
Why?
Well, it was how he did it to me. It was the way his masculinity and strength held me in place, grounded me, hurt me and yet contained all the chaos of my life. Spanking was the keystone of my private submission and exposure to him. My life was an open book to him; he could open me whenever and wherever he wanted. The spankings were a mixed bag. They reflected both his kindness—the attention and patience and way he cared for me—and his cruelty, too, his obsessive-compulsive rigidity, his cold adherence to the prescribed punishment, the inflexibility of it. The rules were the structure for the relationship. No rules, no relationship, and that, I confess, turned me on, too. I was an object. I liked being an object. It turned me on, whether I was his object to fuck, his object of desire, or the object of his rules, subject to his rule.
I knew our strange love wasn’t for everybody, but it suited us just fine.
“The law makes us free.” He liked to quote Kant and it felt true. It was our catechism. When I had believed myself to be free, I had really been a slave to my bad habits. With Tom, subservient to his elaborate order, I was truly free.
