Signals
Chapter 1
 by Kathryn Jay
copyright ©2003

Note: This is not a complete story. For the entire story, please join our website here.

Emily leaned into the wall and tried to quell her sobs. For someone who prided herself on being able to control her emotions, she was doing a pretty poor job, she reflected miserably. One part of her mind urged her to pull it together for Owen's sake.

But another part of her seemed to be sinking into an abyss. Sorting through the conflicted feelings, she was surprised to see not only embarrassment, anxiety, and contrition – which were always there to some degree after a spanking – but also alienation, a new and unexpected emotion. How had this gone so wrong? She should have felt – had expected to feel – warm affection. Instead, she felt this frightening abandonment. It occurred to her, vaguely, that Owen might be worried. She assumed he was in the room watching her as she stood facing the corner. That would be like him. But he made no effort to comfort her, and she sunk a little deeper into the blackness.

Eventually, more from exhaustion than from relief, the tears ended, but she felt no return of equilibrium. Her shoulders still trembled with emotion.

The day had started unremarkably enough, a lazy Saturday morning after a long, tiring week. Owen had awakened first, and Emily was brought to consciousness by the easy, sensual exploration of the hills and valleys of her body as mapped by Owen's hands and mouth. For a long time, she had just enjoyed it, lying still and feeling his gentle movements. His attention was firmly on her midsection, and she didn't think he knew she was awake, so she was startled into a bubble of laughter when he growled, "So, is this a one-man show or are you going to join me?"

She did join him, and it had been good, as it always was, a tender reaffirmation of their love. But she wasn't quite ready to let him go when he began to pull away to go shower. "No. Stay with me," she had murmured, still drowsy with sleep and nearly-sated love. Her hand on his arm wasn't enough to restrain, but he dropped back to the mattress with a tolerant sigh and took her back into his arms. Over the next half-hour she had pulled herself to full consciousness. They had whispered of love and reconnected after the long week. Eventually, they moved on to the chores that needed to be done and sketched out a brief plan for the weekend, but when he tried to get up again, she wrapped arms and legs around him and kept him in place.

"Who said you could get up, mister?" she challenged mischievously.

He was surprised but immediately recognized the tease in her voice and the coquettish glint in her eyes. There were things to be done, but it had been a long week, and if she was feeling a little playful, he could certainly indulge her. Not like there wasn't anything in it for him, he grinned, then forced the corners of his mouth down as he settled himself on the edge of the bed. "And since when do I take orders from you, miss?" he answered almost seriously. "It seems like time to remind you who's in charge here. You looking for a spanking?"

"Well," she said breathlessly, "if you think it's best." She hid the grin he knew was there as she crawled across his lap.

It had always been like that. She was always eager at the beginning of a spanking, eager and provocative and compliant. If he was so inclined – and sometimes he was – he could change that completely. It was a game, always, but it could be a lighthearted, tingly game or it could be a serious one that left her tender for days. Sometimes she would tell him what she wanted; sometimes he would intuit her desires; after two years, he could read them pretty well. Every so often, he would even initiate the play and act on his own urges, either manufacturing a pretext for the spanking or just declaring that it would be done.

That Saturday morning, though, he wasn't sure what either one of them wanted for a moment. She had thrown him just a bit with her timing because his mind was already moving ahead, sorting through the things that needed to be done. A busy week had a way of producing a busy weekend as routine chores were relegated from weekday nights to weekend days. The lawn had to be cut and trimmed before the rain that was expected mid-afternoon. There were errands to be run, groceries to be bought, and laundry to be done. They had divvied up the chores as they cuddled in bed, but then she subverted the plan by angling for a spanking.

He smiled warmly down at his wife, now prone and naked over his equally naked lap. Well, if that was subversion, he could live with it. The grass could wait until Monday if it had to.

His hand moved gently on her bottom, soothing and stroking as he resettled his mind. Emily had obviously felt the strain of the week as well and needed a little extra attention. He was happy to oblige and began a gentle warm up that he knew would help her relax into him further. Two dozen spanks, back and forth in an easy cadence that had her squirming but not gasping for breath, then he resumed the rubbing. Owen used the time to admire the faint pinkness in her cheeks and to try to slip "into character." They played out scenes occasionally, but even an impromptu spanking like this required an adjustment for Owen.

Brought up in a "don't hit girls" society, he found the idea of even simulated punishment to be a stretch – a stretch he had been willing to make, but a stretch nonetheless. Seeing her responses – emotional and sexual – had convinced him early on that spanking would be an integral part of their relationship. Now, two years later, it was the rare week that went by without a spanking. Nearly always, a spanking was followed by sex, which was part of what had thrown him off stride that morning. But Owen was nothing if not flexible, and if Emily wanted to flip the order of things, he could accommodate. If it made any difference to him at all, it was perhaps to make this spanking a little crisper, make the breaks for rubbing her bottom a little briefer than he probably would have if his goal had been to excite her for sex. He was less concerned about pushing her toward climax and more concerned that she find the emotional release she was undoubtedly looking for.

He shifted her slightly forward and resumed his assault on her tail. Under the right circumstances, he could have her in tears in under a minute, but he wasn't looking for that kind of intensity either. No, this called for a little more finesse, he mused. He needed to be able to let it build slowly enough for Emily to mentally and emotionally gather her troubles and frustrations so she could free herself of them all at once. He began to coax her gently into the self-examination he hoped would let her do just that. It had been less than five minutes since she had placed herself over his lap.

"Well," he said, "I hope this clears up who's in charge around here." Her silence prompted two quick swats to a vividly-blushing tail. Part of the game.

She gasped in apparent surprise before answering. "Oh! You are, Owen. You're in charge."

"Yes," he agreed as he resumed rubbing those red cheeks. "I am. But that's not the way you're acting this morning, is it?"

Again, two sharp spanks produced the required answer. "No, I wasn't. I was wrong. I'm sorry." The words were said without taunt, but also without much sincerity. She was still clearly in the playful mood that started the game, but Owen wanted her to be able to have more of the emotional release she needed, and that would mean forgetting, temporarily, that it was a game. It was time to ratchet up the spanking a little bit.

He aimed another dozen swats down low on her bottom, stopping when her sharp intake of breath told him she'd taken a step closer to release. He resumed the verbal prodding where he'd left off. "Yes, you were wrong, and I'll bet you are sorry. But not as sorry as you're going to be. We had already decided what needed to be done today, hadn't we? We had plans, but you decided you needed to be in control, didn't you? You've controlled things at work all week, so you think you get to tell me what to do, now too, is that it?" The patter that he knew was key to her experience often felt silly and artificial at first, but once he got past the pretext for the spanking, Owen could relax into discussing real issues and eliciting information from her.

He resumed spanking. For thirty seconds there was nothing but the spic-spac of his hand meeting flesh, then his hand again resumed a gentle massage that both soothed and calmed. Her breathing had the uneven catch that he recognized as just a bit short of a sob.

The playfulness was gone. In fact, she seemed unusually agitated, but it had not been a very severe spanking and he couldn't quite account for why. Her hands were still in front of her, where they belonged, but there was clear tension in her upper body, and she ground her elbows into the mattress in unnecessary struggle and rocked forward and backward slightly, though she made no effort to escape his hands, and that would have been easy to do in this interlude. Owen moved his left hand north along her back, easing the muscles there, reassuring her, and helping her maintain control.

"What's gotten into you today?" he asked, half to himself. He was still feeling her out, trying to figure the path in the dark. She was giving him few clues, verbal or behavioral, and that reinforced his feeling that she was looking to slough off the various troubles of the week. Perhaps even Emily herself did not know what she was looking for, he considered with an unexpected note of surprise. Early on, when he was still new to the idea of spanking, they had talked the subject almost to death. It was not unusual for her to slide off his lap to kneel on the floor and say, "Can I tell you something?" What followed was always a very polite, very precise explanation of what was going wrong: too hard, too light, too fast, etc. She always knew what she wanted and gradually he had come to know just as well. Or almost as well.

It had been a long time since she had interrupted a spanking, but Owen reassured himself that she would interrupt if necessary, and he returned to business.

He needed to focus her attention and get some answers. He jumped ahead in his self-script and said, "Why are you getting this spanking?" It was something he always asked, and the answers sometimes surprised him. She might come out with something raw and earthy about how the heat in her flesh enhanced the lovemaking yet to come. Other times she would admit transgressions large and small, including slights against Owen that he had never noticed. Once she had surprised him into full-belly laughter when she said that he seemed a little out-of-sorts and she was hoping to cheer him up. Whatever the answer, he had come to view these little over-the-lap conversations as among the most honest interactions they had. It was not that Emily was dishonest in the rest of her life, but she could be evasive and she was strikingly private about her thoughts most of the time.

So, expecting some clues that would orient and guide him, Owen was perhaps unreasonably upset when she didn't answer him – when she refused to answer him.

After a long silence, he asked, "Do I need to get the hairbrush?"

"No!" There was a note of real panic in her voice, but he dismissed it, waiting for her to elaborate. They had tried playing with implements a few times – a hairbrush, a small paddle, a freshly-cut switch. In each case, she had been enamored with the idea, but the reality had been unsettling. After only a few strokes – and only one with the switch – she had rejected each. He had no intention of using the brush again; it was just another move to focus her attention.

"Why are you getting this spanking?" he repeated, with a squeeze to her well-warmed cheek.

Again, he heard the catch in her breathing and in her voice as she said, "I don't know. I'm all mixed up. I think I just hoped this would settle things down so I could relax for the rest of the weekend." She paused, measuring her words. "It felt really good waking up slowly with you this morning." He smiled in agreement; it had felt good. "But then you were going to just walk away, like it was nothing." The accusation was clear in her voice, but she continued before he could correct her perception. "And then I realized that's stupid. You weren't walking away; you were just going to do what we'd already agreed to."

Owen considered her words for a moment as he ran his fingers up and down her back, scratching gently on the way down, rubbing somewhat more firmly on the way back up. It was a rhythm he knew well, and it was designed to soothe. Kept up long enough, it could practically tranquilize her. "So you're upset with me or with yourself?" he asked, clearly puzzled.

"I don't know," she admitted. "I shouldn't be upset with you because you haven't done anything wrong. I know that. But I just want you to make everything okay. And you haven't. But I want you to." The self-conscious watery chuckle struggled from her throat. "That's pretty stupid isn't it?"

"No, not stupid, but a little unrealistic, don't you think?" He sensed more than saw the resignation in her posture that his words produced, and he felt a pang of guilt over having let her down. If only he were omniscient.… He tried a different tack. "I know this has been a busy week for both of us. Did something happen at work that you want to talk about?"

Her response was a brief, almost curt, "No."

"You sure?" he prodded.

"Yes," she said impatiently. "It was a lousy week. My boss yelled at me. I yelled at my suppliers. They yelled at shipping. Just when it looked like we'd never get the presentation delivered to Chicago in time, I miraculously pulled it all together, and Friday at 5 p.m., I'm the fair-haired girl again. Situation normal."

On another day, he would have teased her that her tight auburn ringlets could never be considered "fair" but she was clearly in no mood for teasing. He was baffled. She normally became more calm during a spanking, not less so. He tried sympathy. "That doesn't sound like a normal week. That seems like a pretty stressful week."

"No more than usual," was the unsatisfying answer.

He changed tacks again. "Is there something about our conversation this morning that bothered you?" Even as he asked the question, Owen dismissed the possibility. She had been fully involved in the planning for the day, reminding him that the back door needed his attention and that she planned to work on the garden after getting the laundry started. No, she couldn't be brooding about that, he thought.

But the sharpness of her tone surprised him. "No, there is nothing about our conversation that bothered me!"

Owen paused, his left hand stopping its soothing pattern. There were lots of reasons Emily craved spankings – sexual excitement, intimacy, playing with control issues, emotional release – and they had talked about them all. But there were also spankings that he might easily have written in on the calendar – several days each month that she would describe herself as witchy – and a spanking seemed to ease her moodiness. Owen's read was more compassionate. She might feel witchy, but she acted weepy; the smallest thing could prompt tears. But a spanking seemed to free the tears in a controlled, manageable situation that left her relaxed and turning to him instead away. A win-win situation. They had learned through experimentation to make those spankings short, intense affairs designed to bring her to tears as quickly as possible – with a long "recovery" period in his arms. Then, more than any other time, she was emotionally open and affectionate. She was always physically demonstrative and courteous in daily life, but in those unguarded minutes after a PMS-inspired spanking, she would talk with unexercised candor. It was in those moments that he became aware of how observant she was. She would tell him, in explicit detail, what she loved and respected about him; she could share, without embarrassment, her own fears. Then, too, the sex was always great after a spanking. A win-win-win, he thought wryly. But a mental check against the calendar reaffirmed what he already knew. This was not PMS tension, however much it might look like it. Owen was at a loss.

Finally, he said, "You need this spanking, don't you?"

She hesitated a long moment, knowing what her answer would bring. He waited, knowing what she would say, willing her to say it. Finally, at a peak of anxiety, she gasped out, "Yes, I do," then braced herself for the final flurry.

Owen obliged. Thirty rapid-fire cracks to a bottom already blushing from attention. It wasn't the hardest spanking he had ever administered, but the bawling and the gasping breath told him he was finished. He stilled his hand, wondering if he had helped her or made things worse. The doubt was uncomfortable, and he found himself looking to place blame. She hadn't given him enough guidance, enough information. No, she hadn't, but it was his job to ferret out those clues.

With a flash of relief, Owen realized that he hadn't yet lost the opportunity. On a handful of occasions they had played with the idea of "corner time." Nearly always it was because one of them needed a few minutes to emotionally settle into the coming spanking. If she had been working intently when he swooped in to abduct her from her home office or had just gotten off the phone, he might guide her gently to the corner, both a physical end to what she was doing and an unspoken announcement of what was to come. A couple of times, she had even put herself in the corner, and he was amazed by the raw impact of walking into their bedroom to find her facing the wall, head bowed in simulated penitence.

It had started as a joke one time when she had been teasing him good-naturedly at a family gathering, and he had finally responded with "Wait 'til I get you home." The group erupted in a mix of laughter and "Oooo, Aunt Emily's in trouuuuble," that quickly passed as both Emily and Owen joined in the laughter. Nothing more was said about the exchange and Owen had completely put it out of his mind – until he emerged from the shower that evening to find his pretty wife in the corner wearing nothing but a little slip of a nightshirt. He had stopped in the doorway a moment, befuddled. "What's this?" he'd asked, and she had looked back over her shoulder with that coy expression that made her look far younger than her 45 years, and said, "You said, 'Wait 'til I get you home.' Well, we're home." He stood across the room, still rubbing the towel through damp hair and taking in the picture she made. She was just too cute for words. So he found ways to communicate that didn't require words – or at least not many.

Until that Saturday morning, though, corner time had always been a prelude to spanking, the scene-setter that established the mood of calm-but-excited anticipation. But, Owen reasoned, it didn't have to. She had read him enough of those stories she was always printing out from the computer that he knew there were other uses. Lots of couples – at least in the stories she read – used time in the corner after a spanking, as well as before. Maybe Emily could use a few minutes to pull herself together, to calm herself down so they could talk about what she was feeling.

She was still shaking with sobs when he lifted her from his lap and led her over to the slightly-cramped corner next to their bureau. She looked up at him in confusion, the tears still tracing down her cheeks, as she struggled to process what was happening. "What –" was as far as she got, though, before she found herself firmly ensconced in the corner.

Owen's hands were still on her shoulders as he spoke. "You stay right there, Emily, until I say otherwise. I don't much like the way things are going here this morning, and I want you to think about what's happening and what it means." He paused several seconds, then added, quite unnecessarily, "We're not done here." She felt his hands fall away and knew a moment of profound loss.

When she heard his voice again, it was from across the room. "I'm going to take a shower. You stay put. Understand?"

She nodded miserably into the corner, unable to muster a verbal reply, then heard the water go on in the master bath.

She leaned her forehead into the wall, and the tears, which had never really stopped, intensified. Through a haze of conflicting emotions, what she felt most clearly was abandonment. Owen had set her aside and walked away, unable to deal with her unpredictable behavior. And who could blame him? She didn't understand it herself. He certainly couldn't be expected to divine the problem – if there was one. Maybe there really wasn't anything wrong, and she was just too demanding. She wanted . . . well, everything. She wanted Owen to spend the morning in bed with her; she wanted the chores to be done so they wouldn't be hanging over their heads; she wanted to check on her mom so that bit of worry would be assuaged; she wanted to go out for a decadent champagne breakfast at the hotel down the road. But mostly, she just wanted Owen to hold her and console her as he always did after a spanking.

To be so far from him right then felt like exile.

She could hear the water splashing in the shower, but she didn't picture Owen's strong, solid body. She was, instead, seeing the 15 feet to the bathroom door, 15 feet that grew to 30 in her mind, then 60, and for a few minutes it might have been miles.

She wished she'd never started things this morning. The spanking was clearly a bad idea. Now Owen was so angry with her he couldn't even stand to be near her. The tears turned to sobs and she didn't hear the water in the bathroom go off. There was guilt and shame, but mostly regret for having prompted – even asked for – a spanking before she knew what she wanted to happen. Now she had ruined the only safety in her life and there was no way to undo it. It was a sad, desolate thought that dragged her further into an already very lonely place.

She was surprised at movement to her right, then realized that Owen was back in the room, pulling fresh clothes from the bureau. He didn't speak, and she took it as mute confirmation that he was still too angry to talk to her. He was usually so even-tempered and patient that his silence reinforced her downward spiral. She heard the bedsprings as he sat to put on his socks, heard the distinctive zip of his Levi's and the slide of the closet door as he went in search of a shirt, and she became acutely conscious of her own nakedness, the knowledge making her feel even more vulnerable. There would be none of the sexual play that strengthened and reaffirmed their union. He was done. She continued to sob erratically.

Leaning against the far wall, forehead furrowed in concern, Owen watched her as she struggled against invisible demons. He had expected she would collect herself during his decidedly-brief shower. The morning had taken a terrible and upsetting turn, and he was anxious to put it to rights. Somehow they had gone from tender lovemaking to Emily sobbing in the corner, and he wasn't exactly sure how. Or what to do about it. Unconsciously, he admired the slim body and the prominent bottom that still showed the blush from his hand. She was beautiful and precious and so obviously unhappy.

"Em," he said gently, but she appeared not to hear. She was taking deep, deliberate breaths in a clear effort to regain control. He crossed the room to stand directly behind her and was surprised to see her stiffen. "Emily," he said into her ear this time. "Are you ready to come out of that corner?"

A jerky nod was his only answer, and Owen found himself wondering when she had stopped talking. He ached to hold her and fix whatever was wrong. Despite his hopes, the corner time seemed to have done nothing – or at least nothing good. His arms came around her, meeting on the bare, taut skin of her abdomen.

And she struggled away from him.

"Red," she sputtered. "Red!" It was the closest he had ever heard her to hysteria.

"What?" he asked, even as he stepped back and his hands went up in a defensive gesture of innocence. She had never safe-worded before. Never. He was flabbergasted. It had even taken him a moment to recognize it as their safeword.

But as he stood, dumbfounded, in the middle of the room, she was suddenly moving, her back to the wall as she sidled along, her eyes darting around the room anxiously. When she reached the bed, she grabbed the robe draped over the bedpost and covered herself quickly. Owen continued to watch, open-mouthed. She gave him a wide berth as she moved across the room but finally looked directly at him from the bathroom door. "We both have things to do today. I'm going to take a shower and get started." With that, she closed the door, and he heard the unfamiliar "snick" of the lock engaging.

"What the hell?" he muttered in disbelief.

To Be Continued...