Finely Disciplined Thoughts (6 page)

“There was grease. A lot of grease. I reminded you to be careful how you disposed of it. You weren’t,” he said.

She summoned up her most righteously indignant pose, but when she tried to look him in the eye, her own kept sliding off to the region of his ear, instead.

“What did you do with the grease?” he asked point blank, knowing he was quickly running out of time and still had some clearing out to do, although he intended for a vast part of the mopping up job to be hers.

“I put it in the — the old coffee tub I had saved, and I stuck it in the trash.” Her heart rate accelerated slightly, even as the fib left her lips.

He nudged the slimy trashcan with his foot and pointed out the obvious.

“No coffee can here. Try again.”

“Well,” she said through lips she had to lick first before they would co-operate, “that’s because I didn’t put it in that trash can. I took it outside. It’s in the recycle container.”

He looked at her quietly for a full minute. She had time to fidget. She used it well.

“I’d like to see that coffee tub. Let’s go take a look,” he suggested finally. “Why don’t you go get us both some shoes and we’ll go outside and find it.”

She knew the hole was deep, but dread that prickled at the base of her bottom forced her to keep shoveling. “No — I — you can’t — I mean, it’s nasty and yucky. You don’t want to go digging through there. And besides, there’s lots of other stuff on top of it because I did some more cleaning after you went to bed, and it’s all in there, and it will take forever to find the right container, and —” She snatched back the hand that had made its protective way rearward. No need to provide clues to her guilt.

“You’re right. I have no desire to go digging through there. I want you to do that for me. And, by the way, as long as you’re concerned about digging through things, I think it’s only fair to tell you, you’ve dug yourself about three feet down by my count.”

Her face lost all color at that point. Except for the two bright red marks across her high cheekbones.

She was running true to form. He’d have to give her that. Even faced with overwhelming evidence that he recognized her duplicity and was prepared to deal with it, she hung in for another round.

“This isn’t my fault,” she wailed. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Four,” he said. “And because I love you, let me remind you, there’s a large supply of truth serum in the bathroom closet and I’ll be home early tonight to give you as many doses as you tell me you need. So will four be enough, or do you think you’ll require five?”

“I poured the grease down the sink,” she confessed on a wretched sob and slip-slided across the kitchen to throw herself into his arms and on his mercy.

He hated lies.

He hated them from anyone, but especially from his beautiful girl, who — though she could be unbelievably naughty at times — was seldom hurtful to anyone else in that misbehavior. It was only he that she wounded without thought and, apparently, without understanding. Although, heaven knows, he had tried to make her see.

Most of all, he despised her lies when she employed them to avoid responsibility for her disobedience. It was difficult enough to help her walk the straight and narrow when she had been encouraged by indulgent parents to seek only her own pleasure for the first 25 years of her willful life. That was before he had stepped in to set her feet firmly on a path of inner beauty that would mirror her physical perfection. It seemed a true rejection of his higher purpose for her when she hindered his efforts and made life harder than it had to be for both of them.

He had struggled to find a way to help her overcome her tendency to resort to subterfuge. For a while, he had relied on simply telling her that lies would mean she had to endure a harder spanking than she would normally have earned for her faults and failures.

New to the whole concept of discipline, she seemed to have trouble distinguishing where the sting delivered for the infraction left off and the one for lack of truthfulness set in, so she was perfectly willing to gamble that she might avoid punishment altogether if she could only appear guileless enough.

He had even warned her that he could read all the signs of her duplicity, so there was no possibility her lies would be effective and, in the end, she would surely suffer more.

She apparently thought additional practice would make her a more artful dodger.

It did not. Although it was not for lack of trying over a period that left him with a right arm so sore he had learned, of necessity, to be just as effective with his left.

His next approach was to separate the punishment for the lie from the punishment for the transgression. The hated hairbrush became the instrument of correction, reserved exclusively for a lack of honesty, and it bit deeply only when the sting of the initial punishment was about to wear off and her tears were dried.

She was still willing to gamble. Consistently.

And then he had found, quite by accident and thanks to a nasty strep infection, the only halfway effective curb to her seriously forked tongue ...

He had come home from work to find her almost delirious with a high fever and a throat so swollen he could barely understand her when she struggled to speak. Bundling her into the car, he had driven to his friend’s clinic office in a panic, praying he could catch the physician before he left to make evening hospital rounds and that he would agree to see her immediately. Luck had been with him, and he had made contact by phone just as they were wheeling in to the almost-deserted clinic parking lot.

Dr. Bennett Scott had met them at the clinic’s back door and brought them through to a treatment room. He could still recall carrying a moaning and listless Vallie who seemed oblivious to her surroundings.

He had held her in his lap as though she were 5 while the good doctor and good friend had poked and prodded and evaluated and nominated a virulent strep infection as the culprit, even without benefit of a lab test.

“So what’s the treatment?” he had asked, snuggling her close once again as though her recovery were directly tied to his proximity. Which she had seemed to feel it was, if her burrowing instincts were any indication.

“She needs a massive dose of an antibiotic. You don’t want to fool around with strep. I’ve got a wonder drug that will have her feeling like a different person within twenty-four hours, but you’ll need to keep her full of fluids and make her take it easy the rest of the week, even though she’s going to think she can pick right back up where she left off once the drug washes all that nasty stuff out of her system,” Dr. Ben had said. “My nurse has gone for the day, but it will only take me a minute to get the meds.”

Vallie had nestled against him, her head tucked beneath his chin and her face resting against his chest. She had turned her body in to him and curled her legs up onto his lap, heedless of the fact, in her misery, that her knee-length sleep shirt had ridden up around her hips and exposed her panty-clad bottom.

So when the physician had re-entered the treatment room with a hypodermic in one hand and a cotton ball doused with alcohol in the other, she had unwittingly presented him with the most obvious target for his medical ministrations.

The doctor had sought approval from the guy in charge, whose only concern had been the launching of an immediate attack on the germ that had dared assault his darling, and he had received it immediately. It had been a simple move to edge the hem of her nightclothes up a few inches and to stretch the elastic waist of her panties down a few inches and then to prepare the creamy skin of her upper hip with the cold cotton swab.

It was a move that had launched Vallie instantly upright and determinedly hostile.

“What are you doing?” she had shrieked from the depths of her swollen throat while the one who loved her best in the whole world had struggled to keep her from falling off his lap in her hysteria.

“It’s just a shot to make you feel better,” he had told her reassuringly. “It’ll be over in just a second.”

“No-o-o-o.” she had wailed. “I want a pill. I hate shots. You know I hate shots. Don’t let him stick me,” she had begged piteously, while she had slapped, and even kicked, ineffectually and comically at Dr. Ben.

Had either of them been able to see inside her mind, they would have been treated to a journey back through time to another doctor’s office — one in which a tiny, defenseless girl was held facedown across her mother’s lap while warm hands divested her bottom of protection and something cold and sharp delivered a searing trail of long-lasting, stinging pain she would never forget and would always dread with everything in her.

Oblivious to such background knowledge and focused only on a cure, however, her troubled husband had simply raised an inquisitive eyebrow at his workout buddy, who held all medical knowledge.

Ben had shrugged. “It will get into her system much quicker this way. If she won’t take it, I can’t force her, but you may end up in the hospital with her before it’s over, otherwise.”

It had been all he needed to hear. He had forcefully pulled the weeping sick girl back into her former fetal curl on his lap, secured her hands as he knew how from long practice and forestalled her kicks by simply scooping her legs up beneath her knees with his right arm.

Thus restrained, Vallie had had no defense but her sobs and unladylike threats, which he was finally moved to silence by a simple approach he would have hesitated to use in most instances but which seemed called for under the circumstances.

“Hush that right now and be still, or I promise you I will spank your bare bottom here and now in front of Dr. Ben and then I’ll have him give you two shots,” he had promised in exasperation.

“And I’ll make sure they sting a lot,” the physician had added for good measure, with a wink at her protector-turned-threat.

She had compressed herself into a tense ball of resistant flesh then, despite the warning that clenching would only make the needle’s bite sharper, and had wailed like a five-year-old even after the miracle-working drug had been delivered, a cleansing final cotton dab had removed a tiny drop of blood and a flesh-colored band-aid had been applied to the site.

In fact, she had still been crying real hicccuping tears and rubbing frantically at her throbbing hip with a gesture she usually employed surreptitiously slightly further down when he had replaced her clothes, stood up with her still in his arms, and edged out the clinic’s back door. With Dr. Ben’s help, he had gently laid her down on the back seat and tucked a blanket from the clinic’s treatment room around her while she snuffled, sounding remarkably just as she usually did from her place in the corner about fifteen minutes after an unhappy encounter with his belt.

On the drive home, with her piteous, damp sniffles as accompaniment to his thought processes, he had reviewed her response to the injection with interest.

As promised, the injection did its work beautifully. But Vallie had pouted and complained for days following and tried to make him promise he would never again subject her to such medical treatment.

He had promised nothing of the sort. Instead, with Dr. Ben’s assistance, he had purchased a large supply of sterile syringes and large gauge needles, along with sterile saline solution — his own version of truth serum. Then, with careful tutoring from his physician friend, he had studied anatomy charts, while envisioning his own beloved’s very familiar plump backside, and mapped a plan.

Such careful preparation was necessary so that he could make his future lessons about lies stick a little farther down the cheek than usual under ordinary circumstances without risk to her sciatic nerve. He estimated there would be ample space for several doses, if necessary, in the area of her oh-so-vulnerable spank spot, which would probably be just as sensitive to sticks as to smacks.

Because Vallie had, of course, written her own prescription for a liar’s cure. And he was dedicated to healing her of that particular nasty malady.

A ‘Top’-rated Show

By Ashlynn Kenzie and Devlin O’Neill

Breschetta Fontaine, host of top-rated TV talk show “Personal Preference” (and real-life BRAT): “Ladies and gentlemen, join me in welcoming Professor Devlin O’Neill — author, actor, Website host, educator, and behavioral therapist — to the show this evening.”

(Polite applause, in accordance with prop card directives, as O’Neill strides confidently onstage, attired in a pale blue long-sleeve broadcloth shirt, crisp jeans accented by an inch-wide belt in soft brown leather, a casual-cut light-weight beige jacket, and brown suede boots with tasteful silver buckles over the ankle bone. The very blonde and very green-eyed Fontaine extends a languid hand in greeting and then waves O’Neill to the guest couch, taking a seat at right angles to him.)

Fontaine: “Now, Professor O’Neill, tell us a little about yourself.”

O’Neill: “Well, I —”

Fontaine: “About your books, I mean. I believe you have two currently on the New York Times best-seller list.”

O’Neill: “That’s right. The first —”

(Reaching in front of O’Neill and obscuring him from the camera, Breschetta Fontaine seizes the books from the set’s coffee table, where they have been positioned for her to display, but instead of holding them toward the camera for a close-up, she deposits them facedown in her lap.)

Fontaine: “Some people are rather surprised to find your books on that list, I must say, Professor.”

O’Neill smiles politely and tries to address the audience. The host arches an eyebrow and favors him with a condescending stare, interrupting her guest yet again.

Fontaine: “Some people wonder, Professor — and, by the way, is that an honorary title?”

O’Neill: “No, it isn’t, Miss Fontaine. I earned three degrees and have been on the faculty of —”

Fontaine: “If you insist, Mr. O’Neill. Now on to your books. Don’t you have to admit that the titles are — let’s be honest here — little more than overworked clichés?