“Pani,” she said sulkily.
He crossed from the kitchen to the dining room with the bottle in his hand. As he checked the temperature against his wrist, he said, “What’s my name?”
“Papa.” If such was possible, she sounded even more sulky than before. He was going to have to do something about that.
“If someone comes up to you, what do you say?”
“Pani, property of Papa, 11355921.”
It might have been a more note worthy accomplishment to get her to repeat all of that if only she understood what she was saying. She didn’t. Humans, he discovered, were first rate mimics. She was copying the sounds he’d taught her over the last week because past experience had already convinced her, twice this morning alone, that ‘Papa’ was not a man to be ignored when he made a request. She was also learning that he had a very hard hand, a willingness to apply it frequently and vigorously to her bared backside, and the resolve to do so as many times as it took to secure her cooperation. She was being particular in how she obeyed, following for the most part what he wanted her to do, but there was still a very obvious contest of wills taking place between them.
Bach sat down in his chair, turned her highchair to face him as he said, “Open your mouth.”
He held up the bottle to signal his intent, and she glared first at it and then at him. She clamped her lips together and rebelliously turned her face away from the foul tasting protein drink.
She had a stubborn streak in her at least a mile in width. She seemed determined to make him work for every inch of acquiescence that he managed to pry from her.
“All right,” he said again, and set the bottle on the table with a sigh. “Have it your way.”
He took his time rolling up his shirt sleeves, an action he was hoping she’d pick up as a signal for her to either change her behavior or a good, sound spanking would be quick in following. It was too late for her now, but Pani didn’t seem to care. She showed absolutely no hints of repentance, but instead stubbornly glared at him with mutinous eyes. That was fine, she’d come to realize her mistake soon enough.
“You’re going to discover that I don’t respond well to defiance, my little miss.”
He began to unbuckle her ankles first, saving her wrists for last. Since she had yet to go quietly over his lap, he kept a firm hold on her right arm, which was the last to be freed from the highchair straps. She didn’t disappoint him, either. Just before the last buckle came off, her eyes narrowed to thin grey slits. Her slight muscles tensed in his grip. Defiant to the end.
He couldn’t help but chuckle. With a shake of his head, he sighed, “All right, Pani. Over my knee you go.”
And the fight was on. When he tried to bring her up out of the highchair, Pani locked her legs against him and grabbed onto the arms, clinging as if for dear life. It was the shortest lived revolt in the history of his planet. She lost—miserably.
Being both bigger and stronger, he had her down over his thighs despite her wild attempts to do otherwise. Her arms and legs scrambled for the leverage to fight him, but he still pinned her down, wrapping his arm around her tiny waist and centering her bottom so that her toes barely scraped the floor.
When she reached back in a final, last-ditch effort to halt the inevitable, he merely caught her hand and pinned that against the small of her back. Well and truly captured, her struggles came to a highly frustrated end. Pani lay panting across his lap with nothing gained for herself but an excellent view of his kitchen tiles.
He, on the other hand, had an excellent view of a pert, round bottom, slender legs and a graceful well-spotted back, fully revealed in all its unusualness as he raised the back of her baby girl dress. When he hooked the elastic back of her panties, her buttocks clenched as if squeezing tight enough might keep them up. It didn’t. He not only pulled them down, he took them all the way off her.
“Shall we start again?” he asked, the epitome of patience. “Maybe this time with a good deal more respect and cooperation on your part, hm? Your name is—?”
Pani stayed stubbornly silent, her breathing hard and angry.
Her stubbornness made him smile, and Bach shook his head again. “You should know by now that, although I’d probably find your obedience quite pleasing, your disobedience is nowhere near as displeasing as perhaps I should. This,” he patted her already spank-reddened bottom twice, a gesture of fondness but with little of the bite that his coming blows would hold, “has become a gratifying undertaking, rather than a chore.”
Her shoulders sagged as though she understood him. “Pani,” she finally said.
“Thank you.”
His hand cracked across her bruised buttocks. Not very hard, really. But hard enough to make her yelp. She began to struggle all over again, but it was short lived and he had no trouble holding her until she settled down again.
“What’s my name?” he then asked.
“P-pa—” she groaned, trying to squirm to take the sting out of the impact that couldn’t even be seen over all the redness and the black and blue marks that covered her flanks nearly top to bottom. “Papa.”
“That’s right.” He spanked her again, five sharp times, with each crack of his palm just a little harder than the last. One after another, they elicited louder and more frantic shrieks until the final swat bounced off her fiery buttocks and Pani stiffened with a hoarse, tormented shout.
She collapsed immediately again, gasping and groaning, on the verge of tears. Barely able to wiggle, she struggled to break out of his grasp until she was exhausted.
Bach merely waited until she was still again. “Last one,” he told her, gently running his hand over each clenching buttock in turn. “If someone comes up to you, what do you say?”
Moaning, Pani pulled meekly at her imprisoned hand. She grabbed onto his leg with her other and tried to roll over. When that failed, she went still again.
“Pani,” she sniffled. “Property of Papa, 11355921. NO!” she wailed when his hand abruptly left her battered rump. Like the breaking of a dam, she burst into tears at the very first ‘CRACK!’
Bach made her bottom dance under a barrage of strong-armed swats. He wasn’t spanking very hard, but with a bottom as battered as hers was, hard wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t her spirit he wanted to break anyway; just her defiance. He did his best to avoid the worst of the bruising, his open palm slapping upward as he caught the plump base just above her thighs. Each impact jolted her over his knee and made her hidden sex wink out at him from behind the cover of her clenching thighs.
Even her pretty little bottom hole winked at him. Until the more he held her, the more curious he was to make her a full-fledged recreational pet. He’d never been much of a man for the fucking of animals, but Pani was an animal who looked like a woman. Soft in all the right places. Welcoming in all the ways that women appealed to men.
His hand began to burn and throb, but still he continued to spank her until she fell still over his lap, and Bach finally stopped.
He left her to cry in position, resting his hand on her blazing skin so he could feel the rising heat. Her bottom was so swollen and raw now, the flesh upon the summits felt hard to the touch. He was quickly coming to love the sight of her like this. Penitent in pose, sobbing so hard that she could barely catch her breath, writhing in his unyielding grasp so intently focused on the fire burning her from behind that she didn’t even realize the spanking had stopped. Mindless to everything but his immediate touch.
Bach even liked the noises she made: hoarse and ragged “Ow, owie” sounds that she repeated again and again as she cried.
He waited patiently for her to come back to herself, and while he waited, he rubbed her bottom to show that he could be gentle as easily as he could be harsh.
Instead of trying to get up, when his grip finally relaxed, Pani slid off his knee and fell to the floor. Her hands went behind her, tenderly framing her blistered backside, either unable or perhaps unwilling to touch her wounded flesh directly. Like a tormented beast, she crawled away from him to cower against the nearest wall.
“No,” he told her, and she looked up at him, tears trembling on her lashes and spilling down her spotted cheeks. He beckoned her back to him. “Come here.”
Her mouth quivered. But after only a slight hesitation, she reluctantly crept back to stand in front of him, clasping her bottom in a way that was increasingly more protective and less reflective of the pain.
Taking a napkin from the table, he wiped the tears from her cheeks, then held it to her nose. “Blow,” he said.
She tried to turn her face away, then opened her mouth so she could breathe when he caught the back of her head to keep her from squirming away. He wiped her nose anyway, then stroked the stray wisps of copper hair back from her flushed face.
“That’s enough of this kind of attitude, young lady. Like it or not, you’re going to learn to behave yourself.”
Her mane was a mess. Bach untied the ribbons that bound it so he could untangle the braids. When he got up to get his hairbrush from the bathroom, he half expected to find her scrambling to get out the door or window again. But she remained standing where he’d left her, in front of his chair, her hands rubbing slowly up and down around the edges of her sore bottom, her head bowed and her shoulders sagged in defeat.
Bach caressed her hair as he sat back down, then gently began to brush it. He was as careful as he knew how to be, smoothing out the tangles as painlessly as he could until her long mane was flowing as soft as silk all the way down past her waist. Parting the thick mass in the middle, he wove new braids neatly one to each side of her head and fastened the ends with the green ribbons again.
“There you go. All beautiful again.” Laying a finger under her chin, he tilted up her head so he could see her face. Once more, he swiped away the lingering tears with the napkin, then leaned down and gently kissed her mouth.
The thin copper dashes of hair above her eyes quirked together as he pulled slowly back again. He looked at her, then at the pink ribbon bow of her mouth as she touched two fingertips to her lips.
There was a tingling in his groin. She had felt so…good. Bach stared at her, hardly able to believe how good. Hesitantly, he leaned down once more, cupping her chin gently between thumb and forefinger, and he kissed her again. Less like an owner with a favored and darling pet-
-certainly not anything like a parent comforting the child that her mane and dress resembled—but more like a man kissed the attractive woman that her breasts and hips suggested she was.
His hand cupped her cheek, his lips coaxed hers to part, and he invaded the sultry heat of her mouth with his tongue.
Pani mewed, and he pulled back to look at her. Her eyes were closed. Her arms, held straight down at her sides, ending in tightly clenched fists. She was breathing very quickly, panting even, her chest heaving.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “You don’t need to be afraid.”
Her eyes fluttered open again.
He wasn’t quite sure what amazed him more: how hard he was from kissing her, or that she reached up to lay her hand along the side of his face and kissed him right back. Admittedly, it was a very brief and shaky touch. But the instant she pulled away, she touched her mouth again.
Bach held out his hand, welcoming her into his lap. She’d surprised him with her kiss, but she shocked the hell out of him when she climbed up to straddle both his legs. She leaned into his arms so she could lay her head against his shoulder and caught her bottom with both hands again.
With soft sniffles and breathy gasps, she cried against his chest and let him comfort her.
*
The best part about being retired was that he never had to go anywhere. The worst part was that, consequently, he never went anywhere, either. He didn’t have to go to work, so he sat at his computer all day or puttered about making minor repairs to a house that really didn’t need it.
Pani promised to put a stop to that.
As he sat at his desk watching her play—in actuality, she was more just sitting there, trying not to look as though she were staring back at him—he couldn’t help but think of all the things he ought to buy for her. The first being a better formula, something specially designed for the human digestive system. He wasn’t sure what her dietary needs were, but he was pretty sure that a continuous diet of protein drinks wasn’t going to meet them.
Pani shifted onto her knees on the blanket and, in between casting him surreptitious glances now and then, began to sift through the array of toys spread out around her. Some were flashy with color, some made noises, musical and otherwise, and there was even the same maze that she’d hurled at him her first day home. It was undamaged and, remarkably enough, that was the one she reached for.
He made no secret now of watching her, ready to intervene with a sharp word or even another spanking if it looked as though she were going to throw it again. But she didn’t. Instead, with a small sigh, Pani turned it on its side and began to work the marbles through the maze.
Every now and then, she glanced up at him, but never held his gaze for very long. Even less often, the direction of her eyes would shift off towards the door.
She hadn’t given up on the idea of escaping yet. Obviously, she was still thinking about running in the wild. Maybe she always would. Too bad there was no ‘wild’ for her to run to on his world. Just a few well-protected federal woodlands full of big animals that would consider her a tasty tidbit of a snack. There were also a lot of two-legged predators that thrived on the capture and sale of pets to medical facilities for cruel scientific experiments. Or to the sex trade, where a human’s body became quickly worn-out from improper or non-existent pre-copulatory stretching and males, who pandered to their avarice and lacks of self-restraint while indulging in a cheap but exotic thrill.
If Pani were lucky enough to avoid that kind of fate, there were still more than a few unscrupulous breeders, who would take one look at her unusual coloring and promptly over-breed her for whelps with red manes and spotted skins.