“Not yet, little girl.”
“Daddy, I’m sorry, I know it was?—”
He spanked the backs of my thighs, once on each side, firm enough to make my whole body lurch forward, and my apology dissolved into a genuine cry.
“I know you’re sorry,” he said, as if this was entirely consistent with continuing, which to him it apparently was. “You’re always sorry afterward. The spanking is to make sure you’re sorryduringtoo.”
He resumed paddling me.
I stopped trying to maintain any composure. The paddle was thorough in a way that left no room for strategy. Every time I thought I had located some reservoir of dignity to draw from, another stroke would find a place that was already sore and I would have to start over. My bottom was blazing. It wasn’t just warm, not just stinging, but absolutely scorched. My cries turned into full-throated sobs and still the paddling didn’t end.
And I was wet. So impossibly, furiously, wonderfully wet that I could feel it on my inner thighs and I wanted to be embarrassed and couldn’t fully locate the embarrassment beneath everything else.
He paused.
His palm finally rested against the flaming curve of my bottom with a gentleness that was almost unbearable after the paddle. I pressed back against it without deciding to.
“Tell me why you trust me,” he said quietly.
I breathed. In. Out.
“Because you’ve never given me a reason not to,” I said. “Because every single time I’ve needed you, you’ve been there. Because you knew what I needed before I did and you waited for me anyway.” My voice was rough and not entirely steady. “Because you planned a birthday dinner for me and it was supposed to be a surprise and I ruined it.”
His hand moved slowly across my punished skin.
“You didn’t ruin anything, little girl.”
“I didn’t?”
“No, sweet girl. I promise. Now tell me what you’re going to do when something scares you next time?” he pressed.
“I come to you,” I said. “I ask. I trust you, Daddy.”
A pause.
“Good girl,” he said, and reached between my thighs.
I cried out. The contact against my clit was electric after everything, and he moved his fingers with a slow patience that was very clearly intentional, building my arousal back up from a simmer to a sensation much more urgent with a systematic expertise that left me grinding back against his hand and saying his name in a way that had nothing polished about it.
He edged me once. I whimpered.
Twice. I begged properly, without any pride left to get in the way.
“Please, Daddy. Please.I need you,please!”
“I know what you need,” he said, and set the paddle aside.
EPILOGUE
Jaxon
She was extraordinary.
She was always extraordinary.
Now, she lay on her back with her dark hair spread across the white pillowcase, her eyes half-lidded and dark with want, the flush moving from her chest to her cheeks in that particular way that still undid me after everything we’d been through together. Her bottom would be tender for hours. I knew the sting the paddle left behind, had thought very carefully about it, and she had taken every stroke with that specific combination of genuine suffering and complete surrender that I had come to understand was the most honest version of her.
She was always most herself in this room. With me. After.
