Everything Gained Page 4

As if it knew she was thinking of it, the cell trilled, but she could see that it wasn't Gain. Instead, it was Gail, another of her good friends. She pushed the "answer" button. "Hi."

  "Hey, where the hell are you? You're husband's downright frantic, ya' know."

  "I started out at Moll's house, but we decided that what this situation needed was a sugar rush, so we're at Friendly's, drowning our sorrows in a pile of ice cream and hot fudge sauce that's bigger than my head."

  "And you didn't invite me?" Gail sounded downright indignant.

  "Come on down. I'm sure we'll still be here. If we keep eating this, we won't be able to slide out of the booths."

  "I think I'll pass, although I want in on the next blow out."

  "K." Nina purposely moaned and groaned sensually as another mouthful melted over her tongue.

  "Ewwwwwwww!" Gail whined. "Cut it out! It sounds like you're having sex."

  "Just enjoying the ice cream," Nina replied innocently.

  "Speaking of having sex... when are you going to call that gorgeous husband of yours and let him know that you're not dead or otherwise horribly mutilated?"

  "Nice segue."

  Gail wasn't above sarcasm, either. "Thanks. I thought it was rather smooth, myself. But you really should call him - even if you don't come home. Just call and let him know you're all right and with friends and that he doesn't have to worry."

  The guilt she'd been trying unsuccessfully to avoid all evening came home to roost with a dull thud. It seemed everyone was right today except her. "Yep. I will," the seriousness of her tone made Molly stop shoveling the luscious dessert into her mouth and sit there watching her closely.

  "Are you okay?" Gail asked.

  Rubbing her hand over her forehead as her eyes closed, Nina answered in a tear husky voice, "Yeah. It's just been a really shitty day, overall."

  Gail immediately shifted into sympathy mode. "Awww, I'm sure everything's going to be okay, Neen. Gain didn't sound mad or anything, just worried."

  Gain almost never sounded mad, but she didn't say that to Gail. "Yeah. I'll call him shortly."

  "Good. I'm always here if you need to talk, you know."

  Gail's heartfelt sympathy wasn't helping Nina control her tears any. "I know - and thank you. You know the same is true for me."

  Gail did know that - she'd come to stay with Nina and Gain when she was going through a pretty bad divorce, where she'd really needed to hide out from her soon to be ex. "Call me tomorrow. I'm missing details here that are going to drive me crazy."

  "I will," Nina promised.

  "I love you, you know."

  The battle against crying was surrendered then and there. "I love you, too," she was barely able to get out before hanging up.

  Luckily, Molly was there with a napkin in her hand. "Here. It's a good thing you don't wear makeup. You cry so much it would all be around your knees, anyway."

  "Bite me."

  They chatted for a few more minutes, then Molly sat back. "So, are you going to call him, or hasn't he suffered enough for you?"

  It was a damned good thing that Molly was such a good friend, or Nina would have had to punch her out. Instead, she sighed, toying with a cherry before popping it into her mouth, throwing the stem onto her plate.

  "No tying it into a knot with your tongue? I would have thought something like that would be child's play for you."

  Nina didn't deign to acknowledge that jibe. Molly's relationship with her husband could not have been any more different from Nina's with Gain. Whereas Gain and Nina were more sexually active than a lot of twenty year olds, and were even more in love now than they had been when they were first married, Molly's marriage hadn't faired so well. She and her husband hadn't had sex in years, and Molly professed to have absolutely no interest in picking up that thread of their relationship.

  But she was almost insatiably curious about Nina's sex life - but more than that, about her lifestyle with Gain. Molly was always amazed at how open and interested Nina was in sex, and how many different things she and Gain had tried, especially the spanking aspect. She was always asking her when her last spanking was, and for excruciating detail about what it was like, always wondering aloud if something she'd done had gotten Nina into trouble, and listening raptly to the answers.

  If she hadn't known that Molly had become largely asexual, Nina would have thought she was a closet spanko.

  Try as she might, though, Nina couldn't explain, somehow couldn't convey to Molly, despite her facility with language, how emotionally fulfilling this type of relationship was, at least for herself and her husband. It went much further than a mere fetish. It engendered all of the deepest concepts of love and commitment and responsibility and, very definitely, sexual attraction. But it also involved real pain, real tears, and the resolve necessary to invoke them when needed.

  She'd given up trying to explain the less prurient aspects, knowing that Molly didn't want to hear about them anyway. Her marriage to Glen was largely affectionless, due, Nina was sure, to her own lack of sexual interest.

  Nina glared at Molly. "It is not 'right up my alley', thank you very much, although I'm certainly no slouch in that area, either." She dabbed at her lips, certain that she had worn more of the treat than she'd ingested, then threw the napkin onto the table, sighing loudly. "I'll call him, I'll call him. It's just that I know what I'm going to get when I get home, and even though I know I deserve it - although not necessarily for the same reasons as I'm going to get it - I'm still not in any hurry to get my bottom blistered."

  Molly shook her head slowly. "I will never get over being amazed that you let him do that do to you."

  "I know. But it's right for me, and for us, somehow."

  "Even though it makes you afraid to go home?" came the pointed question.

  Nina pursed her lips. "It's not afraid, really. Just... reluctant."

  One of Molly's thick eyebrows rose nearly to her hairline. "There's not a lot of difference there, so far as I can tell."

  "Yeah, there is. You've never seen me with a black eye, have you? Ever had to come get me and take me away from the E.R. so that my husband wouldn't be able to beat me up again?"

  Molly had to agree that she hadn't.

  "And you've said it yourself - he loves me. He doesn't hide it at all. He loves me."

  "Yeah, he does." They were the only couple, who, when they got together to play cards or just have dinner together at someone's home or a restaurant, that spent the majority of their time holding hands, or with his hand stroking her hair, or lying across her shoulders. It was as if they still couldn't get enough of each other, and they'd been married much too long for that to be true anymore.

  But it was.

  Nina just kept repeating what she'd said to Molly all the way home, more hours later than she wanted to admit, and well past the ten o'clock curfew he'd set. They'd gone from the ice cream parlor back to Molly's for He loved her. He loved her. He wasn't going to be very happy with her, but he loved her very much, and she knew that, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  She came in through the front door, not wanting to give him any more warning that she was home than she absolutely had to, and if she'd gone in through the side door, into the mud room, he would have heard the garage door going up and down.

  It didn't matter in the end. He must've been sleeping on the couch in the living room - where no one ever sat and definitely never slept - because when she turned around from shutting the door, there he was, in all his seething, outraged masculine glory.

  Nina looked him straight in the eye. It was the least she owed him. Then she took the few steps necessary to press her body against his and reached up to frame his precious face with her hands. "Come down here and kiss me," she whispered, cursing her small stature not for the first time.

  For a split second, she thought that he was going to refuse. But then he melted, almost the way she'd imagined he would, and kissed her, wrapping those wonderfully strong arms around her and lifting her o
ff her feet so that she was eye to eye with him.

  "You had me very worried, you know."

  Nina's eyes skipped away from his, and she worried her lip, fussing with the collar of his golf shirt. "I know."

  "And you also heard that I wanted you home by ten, and you know the rule about letting me know where you are, and answering your cell phone - "

  "I know, I know," Nina answered, sounding whinier than she probably wanted to, considering her precarious position.

  Gain took a deep breath. "You do know that you have a good sized punishment coming."

  Nina just nodded, apparently finding his top button fascinating.

  He tipped her face up, making her meet his eyes. "And you do know that I love you to distraction, don't you?"

  Her face clouded. "Even though I lead Dunn on so that I could keep my writing career on track?"

  The glare she got made her wish she hadn't said what she did, but there was no retracting it. "That's not what I thought, and you know it. I just thought that maybe you weren't looking at the signs of his... interest," he spat the word out as if it was acid in his mouth, "in you because you were so wrapped up in being happy with your success in writing for him."

  "You can backpedal all you like, but I know what you meant."

  Gain gave her a sobering glare. "No, you don't, but we're not going to argue that point right now, because we have other business that needs to be attended to."

  With that proclamation, he swung her up in to his arms and took the stairs two at a time, despite the added weight. When they'd reached the master bedroom that she'd decorated in soft pink and green florals, he stood her at the end of the bed, then bent her over it, tugging her loose fitting jersey capris and her lacy boy shorts down to her ankles without so much as a by your leave.

  "Gain, no, please!"

  "Nina, you know exactly what happens to you when you disobey my rules, don't you?"

  She was already sobbing, knowing she was in for it.

  Bad.

  "Y-yes."

  "What happens to you?"

  She hated it when he made her say it. She didn't quite know why, but the humiliation of it stung her almost more than his swats. "I - I get spanked."

  And with that, as if she'd asked for it herself, the spanking commenced.

  Chapter Five

  Damn that man was strong! Why couldn't she have married a ninety-eight pound weakling computer nerd of some sort, with a dearth of upper body strength, instead of someone who more closely resembling Ahhhnold than Bill Gates?

  Nina knew she wasn't supposed to reach back. She knew that if she did, she was going to get it even worse than she was getting it now. But that didn't keep her right hand from sneaking back there, fingers spread, palm up, trying desperately to stop the awful dull, thudding smacks he was applying in rapid concession.

  Gain stopped spanking immediately for fear of accidentally hitting her hand. "Nina," he warned in a tone that clearly conveyed disappointment, "you know better than that. Move your hand. I don't care where you put it, as long as it's not in my line of fire."

  He waited, knowing how hard this was for her. Once she got her hand back there and succeeded in stopping him, if only for safety reasons, it was just that much harder to voluntarily give up the protection she'd just won. "I'm not going to wait forever, Nina. If I have to move your hand for you, you're going to find your wrists bound. Do you want that?"

  Nina sighed, her lower lip protruding. "No, please!" She absolutely despised being tied in any way, so her hand began to move back towards the bed, of course as slowly and reluctantly as she thought she could get away with.

  "For that, you're going to get fifteen strokes of the cane - when we're finished with the rest of your punishment."

  Giving an outraged shriek, Nina craned her head around, trying to get a look at him. "No, please, Gain! I'll be good! I won't put my hand back again!"

  "The operative word being 'again'. Apparently you're forgetting a lot of basic rules we have around here for your behavior - that's why you ended up here in the first place. I think that a reminder is in order that leaves a bit more of an impression than this warm up spanking and strapping you're going to get."

  Nina had fairly wailed at his pronouncement of her fate, pounding the bed with her fists in frustration. But the hard, unforgiving flat of his hand against her the taut flesh of her buttocks quickly convinced her to abandon her tantrum in favor of sobbing and screaming from the pain he was inflicting.

  Not only was she going to have to endure this terrible spanking, which was at least as bad as the rest of what he was promising, but he was going to take that thick leather belt of his from around his waist, double it over, and use it to make her fairly sing with the sting it evoked with every agonizing kiss of her bottom.

  The spanking ended before she expected to, not that she was complaining in the least, but it just meant that he was getting to one of the worst parts more quickly. Although she couldn't see him, because he was standing directly behind her, but she could hear the metallic clink of his belt buckle as he undid it, then the zip of leather grating against fabric as he tugged it out of his belt loops.

  Eventually, though, he positioned himself to her left, his fingers touching the small of her back, as if they were going to be enough to keep her in position once he started in with that awful thing. That wasn't very likely.

  She began to dance and sing even before the strap found her behind - as if moaning and whining would postpone the inevitable sizzling sting the strap created as it lanced her behind cruelly, leaving bright red swaths in its path that began to crisscross much too quickly.

  Gain had become pretty good with the belt through necessity when they were first married and she was a lot more likely to break rules than follow them. He kept it relatively short, and made very sure that it never wrapped around to score the tender front of her; he was as careful with the belt as he was with the cane. The only places that ever felt her need for discipline were those areas made to receive it - her well rounded bottom, and the backs of her thighs.

  Gain rather liked the idea that she was reminded of her misdeeds every time she sat down - or laid down - for the next few days. And he loved to grab them while they were making love, fingering them and forcing her to arch even more into him to get away from the slight pain he evoked and towards the pleasure he promised.

  And she deserved a little payback for the worry she'd put him through. He did his best not to be a control freak, but considering how they'd parted, he was pretty frantic by the time she finally deigned to call him, and he never wanted to feel that way again.

  She was already screaming so hard he knew that she was going to be hoarse the next day, even though he really wasn't putting his shoulder into it, as he might if she hadn't had any warm up. But her bottom was so sensitized from the vigorous spanking he'd given her that even the lighter swats he'd been giving her seemed like too much to bear.

  And she still had the cane coming.

  He set the belt down next to her on the bed, which only made her wail louder, because she knew what that meant: he was going to get the cane, which was permanently propped in the corner he some times sent her to before punishing her, panties down just below her butt cheeks, so that she could think about what she'd done.

  Nina could hear it whooshing through the air as he approached her, while she tried to get her breathing under control. Just when she became conscious of herself enough to wish for a piece of paper towel, one appeared in her left hand. He knew her almost too well.

  Gain was listening closely to her breathing. Occasionally, she got very choked up during a punishment, expelling all her breath at once and hyperventilating a bit, and he did his best to avoid that as much as possible. Of course, it hurt. And he expected her to react to that. But if he ever, at any time, thought that spanking her was more detrimental than helpful, they'd stop it cold.

  He only did this - he could only do it - because he thought it was what was bes
t for her. That it helped her to feel loved and looked after. If he had, for the slightest second, thought that she wasn't getting anything out of it, then he would have stopped every bit of it immediately. Their relationship was more than strong enough to survive shifting gears a little.

  She was his wife. She was his life. And he knew that, when it came down to it, he was the one who would had to keep his eyes open, had to make sure that this wasn't something that was doing more damage than good.

  He almost wanted to stop there. She had been through the wringer in the past twenty four hours, in more ways than one. But he knew that stating that she was going to get a punishment and then not going through with it wasn't the right thing to do, either.

  And he couldn't let her down. He just couldn't.

  Gain was always very careful to take his time with the cane - it was probably the most vicious implement they owned, although Nina would probably say that all of them were pretty awful. He had spent a lot of time learning to master it once he'd decided to add it to their collection, using a pillow on the bed, then only giving her very small - but sharp - lessons at first, until he got the feel for it. He'd only let a stroke wrap three times since they'd gotten it - and he remembered each of her agonized shrieks when he'd made that mistake.

  Of course, he'd stopped punishing her immediately, and used a cooling, soothing lotion to help the angry red mark heal; something he would never do to the swollen stripes he applied to her rear.

  But that hadn't happened in a long while, and he didn't intend for it to happen this time.

  "No, Gain, please don't - I'm sorry!" she sobbed, clutching the paper towel to her chest.

  "I'm sorry, too, Nina," he answered grimly. "But you reached back, and if I'd been using the paddle and was in mid swing, I might have broken your hand. That rule isn't in place to make things harder on you - although I know it doesn't make it any easier. It's there to protect you, just like all of the rest of the rules I have for you. If you hadn't reached back, this punishment would be over, and we'd be cuddling by now. But, having promised you fifteen with the cane, I'm not going to just discharge it."