Daddy strides into the living room, between me and the TV, and switches off the “Buffy” rerun I’m half heartedly watching.
Then he holds up a pack of cigarettes and a romance novel. “I found these in your room, Cherise. What do you have to say for yourself?”
Heart pounding like a techno track, palms wet and mouth dry, I plaster on a brassy, totally fake smile. “You always tell me I should read more?”
I squeak at the end.
Damn it. He’s caught me by surprise, and it’s making me nervous. “Smut isn’t what I had in mind.”
“It’s just a romance novel, Daddy.” I knew the cigarettes would get me in trouble, but I’m surprised he’s harping on the book. He’s always got his nose in a book-sometimes some classic, since he’s a lit professor, but just as likely a thriller, and he knows I love a good romance as much as he loves a good save-the-world-from-the-bad-guys adventure.
Maybe the difference is that this is an erotic romance, and a kinky one at that?
I jump up and try to snatch the book away from him, but it’s too late. He opens it at my bookmark, and begins to read out loud in a rich voice, like he’s reading Shakespeare.
Oh, god. It’s the part where the hero gives the heroine a sexy spanking. Hearing Daddy read it is so embarrassing.
Embarrassing, yet hot.
My face burns, and I squirm from humiliation and horniness, pressing my thighs closer together as if that would protect my clit from being attacked by lust.
Instead, it gets me excited.
It’s not just what he’s reading. What’s getting to me is him reading it, with his deep whisky voice and the blue eyes behind the sexy-professor horn-rims, and the way he’s disapproving and disdainful and amused all at once.
A girl’s Daddy shouldn’t read her things like that, in that way. It’s just not what fathers do.
He’s not playing by the rules, not following the script.
It’s freaking me out and it’s turning me on and it’s freaking me out because it’s turning me on.
He stops reading just as the characters move on from spanking to screwing. “What do you have to say for yourself, young woman? Doesn’t that sound foolish, read aloud?” He’s not just scolding me. He’s making fun of me, too. Great.
I roll my eyes. “Daddy, it’s just a book. I like it, and besides, Tom Clancy would sound just as dumb if I did a dramatic reading.”
He takes a step forward, and then another, taking over my personal space. I’m surrounded by his cologne, the leatherywoodsy one that’s like Essence of Grown Man, and I know I ought to back away, but instead I’ve grown roots into the rug.
“You’re right about Tom Clancy,” he admits. “But if you want to read about erotic spanking, let me find you something better. I doubt this author has been spanked since she was six years old and got caught stealing cookies.”
God, what am I supposed to say to that? He’s so not playing by the rules, so not acting like a proper Daddy, and I can’t keep up. And I actually thought she’d done a pretty good job with the spanking scene, so that’s pissing me off a little.
I thought my face was burning before, but he’s thrown napalm on it. And apparently some of it got into my panties, because things are on fire down there. I finally manage to spit out, “That’s gross.”
“You’re reading that tripe and you’re talking to me about gross?”
Tripe? Who the hell actually says that anymore? I almost ask him that, but his nearness, the smell of his cologne, the throbbing between my legs, all conspire to tie my tongue.
And that gives him enough time to make his move.
One hand brings the offending trade paperback down on my butt with a surprisingly firm thud. The other grabs my ponytail, uses it to propel me forward.
He forces my mouth against his. I keep my lips firmly shut.
He keeps smacking me with the book as he kisses me.
I fight it for as long as I can-fight the seductive stinging against my ass, fight the mixture of arousal and alarm flooding me. Finally, my lips open, and I melt against him and let him plunder my mouth. He’s hard against my bare thigh, and that’s killing me. I want to rub myself against it, but that’s just not what a girl does to her Daddy.
“I think,” Daddy says, “that you need to be punished-to know what a proper spanking feels like so you’ll know when you’re reading bad porn. Don’t you agree, Cherise?”
I pretend to consider the question. My face is scarlet, I can tell, and my white cotton hipster panties are soaked through, and even though things have gotten weird, I know what answer is expected of me. “I’ve been a bad girl, Daddy. I deserve to be punished.”
I look contrite and nervous. He looks stern and annoyed, but eager at the same time.
Then we both start laughing-first him, then me, laughing and holding each other, his hard body pressed against me. His lips press against my hair, and he whispers, still chuckling, “I love you.”
We both rearrange our faces appropriately, he to the stern father, I to the nervous teenager. I wonder if it’s as hard for him as it is for me.
He sits on the sofa, pulls me roughly over his knee. “Daddy, please…” I protest. It sounds more like I’m begging for him to give me the spanking I crave.
Which is true. Very little here is what it seems.
“Daddy” is my lover, Mike, not my father. My name isn’t Cherise, either; it’s Kaitlyn. The fake name helps me separate. Otherwise I don’t think I could let myself indulge in these punishment fantasies, let alone the semi- incestuous ones. It’s a trick I learned from the ex-boyfriend who lured me into his kinky world of spanking and erotic role-play, and one I’ve taught Mike.
I’d never let myself be spanked before I learned that trick. I had too much trouble letting go of my real-life doctor self, and all its responsibilities, to indulge my spanking-and-discipline fantasies. Making it all a game, with the spanker and spankee both characters, allows me to have my fun without giving up any real power or control. Besides, I like the whole package: the role-play, the costumes, the way it lets us toy with taboos without actually violating them.
Only today it’s all going a bit oddly.
At this point I should be deep into role-playing teenage Cherise, scared because she’s in trouble and because her Daddy’s crossing lines that fathers shouldn’t cross. To make it worse for her, Cherise thinks her Dad’s a Hot Older Man, the kind she’d have fantasies about if he was someone else’s father, and wrong as it is, she’s getting turned on. It’s a game we’ve played often before, and it always works.
But right now I’m thrown. Excited, but thrown. Mike’s deviated from the script. He was supposed to “find” and react to the cigarettes, not the novel.