Free Old-Fashioned Values by Emily Tilton Page A

shameful.”
    “Isn’t it?” Rachel interjected. John looked at her. She had caught her right cheek in her teeth, and was chewing on it very slightly. In Rachel’s voice John heard the yearning he had thought he would hear: she wanted to be told that it wasn’t shameful at all… that to think about it all the time, the way John thought she probably did, didn’t make her a pervert.
    And he wanted to tell her that, but he knew, from long experience, that he had to tell her in a way that would help her believe it, and that would take a great deal of time. Nor might John be the right man for the job.
    So he said, “It is and it isn’t. Part of the point of the kind of discipline I practice, and it seems like Mark and Sally are starting to practice, is to make the submissive partner feel ashamed of herself, with regard to what she’s done that doesn’t come up to the standard she and her dominant partner have decided on. That’s why the punishment we use more than any other is something that, in the old days, was for children.”
    “Spanking,” Rachel whispered, almost as if she hadn’t been intending to speak at all and the word had simply crept out of her mouth.
    John looked at Sally. “Sally,” he said. “I have a feeling you know what I mean.”
    Sally turned bright red, and a part of John felt a certain envy of Mark Weaver for having found such a wonderful blusher. She nodded quickly.
    “Forgive me for using my instructional skill here,” John said, “but, Sally, can you unpack that a little bit? Afterward, how did you feel about being spanked like a little girl?”
    Sally’s blush only deepened. She looked at Mark beseechingly. Mark said, “Go ahead, Sal. I’d like to hear this too.” The young man really did have a special air about him—a sort of wisdom that made you feel he was older than his years, but which you also felt couldn’t exist in an older person; there seemed to be too much energy in it for that. Watching him guide Sally gave John a sort of pleasure that he had always thought he lost his chance at, in not paying more attention to the job of finding someone with whom to spend the rest of his life. Carol had probably come closest to being that person, but John had known that she would leave—her future elsewhere was just too bright. He had decided that loving her while she was around was more important than pursuing the phantom hope of children for whom he supposed he would be too old, anyway. Now Mark Weaver seemed to him, though it was a cliché, the son he’d never had.
    Sally looked back at John. “Well,” she said, “like you said before, John, it made me feel ashamed of myself. I guess a big part of that was… I don’t know… Feeling like I let Mark down, and now he had to spank me. It sounds kind of weird to say it, I guess, but being ashamed like that seemed to make me want to do better for Mark and for myself.”
    “Aren’t you just fooling yourself, though?” Rachel asked. Now she too turned red. John had to admit that while her blush wasn’t quite as pretty as Sally’s—Rachel’s darker coloring made the pink hue a little less cute, he supposed—nevertheless the way she wore it was much more attractive to him. “I mean, that’s what Cassandra would say, right? I mean, I’m not saying that’s what I think…”
    “I don’t think she’s fooling herself,” John said gently. “But I can also see how a woman who isn’t put together the way Sally is—and maybe the way you are—” John paused there, just for a split second, to see how Rachel would react to the suggestion that she too might be a submissive, which was possibly a word she had never heard, though if John had read her correctly she knew exactly what a submissive was. To his satisfaction, Rachel looked down at her coffee, her mouth twisting to the side. She knew she was very much like Sally. “I can see how someone put together differently could easily think that Sally is fooling herself,