Free Old Enough To Know Better by Carolyn Faulkner

you.  You can leave now.”
    He’d already graduated to rifling through her cupboards.  “Spicy chicken Ramen, Oodles of Noodles, Spaghetti O’s –” he held the can up and looked back at her, “Spaghetti O’s?  Really?  I wouldn’t have guessed.”  Then he started listing things again,  “Peanut butter, Fluff, raspberry jelly . . .”
    “You’re too young to be deaf, Finn, but I just said I’m not hungry.”
    “PB and J it is,” he pronounced, looking in her breadbox but finding it empty and turning back to her with a curious look.
    “It’s in the freezer.”
    “It’s in the freezer,” he repeated, finding it while mumbling, “of course it is, Finn.  She has a perfectly good breadbox, but she keeps the bread in the freezer, of course, you idiot.  Doesn’t everyone?”  Setting the ingredients in front of him, he said conversationally, as he constructed a sandwich, “You should really put a note in there saying something like, ‘See Freezer’, so that people don’t get confused . . .”
    “People don’t, since I’m the only one living here,” she growled.
    He put the sandwich on the plate, and added chips from a bag on top of the fridge, and offered it to her, then snatched the plate back from her, not that she was reaching for it anyway.  “Do you like your chips with your sandwich, or in your sandwich?”
    “It’s not my sandwich, so make it whatever way you like.” Cat shrugged her shoulders.
    Finn placed it on the snack bar and said quietly, “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Catherine, as many times as I need to.  It’s your choice whether you eat with a sore bottom or not.”
    He was glad that glares couldn’t hurt him, or he’d be stone cold dead, but then he actually watched her stubborn set in, and her jaw clench.
    “I am not hungry, so I am not eating that sandwich.  Make of that what you will.”
    What he made was her butt very sore, and her eat the sandwich, and he barely moved a muscle doing so, because she hadn’t noticed – being years out of practice and all - that he’d already moved his food onto the rung of the bar stool he’d pulled out in front of him when he put the sandwich down, in anticipation of her defiant answer.  Clint had told him she could be stubborn sometimes, that occasionally she got something in her craw and just decided that she needed to prove her point to him that she was an independent woman, when there was never any doubt in his mind – ever – that she was a very independent woman.  He’d never considered that the fact that he spanked her diminished her in any way, least of all, her independence.
    But, as he’d said, she sometimes couldn’t get her head around something he really wanted her to do, almost always something that truly was for her own good – go see a doctor for a test, or take a particularly disgusting medicine, or some such thing, and she would flat out refuse to do it.  It went against her usual affable nature, but then, everybody had their quirks.  It was up to him – the man that loved her – to make sure that his woman didn’t cling to quirks that could get her into trouble, and if she did, then she needed to be corrected, in no uncertain terms.
    He had her over his raised knee, baggy knit pants around her ankles where she definitely didn’t want to encounter them, followed alarmingly by her pretty and delicately purple flowered panties.  “Are you out of your mind?” she yelled and wiggled and tried to hit him, but he’d already maneuvered the chair well out into the kitchen, and himself well out of the way, so there was nothing for her to hit, and nothing for her to latch onto to assist herself in any way, either.
    “Bastard!” she yelled.
    “Ah ah ah-hh,” he chided, giving her a very hard swat and she embarrassed herself completely by fairly bellowing because of it.  “Watch your language, Catherine.  You’ll find I’m a good deal less lenient about that kind of thing