by Jake Masters
1. Caroline
"Ow, ow, ow, OW!"
The final four descended in quick succession. I stayed down over the two chairs, placed back to back. He had given me a couple of pillows to make being spread-eagled over two chair-backs less uncomfortable, but only more bearable in one way. It meant that my bare bottom was curved up much more invitingly for his strap, which cracked down twelve times across the easy target. Easy for him. Very uncomfortable for me, having my big bottom forced up and out. Nothing much left to the imagination, if you see what I mean. So psychologically very uncomfortable, especially after how I had reacted to his last spanking. I stayed quiet as well as down, after my involuntary cries.
"OK, then, get down; pull up your knickers, sort yourself out and we'll say no more about it."
"Thank you, Daddy."
My stepfather had just spanked me for what turned out to be the last time. It wasn't the hardest or the most testing spanking he'd ever given me. I think that's because of what happened the second-last time.
My name is Caroline but everyone calls me Caro, and my little half-sister calls me Cali, which stems from when she couldn't say my name properly. I am 25. I was engaged at age 18, believe it or not, but that ended before I was 19, when I got bored with my fiancé and thought that there must be more to life and love than settling down in a commuter town in the Midlands, working in an insurance office and having boring sex twice a week.
That was also when I decided to go back to college, get my A-levels and go to university. I finished my degree last year and am now training to be a counsellor. I had got top GCSEs but had been a rebel at school and had left at 16. I lived with my dad after my parents split up when I was 13, another early act of rebellion as I was at daggers-drawn with my mum at the time, behaving really badly because of the turmoil there had been at home leading up to the separation and then divorce. Also, to be fair, it was because of me and the beginning of my stroppy adolescence. My younger full sister (one year younger than me) went with my mum at the separation, but when I was 17, I moved in with my mum and stepdad. Dad also had a new partner and I just felt like a spare tyre. He was all loved up like a teenager, and although Lori's nice, she was much younger than Dad and yet much older than me. She was neither like a parent nor a mate.
The original reason for not living with Mum, in my mind anyway, was that she had a temper, and of course she was a victim of my own temper, at the time. Looking back it was so much worse because she was unhappy with my dad. She always loved me - and now, by the way, we are better than we have ever been before - but when I was a pain or a brat (and I could be really awful) she would get angry and shake me, really lose it.
When I moved back in with her, all that was in the past. She was happier, was pregnant with Millie my little half-sister, and we got on more like elder sister and younger sibling. My stepdad was a different kettle of fish. He tried to love me but it seemed I couldn't do right for doing wrong. And that's ironical because I was so much better than I had been before with my real dad.
I think I came along when my mum and stepdad didn't have much time for me. He was busy at work, had a new baby on the way and was still in that earlier period of marriage of actively fancying my mum. I wanted to please him but I resented the difference in attitude to me and Kate, my younger sister who had lived with him since my mum moved in two years before. Ok, so he knew her much better. But still, he saw me as a problem and her as a... sort of good girl, well-behaved and so on.
Kate and I have always been close. Maybe not living together in the difficult years from when I was 13 helped. So I have never resented her getting the royal treatment compared to me. I'm glad; I'm protective of her although there's only a year between us. I am the 'naughty girl' being sexually active and lots of experience in that neck of the woods. Kate is drop-dead gorgeous; I'm pretty... well, they say I'm really pretty, but I don't see it, and I need to lose a bit of weight. But she is really beautiful, and slim as anything. Grrrr! But she only lost her virginity at age 19, didn't like sex, and has only had it twice more. Just goes to show: anyone seeing her on the street would assume that she was a magnet for the most sought-after men. Well, she is, but nothing doing.
Anyway, my stepdad's attitude... I came with a health warning which meant that I was guilty until proved innocent on anything that came up, such as boys staying over; drinking too much; being downright sassy to my mother and using bad language. And I admit I kicked off good and proper every now and then. He would just try to ignore me, and when I pushed his buttons too far, he would slap me, hit me when he couldn't stop himself. He'd, like, slap me on the back or legs as I ducked away from him. Funnily enough at that stage he never smacked my bum as I was trying to slip out of his reach.
Once, when I was 18, I was acting up and he shoved me across the room. I was lucky I didn't bang my head on the mantelpiece. My mum tried to stop him. But later she told me I was impossible and that if it carried on I'd have to move out. She told me he'd never laid a finger on Kate, and that I have an ability to wind people up. She called me Caroline, my full name, communicating a distance between us emerging again. That was maybe the only time I even thought bitterly about my sis: oh of course, Kate the angel and me the devil. I stomped from the room and went out, round to my friend Connie's. She gave me a sense of perspective.
"Look, Caro," she said, "you have really become a good person - not just better; good. You run a Guides' group at age 18; you're going back to college... you're an idealist, actually. When you were a rebel and cynical about everything... well, you know what they say: a rebel is a thwarted idealist."
She had a point. And when I was fully cooled down, it got me thinking about how to sort things out at home. For, however unfair things were, my stepdad was not a bad bloke. He expected the worst - and sure, I had history which my mum must have told him about without being disloyal to me - just the facts of where I had lived and why and all that. I had failed with my mum when I was an early teen; got distant from my dad... I couldn't fuck up my third and final chance to have a home life. Sure, I could see the way ahead in the wider world. But that wasn't enough. I had a sister I loved (and a half-sister, a kid who looked up to me and brought out the best in me; I visited my dad's place once a week minimum to see her, primarily.) And a mum who loved me and whom I loved - we were both trying, even though I resented her not stepping in on those uncomfortable occasions when he it me with his open palm.
I genuinely think I was craving proper, stable care and love from a father figure. When I had lived with my dad from 13 to 17, he had been there for me, but in terms of giving me a home and enough to get by. We were not emotionally close and he was not engaged in disciplining me in the good way. He let me do my own thing, out of lethargy rather than as a philosophy of parenting. I was the sort of girl who needed discipline, unlike Kate. I knew I had a bad streak (well, wild and rebellious) and I think I would have responded well to a loving dad who nevertheless didn't hesitate to punish me when I needed it...not with arbitrary violence but with rules which didn't get bent out of shape and lapse into mush. Maybe getting grounded, but rewards too. At least emotional rewards, if that doesn't sound like psycho-babble.
Maybe spankings too. I know that might sound weird, a girl of over 18 thinking she should get spanked. But consider where I was at the time - getting slapped and pushed, no stability or, even better, a real understanding between me and my stepdad, and my mum of course, as to how we should treat each other, what was good, and what was unacceptable. Getting spanked would be a proportionate, disciplined thing based on fairness, ideally. Getting spanked is better than getting hit. I know girls - mates, or acquaintances - who got spanked at home after turning 18. It happens more than you think. Sometimes it really was an alternative to anarchy or at least turmoil.
One Sunday night when Kate had gone to London for an interview for a university place at Royal Holloway on the Monday morning, Mum was upstairs resting. The baby was due in a month's time. My stepdad and I were watching TV, a rare evening of peace and indeed of sharing a room. I took the plunge.
"Dad..." I had been calling him that, at my mum's suggestion, for a couple of months now, to show my willingness to build a proper relationship; I had two Dads now, after all. "Can I talk to you for a few minutes?"
He looked over, immediately interested, but suspicious. His bad news antennae were extending from his head even as he turned off the TV.
"No, it's...um... nothing bad. I mean, the opposite, I hope."
"Go on, Caroline." He looked a bit more giving, but not relaxed by any means. He reached out his long arm - he's a gangling bloke - for his cup of coffee, swore softly as it spilled onto his jeans as he swung it over towards him, put it down with a slop, wiped at the mess with his handkerchief, then leaned down to clean the surface of his brown ankle boots.
"Well, I've been thinking..."
He grinned suddenly. "Don't do anything you're not used to, Caro."
I looked sharply at him. More sarcasm? But no. He was being nice - hence the Caro - as I'd hoped. It was hardly a hilarious joke, but an attempt to thaw ice that he now sensed I was trying to break.
"I've been thinking that we should try to get on better, a lot better, with little Sojo (unborn baby non-name) on the way." I'd planned to start this way, to show him it wasn't just for me that I wanted things to be better. He nodded, looked pleased, and attentive for more.
"And..." I'd also planned this, to take the blame as a kind of loss-leader. "I know it's down to me 90%." One hundred per cent would have suggested I was crawling and not fundamentally serious. "I've made it tough for you. I can be a stroppy little bitch."
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