Finely Disciplined Thoughts Read Free Page B

of the tree? I need a really good Christmas memory.”
    He smiled into her deep brown eyes, fringed with damp lashes still.
    “That’s exactly what I want them all to be,” he said, and she knew she could trust him to make that come true. In the way only Colin could for her.
     
     

Frozen in Time
    “It’s time,” he said, so casually he might have been calling her attention to a TV schedule or the daily newspaper’s delivery.
    “No.” Uttered with suddenly tear-filled eyes. “Please. Not now. I don’t want —”
    He silenced her with a finger placed gently against her pouting lips. “Your preferences are no longer an issue. They brought you to this moment. But in it, your time is entirely mine.”
    In justice, she could not protest. In dread, she could not refrain. “It was all a mistake.”
    “Indeed it was. One you will not repeat, I imagine.”
    She watched him, because she could not help it; saw him shift the pillow from its accustomed place to a new duty location — angled across the low rail at the foot of the bed; saw him finger the shiny gold hardware holding in place the soft and supple leather around his waist; saw him slither the belt through its loops to lie, instead, the length of his leg; saw him calmly double it over, palm the buckle and wrap its threatening length once around his hand.
    She listened to him, because there was no evading his voice — the one she loved and hated at the same time; heard him call her name as a prelude to identifying her sin — Elizabeth; heard him reveal his awareness of her failure in measured tones — childish disobedience, unacceptable in a woman grown; heard him order the manner in which she was to present herself for punishment — bared and bent, defenseless and welcoming; heard him describe the nature of the penance — a dozen well-laid on, provided she was cooperative; heard him justly define the parameters of her compliance — “Count the twelve and at each second one, tell me of your sorrow.”
    She prepared herself, filled with shame that her fault had been uncovered, but emptied, already, of the self-loathing that had been her peculiar burden while she had hidden its ugly face.
    From her new perspective, stretched and offered fully with no protective intervention, she considered the consequences of her behavior. She had brought herself to this punishment place. All choices were her own. All decisions, hers for the making. Each step along the pathway of cleansing pain, hers and hers alone.
    Then there was the slight awareness of air disturbed, the sharp snap of cow hide on trembling human skin, the tiniest moment — frozen in time like immobilized hands on a watch face bound in an ice packet — between impact and imprint. In that space — that cold, cold space of regret — there was, however, just enough dimension to permit hope for the suspension of inevitability.
    But it was not to be. Pain — hot pain — seared her bared, bent and defenseless cheeks and melted the moment.
    “One,” she cried in obedience and of necessity, the result of soul-pain released, and body-pain accepted, in an even exchange they both knew was necessary.
    It was time.
     

She Said, He Said
    By Ashlynn Kenzie and Devlin O’Neill
    ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
     
    I think of my driving speed as a “tree falling in a forest without people to hear” issue. I mean, if no one sees that you’re moving very quickly, are you really going too fast?
    I say, “Don’t be silly. Of course not.”

    The problem is, he saw. 

    But that wasn’t strictly my fault. He wasn’t supposed to be standing on the porch, watching for me to come home from the pharmacy with his pain medication. He was supposed to be moaning on the couch after a trip to the dentist. 

    If I had known he was going to spy on me — his angel of mercy — I would have turned the Seger CD off, which would have automatically decreased my rpm’s by several spins, and we would both be happy at this point. 

    But he