Over the Knee Read Free Page B

then he would move on to the hairbrush, the most domestic implement of all. The polished ebony would elicit cries of pain and promises of better behaviour from me.
    I sighed and flipped through my notebook. It hadn’t been a productive morning. I’d spent most of it lost in daydreams. The possibility that there could be someone out there who wanted to spank me as much as I wanted to be spanked was driving me to distraction.
    Perhaps I could justify visiting spanking websites and chat rooms as part of my research. After all, I couldn’t very well compare Victorian magazines with modern chat rooms if I didn’t visit some of them myself. But I’d have to fill in a special application form for that and I wasn’t sure if I was ready to out myself to the librarian just yet.
    Frustrated and torn, I returned to the comfort of the dictionary. I could always rely on its clinical descriptions for a little fix. This time I looked up ‘birch’. I pictured the embarrassment and dread of having to cut switches and bind them together to make my own birch rod. Presenting it to my disciplinarian and asking to be punished.
    Sometimes I liked to fantasise about being a boy. Or just a modern-day ‘Frank’ disguised as one. I wondered how I would look in short trousers and a schoolboy cap. Or an Eton suit. There was no shortage of corporal punishment accounts about the elite public school. I’d gone to the Eton museum once to see the famous birching block. Imagining myself as a boy during Dr Keate’s reign of terror, trembling before the rod, stretching myself across the block …
    ‘Hey, Angie.’
    I gasped and slammed the dictionary shut, startling several students near by. They raised their heads and looked at me reproachfully before returning to their studies.
    ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.’ It was Karen, the librarian’s assistant.
    I blushed as though I’d been caught with a pornographic book instead of the
OED
.
    ‘Thought you’d like to know that this is back in,’ she said, handing me
A History of the Rod
. Again.
    It was a curious little book, written in the late 1800s by the Reverend William M. Cooper, BA. Subtitled
Flagellation and the Flagellants
, the cover displayed an embossed gold-leaf etching of the Eton birching block, complete with birch rod. The spine bore etchings of other instruments of correction. Not a masterpiece of subtlety, but a potent wellspring for those in the know.
    ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I just needed to check some references in this chapter.’
    I tried to act nonchalant, but I could see her puzzled expression. She’d probably flipped through it and seen the delights on offer. She must have wondered what all the fuss was about – why two people were fighting over it, recalling it back and forth.
    She raised her eyebrows, as though waiting for me to let her in on the joke. ‘I expect it will be recalled again next week?’
    ‘I expect so.’ I refused to elaborate.
    Shaking her head, she left.
    It was an odd but alluring little game of cat and mouse. I didn’t actually need the book at all. I’d already read it. But I did want to know who else was borrowing it. He – and I was convinced it was a man – had to be a kindred spirit.
    He wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind.

Two
    ‘LIFT YOUR SKIRT.’
    I heard the direction clearly, but my response came unbidden. ‘What?’
    ‘You heard me. Lift. Your. Skirt.’
    My skin felt chilled as my tremulous fingers crept down to the hem of my kilt. I hesitated, glancing up at him with pleading eyes.
    ‘Would you like me to do it for you?’ he asked, squarely in control.
    ‘No!’ Slowly, I dragged the fabric up until he could see my knickers.
    ‘Very good. Now turn around.’
    Closing my eyes, I obeyed.
    I was the one who had started this. I was the one who kept recalling
A History of the Rod
so that he had to do the same. It was like a possessive game between children. ‘Mine.’ ‘Mine!’ ‘No,
mine
!’
    So, when he