I listened to myself, barely comprehending what I could even mean. All that mattered, though, was that Rick stopped unbuckling his belt, though he left his hands there, in that terrible significant spot on his looming, muscular body. I raised my eyes again to see that the smile had departed, replaced with the stern look I had already come to know so well.
I bit my lip, feeling tears come into the corners of my eyes. I felt for the first time, really the near nakedness of my upper body, and the full embarrassment of having to show my breasts, in the lacy pink bra, to my husband.
Like a mirror of his own gesture, my hand went to the button of my jeans. My breath came raggedly through my nostrils. I looked beseechingly into Rick’s face.
“Please?” I said. “Can I… can I put on my nightgown, maybe?”
Rick shook his head impatiently. “No. Mandy, I’m your husband. You’ll undress for me when I tell you to. Now get those jeans down, or I’m going to take them down for you and whip you until you can’t sit down for a week.”
CHAPTER17
Mandy
My fingers fumbled at the metal button. Suddenly I had a weird feeling of distance from myself—and I understood at the same time that I had felt it before. I felt as if someone had literally placed a strange new frame of mind around my brain, and I realized all at once that I had truly sensed the beginnings of it back on our wedding night—and that I might even have become aware of it long before that.
When, on that pizza night at Rick’s shared apartment, I had understood that he wanted to take me to his room and to get intimate, and I had said “Forget it.” I had, I remembered as I got the button on my jeans open, seemed to see myself from somewhere above, or behind, my head.
Then, on our wedding night, when I had gotten that glimpse of Rick’s naked body, silhouetted in the light from the bathroom, and I had seen his hard thing, jutting out from his lap. It had seemed to me that the girl in the honeymoon bed, waiting for her bridegroom to come and deflower her, wasn’t me, but some other young woman—a naughty one… a dirty girl who looked at men’s penises and wanted to touch herself between her legs when her pussy clenched at the shameful sight.
The distance had happened, I realized, for a longer time in the private room, over Rick’s knee. I had watched another Amanda Williams learn her lesson from her husband’s firm hand.
I had watched, and…
I had begun—the other girl had begun—to unzip my fly. I felt her hands pause as a new surge of blood rushed to my face.
I watched myself, just like I’m watching myself now. I watched, and I… Ienjoyedit.
“Oh, no,” I whispered. I pulled the zipper the rest of the way down. I hooked my thumbs into the elastic waistband of my panties and started to tug them over my hips. The need to get all this over with grew urgent inside me.
I wouldn’t think about it anymore. I would watch it unfold if that was what my brain decided to do. I would never, ever tell Rick about any of these mortifying thoughts and feelings.
I needed to finish getting undressed as soon as I could; it seemed obviously less shameful just to take everything off than to have to strip slowly, and besides I didn’t even remember what panties I had thrown on that morning, though I felt certain they didn’t match my bra in the slightest.
“No, Dee,” I heard Rick’s voice say. I had focused my eyes on the blue carpet of the master bedroom, where I could see only a little of Rick’s loafers and his denim-covered calves. His voice carried such severity that I froze and raised my eyes to his to see the hunger there just as before, along with a narrow-eyed look of warning.
“What?” I breathed.
Now that I had become fully aware of the feeling of mental distance, it seemed to get much more intense. Whoever had saidwhathad felt at the same time a thrill of fear and need go all the way through her, as she realized that her husband meant to get his way… in everything.
“Just the jeans,” he told me. “I want to have a good look at your panties.”
“Oh,” I said, the catch and the fall in my voice making it sound more like a sob than a fully formed word. “No… please…”
I saw the relentless expression on Rick’s face, and I knew it would do no good to plead any further. I knew it wouldn’t help at all to say the word on the tip of my tongue. The logical voice in my head told me not to say it. That rational part of me seemed to have lost a good deal of its strength, though. Had it fallen into the divide, as I had seemingly separated into the young bride receiving just punishment for misbehavior and the Mandy watching it happen? At any rate it couldn’t stop the word from coming out, the one that the bratty girl, humiliated and fearful, wanted to say.
“Sir.” I begged, “please. Don’t…”
Don’t look at my panties. Please.
I could feel all too well now what I had refused to acknowledge to myself before: my panties had gotten wet. The naughty girl had made them wet, because somehow her sore bottom, the sign of her husband’s dominance over her, of his intention to have his way with her at last… somehow that made bratty Mandy humiliatingly hot for the thing she had only ever glimpsed on her wedding night, silhouetted against the bathroom doorway.
“Don’t look at your panties?” Rick asked softly.
I bit my lip, my brow furrowing very deeply, and nodded.
My husband’s hands, on his belt buckle, moved, starting to unfasten it.
I gave a little cry of fear. I tried to back up a step and found the backs of my thighs, still sore from Rick’s hand, against the bed. I froze for one split second more, and then I pulled up my panties, glancing down to see that, of course, they were my green-with-white-polka-dots cotton bikini ones. Not even close to matching my bra.