Sarah's Tutorial: Corbin's Bend, Book 2 (2 page)

Chapter 2

Email from Sarah Harshaw to her friend Susan Lewis:

Dear Susan,

So here I am, back at Sandy Ridge. Marilyn (remember her? –my roommate–you met her at my house in April) says Hi.

So: news. I'm taking Western Civ this semester. I can just hear you say: “You're taking what?” Because I'm about to graduate with a degree in History, right? Stupid requirements–I waited until senior year to get this one out of the way. It seemed like an idiot move to me too. That is, until I showed up for lecture the first day, and saw my professor. He's new at Sandy Ridge. He just moved here from the East Coast. His name is Dr. Dunn, and he's a wonderful, old-fashioned prof. He's also gorgeous in that tweedy almost-middle-aged way, with dark hair that's just going silver at the temples and light brown eyes, and cheekbones so high I worry they might actually hurt him.

So I, um, asked about him at the history department. He's a widower and moved to Colorado completely alone. Plus, when I told my mom about him, she said he lives in Corbin's Bend, and goes to my parents' church. Also, I'm nearly positive he looked right at me in lecture this morning.

You know I want to apply to grad school after I get through undergrad here. I think I should ask Professor Dunn to do a tutorial with me, don't you? You never know where that kind of meeting can lead, do you? ;) (Yes, I know I'm very naughty–don't you dare tell Fred!)

Love,

Sarah

“If we are to keep company, Sarah,” said Professor Dunn, “you must understand what sort of relationship you are entering into. I am past the age at which I have any wish to trifle with the more traditional—and for me dishonest—forms of prelude to my erotic pursuits with a girl in whom I have taken an interest. These days, when I accept a girl for a tutorial, I ask her to stipulate in advance that she relinquishes certain rights girls and women tend to regard as essential these days.”

Sarah swallowed hard. She had certainly not expected this sort of discourse from a professor she planned to seduce, especially when she had her hand on his lap, lovingly and naughtily bringing it to life beneath his woolen trousers, as they sat on the little couch in his office. The professor was supposed to be grateful, not peremptory. That was how she thought these crushes worked.

And she had been considering whether to bestow on Professor Dunn her ultimate gift, by giving him a little head (a phrase she and her friends liked to throw about to demonstrate their experience, though the little thrill it gave her in fact demonstrated the opposite, she knew) in his office—not letting him go deep or come in her mouth, of course. Just letting him feel what a nubile co-ed can do when she wants with her mouth—the sort of thing that kept her on-again-off-again boyfriend Fred docile, and left her feeling superior, as she delicately removed her lips from his cock and pumped it with her fingers until he spurted all over himself and his dorm room sheets.

But Professor Dunn’s words had changed things completely, in a way she could not quickly grasp.

“W-what?”

“Let’s begin with a little test of your suitability. If you wish to continue this interview, call me ‘sir’, if you please.”

“What?”

He looked at her steadily, from a few inches away. He had taken her chin in his hand when he began to speak, right after Sarah had brazenly put her right hand on the front of his pants.

Suddenly, with a strange mixture of fear and delight, Sarah realized that she was falling in love with him. She recognized that feeling readily enough. She was twenty-one now, and had been in love half a dozen times at least. The lovely idea that she wanted to know everything about another person, and that she wanted him to know everything about her: that meant that Sarah was falling in love. She found suddenly that she wanted to lie down next to Professor Dunn, and touch him all over while he did the same to Sarah. She, though it made her blush, wanted him to put his hand inside her shirt, under her skirt, inside her underwear, because it would mean that Professor Dunn wanted to do that to her. That delicious feeling Sarah Harshaw knew with some degree of thoroughness, although she was quite surprised to find herself feeling it about her Western Civ professor.

She had come there with the expectation of having a little fun with him. There was nothing malicious in the impulse, but her experiences with boys, especially with Fred, had left her dissatisfied in a way that made her–and she knew this even as she, for example, put her hand on his crotch–go against her own nature, and try to take control. Really she did it just so someone would be in control, and it wouldn't just be fumbling around and tentatively touching places that one thought were probably erogenous. Her purpose was to enjoy that kind of control over this nice middle-aged man from the East Coast, with his beautiful manners and his kind air and his handsome face. She wanted to give him a blowjob, frankly, because she liked driving Fred crazy that way and she wanted to do the same thing to Dr. Dunn.

The problem was at the same time she realized she wanted more from him–wanted the aforesaid disclosures, closeness, caresses–she also began to realize the power of this fast-growing attachment was not just in what she had always thought of as the romantic realm. This attachment had some other power, a power she had never actually felt, but only–from time to time–imagined, and then, much more often, avoided thinking about in any detail at all.

What was it? Well, for starters, it was unfortunately the hottest, sexiest feeling she had ever had in her life, and her loins responded as they never had to a real person before. The romantic stuff was nice, and when Fred─and the two boys she dated seriously before Fred–touched her breasts, and even put their hands in her panties, she very much liked the sensation, and moistened at their touch. One of the ones before Fred had brought her to a climax once that way. Fred never had, and she'd actually grown pretty adept at faking it, or at least at making him think that it was time to take his hand out of her panties. But the problem now confronting her was that what Dr. Dunn said–just his words, only touching her chin–made her panties wetter than they had ever been in her life in the presence of another person.

Why? What did she want from him? Did she want him to kiss her again? For the first light kiss had been surprisingly quick in coming.

Yes, but no. She looked into his light brown eyes, waiting patiently for her response to his request that she call him “sir”.

Dear God. She wanted to call him “sir”, and the thought that she might do that–that really, she was about to do that-made all the muscles around her vulva pulse. She was having a terrible time, in fact, keeping from trying to work her hand down the front of her skirt to touch herself.

What did it mean?

She realized, with a shock that made her shudder, that she wanted to belong to him somehow.

The bottom dropped out of her stomach as she looked into those eyes. And she had a terribly distracting, terribly arousing vision of kneeling in front of him, with hands clasped before her, begging him not to punish her for her forwardness and wantonness.

Oh, no. She didn't just want to belong to him somehow. She wanted to belong to him in a very specific way, she realized now. That way. The way when he spanked her.

Sarah Harshaw had not grown up in Corbin's Bend, for the community was so new that no one could yet have grown up there. But if it had existed when she was growing up, her parents almost certainly would have moved there shortly after they married, and they would have raised her in that unique environment. She came from a spanking family. That was not especially unusual in suburban Denver, she supposed. Most of her friends’ parents spanked them from time to time. The difference in the Harshaw family was her parents' dedication to a disciplinary way of life, with hand spanking as the first and strapping as the last boundary-setting practice for Sarah, her brother Jeff, and, most unusually, their mother.

Sarah remembered when she hadn't known it was unusual, but thought it might be, and she had experimentally–though casually–said at school one day to a group of her friends at the sixth-grade lunch-table, "I hate it when I'm still awake when my dad spanks my mom. It's so embarrassing to listen to that through the wall!"

Only one of them had looked back with the slightest bit of comprehension; the others had all had mixtures of disgust and shock on their faces, and Sarah had hastily changed the subject, trying to pretend they hadn't heard her say what they thought they'd heard her say.

That was the same period of her life (and her real reason for bringing it up at school, of course) when hearing that through the wall–the slaps and her mother crying, then the bed knocking against the wall, and sometimes her father speaking in a loud tone she didn't recognize, as if he were giving commands–had started to make her feel funny. She could never understand his words, but not understanding, and imagining, made the funny feeling grow. To her confusion, she often found herself putting her hand under her nightgown between her thighs when she heard it, both unable to stop and ashamed to continue, though she always did, until something simultaneously lovely and shameful happened, and she could drift off to sleep, her parents always quieting down by then.

The mornings after she heard the spankings, Sarah would scan her mother's face for signs of fear of her father, but every time her mother seemed especially happy, and especially loving towards him, and towards Sarah and Jeff.

Like most young adults, her first thought in relation to the way her father had run his household–it most definitely was his household–had been to flee as far away from it as humanly possible. He was a good man and, despite the spanking, a gentle man, though perhaps not a gentleman except that he certainly acted polite. What he wasn't was refined, and neither was her mother, and Sarah aspired to refinement. Sarah associated spanking, and domestic discipline with her parents' house: just what she wanted to get away from at college and then, hopefully, beyond.

Her father refused to pay for any college outside of Colorado, and so her dreams of the Ivy League–which she might well have attained based on her academic record–could not come true. But although she was not above going home on weekends to do her laundry, she had been very happy to be living half-an-hour, and, as far as she was concerned, a whole world, away from Corbin's Bend, and the memories of her childhood in suburban Denver. They were not bad memories; just very different ones from the memories she intended to make for herself now that she was almost on her own. Sandy Ridge College was not in Corbin's Bend, after all. Knowing that she resided half an hour away from her parents reassured her every time she thought of it.

The idea behind this attempt to give a nice new professor a blowjob had been very much along those lines. It was the kind of thing that, when her parents heard about a classmate doing something like it in high school, would cause them to look at her and Jeff and say, "You know what would happen in our house, don't you?" Her father would nod meaningfully to where the strap hung, in the family room. "That's why we don't have those problems," he would say.

And Sarah and Jeff would say, "Yes, sir." And Sarah, at least, would think that when she got to college she planned to try that kind of thing, because, really, it didn't sound like something people shouldn't do if both of them wanted to. She had read a great deal by that point and, to their great credit, her parents had not objected to her reading things like the more advanced Judy Blume novels and even the racier kind of science fiction (although Sarah suspected they didn't actually know what lay behind some of the covers with people riding dragons or wearing armor).

So it hadn't been all that long before she'd realized what happened in her parents' room, but despite her growing interest in things like giving blowjobs (which she always did in a refined manner), the basic ickiness of thinking about one's parents having sex–when one finally figures out exactly what it involves–had kept the realm of those muffled spankings completely divorced from the realm of her romantic exploits with boys like Fred. The two things, spanking and romance, inhabited completely different worlds.

Those worlds had just come together with a crash that had an extraordinarily distracting, and confusing, effect on her Sarah-ness (her private pet name for what her parents had taught her as a child to call her private part).

Without willing it, Sarah said, in a whisper, “sir... w—what do you mean?”

Chapter 3

In a certain important sense, what Dunn was doing could perhaps best be called “bluffing”. That word, however, was not truly accurate, since his heart was sincere in every dominant word he spoke, and every dominant look he gave Sarah. He wanted this. This was why he had come to Corbin's Bend. But he treaded on territory almost completely new to him, at least in reality. She lived in Corbin's Bend–the daughter of his co-parishioners at St. Michael's–and here she was trying to seduce him, and he had the chance at last to try to... to what? To take her in hand, the way a girl from Corbin's Bend should be taken in hand. Presumably.

Presumably, for of course having grown up in a spanking family didn't make a girl a submissive. In fact, it might mean quite the opposite. And she was his student! What was he doing?

When Sarah had asked for an appointment in the evening to discuss a tutorial, he had triple-checked the code of conduct of Sandy Ridge before he let his mind run the slightest bit free, thinking about what might happen. The college wouldn’t dismiss him for having a sexual relationship with a student–that was clear. They could certainly dismiss him for various difficult situations that might arise from said sexual relationship, but he felt that he could navigate those if necessary.

The real trouble was in the ethics of the thing, and not in the legalities. He had fantasized many times about students in his courses, but that had been while he was married, and he had always supposed that stemmed from his sexual incompatibility with his wife, something he'd been aware of since around the fifth year of their marriage. He had never felt he’d been unfaithful to her. Fucking Joanna was playing BDSM, from his perspective, and did not break his marriage vow, and though he knew his wife would have disagreed he nevertheless acquitted himself on the grounds that the release he got from playing with Joanna had given him the strength to make it through the final days with his wife.

But here was a young, beautiful, perhaps submissive student in one of his courses. She obviously had a crush on him, and there was something about her–her seriousness, her clear intellectual excellence and vigor, something he felt in their conversation when she had requested the appointment–that made him wonder whether his own garden-variety infatuation with her (which had given him more than one high-quality masturbatory fantasy over the past two weeks) might actually have more to it. He had wondered what would become of them if something did happen, but he hadn't thought further. And then she had turned her face up to him, and parted her lips, and the world seemed to shift on its axis.

He had been preparing himself to have this conversation, and to present the document he was now thinking he might actually present to Sarah, for many years. He had begun to draft it, indeed, even before his wife had died, in fact. But though he believed he had done a very good job to this point of making it seem like he had had this sort of tutorial with some other hypothetical tutee at some point in the past, he had never actually had the conversation with anyone. Indeed, he never truly supposed he ever would have this conversation, though it had featured prominently in a great many fantasies he built up over the years.

When he had presented the domestic-discipline contract to Miriam, what seemed like a thousand years and a different life ago now, it had been "Here's a contract I thought might be fun to play with," and (from her) "Yeah, OK–this could be fun," and signing it. It hadn't been real, even though from a documentary point of view, that contract and this affidavit were directly related. The contract for Miriam had been a greatly shortened redaction of an earlier version of the document he was now, to his astonishment, about to give to Sarah Harshaw.

But he lived in Corbin's Bend now, and she was from Corbin's Bend, and everything was different here, at least for a man who had always longed to try the kind of lifestyle that had brought all the families of the community there to live. Certainly the first spanking he had witnessed in Colorado, that first Sunday at St. Michael's, had emboldened him.

Sitting in his office with Sarah, her hand still on his lap because she apparently hadn't thought to remove it, waiting for the correct moment to answer her question ("sir... what do you mean?") in the wake of the incredible surge of arousal he had felt when she had actually called him “sir”, he thought back to how excited he had been when the Rector of the little parish had said, "And, since you're a Head of Household, I'll need to familiarize you with our practice of penitential spanking. It usually makes sense for a new HoH to witness one of the single girls' sessions. Are you free after coffee-hour this Sunday?"

And then he had been hard all the way through Mass, looking about him and wondering whether any of the pretty young things there had confessed their sins to the Rector the day before.

One of them had, it turned out, and had been sentenced to the church strap for offenses known only to her confessor. During coffee-hour, he–Father Henry, a wonderful elderly British priest–had led Dunn and another member, Jake Tuttle, back to a room adjoining the Rector's study, where, to Dunn's astonishment, there was a sort of padded wooden bench, to which were attached at the base, leather straps, and fastened by them, around her tightly-closed knees, a young woman. Her skirt had been tucked up to reveal her panty-covered backside, but the rest of her was hidden from view behind a black curtain lowered from the ceiling and draped over her just above her waist, so that Dunn could see nothing but her shapely bottom and lovely, white-stocking-covered legs.

To his momentary, reflexive embarrassment, Dunn realized he was disappointed her modest pink panties hadn't been pulled down–so that Dunn had no chance to get a peek at the secrets between her thighs. He was surprised, though, a moment later, to realize that being in Corbin's Bend, and in a church in Corbin's Bend where clearly the strapping of young women was a regular practice, had caused his embarrassment to pass away. He felt a need to think further through this emotional turnabout, but at that instant he felt he had become more himself than he had been in years–or, perhaps, ever. He was a man who strapped the panty-covered bottoms of young women, when called upon to do so. In the process of administering punishment, he looked upon those bottoms. As a man still in his sexual prime, how could he not want to see more of this young woman's charms?

"St. Michael's," said Father Henry, "is a very special parish, because we have, as a parish, decided that corporal punishment is a way of discipline acceptable to the Lord, and to us. We maintain consistency thus with the culture of Corbin's Bend, and we provide to our female parishioners the chastisement they need. The way of domestic discipline, as we teach it here at St. Michael's, demands that when a married woman confesses to sins that I feel should be punished corporally, I sentence her to a certain number of lashes, and bid her tell her husband to administer them. When a single girl of eighteen years or older requires chastisement, however, the question is more difficult. Rather than let in any accusation of impropriety, I delegate my authority in the matter to the Heads of Household of the parish, like Jake here."

He handed an old, wicked looking strap to Jake. "She is to receive thirty-six lashes upon her bottom, Jake. Do you accept this charge?"

Jake said, "I do, Father." Father Henry said some words under his breath and made the sign of the cross over the strap in Jake's hand.

"You may begin the punishment when you are ready," said Father Henry.

Jake lifted the strap, and lashed the end of it with a hard flick of his wrist, upon the panty-covered bottom before him. The unseen girl rewarded him with a yelp, and then "One!" in a penitent soprano. Dunn looked at Father Henry, who smiled kindly at him, nodding to tell him that all was as it should be.

By twenty-four, the poor sobbing girl gasped, "Please, Father, no more!" And Jake looked at Father Henry to see if he should stop. The pretty bottom was streaked around the modest pink briefs with scarlet across both its cheeks and down its flanks. The young woman strained against the leather straps, and her bottom squirmed uncontrollably.

Father Henry said (Dunn thought the priest's voice sounded a little thick), "Think of your misdeeds, young lady! This is where they have brought you!" Again he nodded at Jake to continue. Jake needed no further impetus; part of Dunn was distressed by how aroused the young woman's cries and sobs made him, but another part understood that this was the way of life of Corbin's Bend, and he thanked God he had found a home at last.

When all the lashes had been bestowed, Father Henry led Dunn out of the discipline-room so the young woman could rise and depart through a special exit to the outside. Dunn wondered whether he would ever know whose bottom he had just watched Jake discipline. The Rector invited Dunn to sit in a comfortable chair in the study, and sat down himself, behind his cluttered little desk.

"I imagine," said the Rector, "that you're wondering about the discipline of men?" He chuckled. "Perhaps even worrying that some other member of the parish might take the strap to your behind, if you confess to, hmm, some lustful thoughts?"

Dunn laughed himself, taken aback. He actually had not wondered–but he did now.

"In keeping with our church's teachings about gender and orientation," continued Father Henry, "the roles of the taken-in-hand members of our parish and the Head-of-Household members of our parish are not viewed along strictly gendered lines. We don't currently have any male taken-in-hands or female Heads-of-Household, but we have had a few over the years, and we have welcomed them into the parish. All of that is just to say that the discipline of those taken-in-hand differs from that of Heads-of-Household. We are all, to be sure, equal before God, but corporal punishment is a practice that we believe God gives to those called to be Heads-of-Household to bestow on those called to be taken-in-hand."

Dunn had often–always questing to know more-wondered about how those who practiced domestic discipline in a community handled such matters. Father Henry's approach seemed sensible to him, but he could not deny that one thing still troubled him.

"You mentioned lustful thoughts a moment ago, Father," he said.

"I did." The priest looked at him with what seemed a slight twinkle in his eye.

"I don't know how to... put this." He looked to his new Rector for help.

"You were aroused when Jake was punishing that young woman, weren't you?"

Dunn nodded, helplessly, then hung his head.

"Why else would anyone move to Corbin's Bend, John?" Father Henry asked. "Surely you could smell in the air how aroused the penitent was?"

Frankly, Dunn realized, he had been much too distracted by the noise, and how hard it had made him, even to notice what he smelled.

"And, not to shock your sensibilities, let me confess that I was extremely aroused myself." For a moment, Dunn's sensibilities were indeed shocked. Was this kindly old British priest actually saying that he had been hard while Jake punished that lovely little bottom? But, wasn't that to be expected here?

"Let me be direct, John," Father Henry continued. "I suspect you are not a stranger to the world of Dominance and submission. Am I right?"

Dunn nodded, speechless. This was just about the last sort of conversation he had thought he might ever have with a man of the cloth.

"Well, neither am I. We can leave it at that, but I'm happy to say that being aroused by punishing a lovely feminine posterior is no sin, according to my interpretation of scripture and tradition."

"What?" asked Dunn, surprised.

The priest shook his head. "No."

"But," retorted Dunn, "surely I had lustful thoughts!" It seemed very odd, but at the same time entirely correct, that he should protest the sinfulness of his mind to a priest who seemed intent on denying it.

"Did you make a plan to violate that young lady?"

That brought Dunn up short. "No," he finally said, slowly and thoughtfully.

"Well," said Father Henry. "Think about that, and see whether in the end you might agree with me." Dunn nodded in agreement that he would think upon it. "John," the priest continued, smiling broadly. "We're all spankos here. The Lord made us this way. Some of us want to spank, others want to be spanked. There's no use denying that it's an erotic thing for most of us. I'm not sure why anyone would move to Corbin's Bend if it weren't that way for him or her, since you can't move here without realizing that a great many of your neighbors are spanking one another in an erotic way, and not–or I suppose, not only–in what you might call a traditional disciplinary way."

That made Dunn laugh, picturing a traditional Head-of-Household type standing on his front porch, listening to the unmistakable sounds of erotic spankings going on in all his neighbors' homes. The frown deepened on the imagined HoH's face. Perhaps eventually he began to doubt whether, really, he didn't find himself getting a little more aroused than appropriate when administering just chastisement to his wife.

That church was also the one Sarah Harshaw's parents attended, and though Sarah had not grown up in Corbin's Bend, it seemed she must have grown up in a similar environment. But she was his student.

The conversation with Father Henry had given him a great deal to think about, and the memory served now, it seemed to him, to anchor him and to galvanize his resolve to see this through, but it couldn't tell him what he really needed to know–no conversation could, he supposed, because what he really needed to know was whether it was wrong to follow his growing desire to try to take Sarah Harshaw in hand. Unfortunately, he already knew the answer, and knowing the answer didn’t make any difference at all. It was wrong, but... but she had, after all, just called him “sir”.