Asking

It was his frightfully solicitous tone — for a man typically so blunt — that told me my doom was now rather than later.
 
I poured fresh beer and returned to the kitchen where I loudly dropped the bottle opener in the drawer, which I then promptly slammed. When he appeared at my side and asked if there was anything he could do to help, I knew what was really being offered. It didn’t have anything to do with preparing dinner, a task I resentfully completed after rudely refusing his assistance.
 
The only help I needed was a spanking, but I wasn’t ready to admit it yet.
 
In truth, everything I did that day was tinged with resentment. Hating my tone, my body language, I couldn’t stop them. I was possessed by anger. I blamed it on hormones, stress, anything to shift the accountability.
 
With resignation, I cleaned up the dinner plates, rejoined him in the living room and asked him to please pause the movie — forcing myself to finally be polite. I took his hand and asked him to join me in the bedroom, closing the door behind us.

 
“I have been rude and grumpy,” I acknowledged in a stammer. “Could you please…spank me?”
 
“Oh, absolutely,” he said, his demeanor instantly shifting from the solicitous stranger to the Dom I knew. This was familiar ground, a certainty that soothed my resentment.
 
“Pants off and over the end of the bed,” he ordered as he placed pillows over the foot board. “Your behavior this weekend has been…well, it’s been pretty awful, hasn’t it?”
 
“Yes, Sir. I’m sorry,” I answered, already hearing the tears in my voice. I bent over the pillows with my hands clasped before me, as if in prayer.
 
With the removal of his belt, instincts told me that there would be little benefit of a warm-up. My instincts rarely fail me.

 
I may have asked for this, but what happened after was completely up to him. I accepted his hand, briefly, and then his belt. I accepted the strap. Finally, yes, I accepted the cane. It was hard and fast, punishing and cleansing. Despite my difficulty in maintaining position, it was all that we needed it to be.
 
My regret deepened with the color of my bottom. Every horrid comment, petulant shrug of my shoulders, stomp and huff were accounted for; each thwap and groan echoed in the room like forgiveness until there were no hard feelings left, no anger.
 
It was just us — the way we are, the way we should be.