The Dutiful Wife

Photo-story from Janus 77 with Karina Currie and Christian Fennington

Karina waits. Eyes of midnight blue, hair the hue of ripened hay. The clock tocks its slow beat. He is not there, but at 4 pm precisely she removes all her clothes and stands, obediently naked and to relentless attention, in the position he has earlier commanded. Nor could she think of delaying her comfortless vigil by a single second, for his watching presence seems everywhere.

Time creeps on, and still she waits. unmoving, arms straight and shoulders back. Her body is sleek, proportioned like the eternal Venus, her perfumed skin a pallid gold. The grandfather clock’s remorseless rhythm eases into the deeps of her mind like a mantra, focusing all thoughts, all dreams, all past experiences into a single point of utter stillness somewhere beyond herself. She is entranced, in trance, waiting only for his return and the sound of his voice to trigger her to motion and glad servility from her blinkless contemplation. Time floats away on lazy clouds, till its ancient measurer coughs and clangs a count of five.

He is here. Home from the workaday world, bringing with him the city rush, urgent papers beneath his arm, immediacy, decision. The energy of her husband’s entry into the room ripples the surface of its silence, distorts its peace with whirling eddies and quickens the catatonic cadence of Karina’s pulses. Yet she does not turn, unbidden, to look at or welcome him, for that would break the spell of their rapt communion.

He takes his usual seat at the table, and slowly the eddies settle until the stillness reasserts. A calmness flows between them; she makes no move, no flicker of muscle nor twitch of skin, eyes gazing serenely into the infinite, head up, entirely his to animate whenever he chooses. Karina has no other wish than this, no visible world other than his. The clock intones another half-hour as time spins on, and a further forty minutes have slid away before, quite suddenly, he speaks.

‘Turn around.’ His voice is soft, yet full of power: the voice she yearns to hear. Karina rises on to her toes, and turns about. She stares as though sightless, yet all her senses are vividly enhanced, his commanding presence a brightness which lights her spirit. However mundane or far-reaching his instruction might be, she seeks nothing but to obey.

‘Bring me some wine!’

Karina pads away to do his bidding, while he turns his attention to an important letter. Shortly after, she returns, bearing a tray with a glass of ruby wine. She presents it to him gladly, curtseying deeply, her golden-haired head lowered in obeisance. He pauses in his work, and she anxiously awaits his approval while he sips and swallows. His expression of distaste is like a physical blow.

‘This is too cold — and the wrong vintage,’ he comments curtly. It seems to Karina, still in the grip of her trance, that an instrument of retribution has materialised on the table beside him, four fingers of pliant leather merging into a rounded handle. Phantom tingles touch her, coalescing in a sparkling glow on the crown of each swelling buttock; then, like the brief vision itself, fading. ‘Return to your place and stay there for another hour!’ he instructs. Karina moves away to the position where she habitually stands, her naked soles on the polished hardwood flooring, hands to her sides and breasts pushed proudly out. For, in this world they share, there is pride as well as shame in her atonement. As the clock ticks on her state of entrancement intensifies, making the oblivious scratching of his pen on the paper like a cryptic monologue in an unknown yet highly articulate tongue which she, in payment for her lapse, is not allowed to understand. The floating minutes grow gradually more weighty, bearing down on her shoulders with subtle aches and pressures. The half-hour whirrs and clangs. Karina becomes acutely conscious of her body, of how her palms react to the coolness of her thighs, which begin to shiver although the room is warm; of how her spine wants to arch more inward, her waist to twist, her breasts to wobble and swing, while the soft rounds of her bottom twitch spasmodically. And, as her legs become leaden with the strain of standing, she eases one by lifting a foot.

Sensing the movement, he turns. Disgusted by his wife’s uncharacteristic abandonment of self-containment he reaches down. A four-thonged tawse is in his hand, just as her inner eye pre-saw. His arm swings back, the leather sweeps round — and slaps, sharply stinging, across the crown of that perfect female bottom with a crack which drowns the clock-tick, followed by the rapid hiss of indrawn breath Karina makes.

‘You will stand an extra fifteen minutes, for daring to move!’

To Karina this seems just. She had lost control, and is deserving of his castigation. Indeed, without it she would feel their harmony disrupted, the balance of their rapport disturbed. And so, completely still again, she waits the aching minutes as they tick their way into quarter-hours, and halves, and more. She dare not move again, for her own self-respect as well as the shame of his rebuke; locked in compulsive obedience while the fleshy swellings of her buttocks sizzle to the impact of that single tawse-stroke, transmuting to a memory which tingles on.

An eternity later his voice returns her to reality, flooding her mind with colours and her heart with a need to please him. ‘Bring me my dinner, Karina.’ Spoken quietly and crisply, yet oddly caressive. ‘At once, please.’

She is already moving, somnambulistic yet intensely aware. It certainly does not escape her that the tawse has reappeared beside him: one which her tender posterior now knows is real indeed. When she returns with the loaded tray and proffers it to him, she once more dips her head in profound humility, glancing with a frisson of fright at the leather strap as he puts his papers away. The light gloats on her nakedness, gleams on the peaks of her lovely breasts, chases shadows into her secret places, illuminates the lushness of her womanly rumps as she stoops to place the meal before her man, devotionally treats it with precisely the right amounts of seasoning, and humbly pours his wine — now of a correct temperature and vintage to satisfy his palate.

Then, as her husband eats and sips, Karina returns to her place by the clock, hands to her sides, seeking the strength to endure that which she knows is soon to follow, communing with her inmost self, examining her feelings and finding flittering sparks of pleasure invading all her senses.

The moment he has finished his meal she turns and, as he savours the last of his carefully-rationed wine, she bears the plate away. She feels she might have been a handmaiden in ancient Egypt, devotedly tending her master’s every whim and want. The notion excites her, for in her submissively wanton nakedness she feels no sense of present, but drifts in a timeless state paradoxically marked by the constant tick and regular chime of the grandfather clock.

Karina returns, and stands at meek attention before her man. Her wifely duties for the moment are done, but shame stains her cheeks and her head bows low for she has failed him, and herself, in so many ways. She needs his calm, curt voice to take command of her every move and thought, to be subservient solely to his will. Her neglect of duty hovers between them, a spectral blemish in their wordless unity, and Karina knows full well how he will deal with her, for the four-tongued leather is in his hand — ‘tongues’ now, because soon it will speak, loudly and with unopposable authority, upon those soft, pampered parts of her person which she has flaunted before him with such quiet delight.

‘Close the curtains,’ he tells her. Karina moves to the window and does his bidding, shutting out the night. While she does so, he watches his wife with wonderment, for what he is about to do is an act of adoration, as well as a longed-for ritual of atonement, which satisfies a soul-deep need in them both. He leads her firmly but gently from the window.

‘Bend over.’

The voice strikes in, strident as a clock-chime. Karina doubles over at the waist until her elbows rest upon the table-top, her breasts and hair only inches from its polished surface. Again it is a deep bow of homage, but this time her head is not towards the devoted one. Instead, she offers him her buttocks, succulent to his sight, full-cushioned and ripe.

Carefully, as always, he positions her, and she shudders to his fingers’ touch. Then she tenses over the table as he steps to one side, measures his distance, and swings the multi-tongued implement. The leather meets the out-pushed globes with a hot hard kiss and an echoing splat. Karina winces as the supple leather strips mould themselves ferociously and fleetingly to each flinching buttock. She feels the biting sting eat deep, and groans and gasps at it. The fire quickly fades — but then the leather hisses down to crack loudly against the thrusting rumps a second time. The caressive burn of it pains more strongly on her left buttock than her right, causing Karina to toss her head and kick back with a leg.

‘Keep still! Out more with that bottom. Push it out!’

Karina strains her spine inward, bending a little at the knees so that her behind juts out from the table-edge more — juts and twitches deliciously, smoulders and yearns. It yearns for more. She feels her nipples swell and stiffen as her bottom sensuously burns, feels the flitters of pleasure dancing through her blood and rousing all her primal senses.

He plants his palm more firmly on the small of his wife’s back, feasting his gaze on the two half-moons, soft as peaches, which seem to beg him to strike them. Strike crisply and smartly. Raptly he lifts the tawse above his shoulder, entranced himself by his wife’s sheer beauty, her stooping humility and the excitement he can sense welling up in her with urgent little squirmings, like a rising tide.

Whap. The leather slams low on her buttocks with fervent force, reigniting them with fire. The searing sweetness of it digs her chin towards her chest, makes her clench dainty fists above the table-top.

Splat. Again the leather hits, full across the summits of those luscious buttocks, making them shake and wobble despite his terse enjoinder to be still. Their communion becomes enhanced as Karina moves into new realms of experience as the thick, flailing leather rises, falls, rises and falls, beating an increasing, urgent tattoo on her eager hindquarters. The rhythm becomes a rapid, clapping harmonic to the placid clock-tick, each loud concussion accompanied by a stark sensation like a fire-flash blazing brightly into her bottom, fading to a hot smouldering then reigniting to flame with the next authoritative stroke of the pliant tongues.

Perhaps two dozen times or more the busy leather bites and retreats, making her pale-tanned buttocks two rosy beauties which shake and jerk as their blushes deepen. After a final swipe on her right-hand rump, Karina clamps a palm to the glowing skin, rearing up and half-turning from her position over the table.

‘No! N-no please. No more!’ They are the first words she has uttered since his arrival home, indeed the first words she deems necessary in the intensity of their unique communion. There is a shocked silence after they are spoken.

He is not pleased. ‘I didn’t say you could rise, or speak.’ With gentle force he bends his naked wife back into position across the table. He knows he must not relent, that their very relationship is based upon her need to yield to his every wish, and the necessity for him to control her utterly in these situations. ‘An extra five,’ he says.

Karina protests. Her elbows ache, her bottom smarts. Her groans and cries, inarticulately pleading, do not avail her. Her feet begin to shift and dance, as if in an attempt to redistribute the stinging in her bottom.

‘Keep still!’ His injunction is reinforced with a downward swat of the pliant tongues which slap soundly against the curves of that heavenly behind. Up comes her head with another shrill cry, half joy, half pain, as the heat sizzles in. Thwack-thwock. Two more, hard upon each other, fling scalding sensations into the soft under-cheeks of the part of her she calls her arse, that part of her body she fingers with thrills in the silent stretches of time when he is not with her, imagining him doing precisely this.

Whap. The tawse-tongues spread out on contact with the satiny skin, licking hotly again all over the wobbling globes. Karina caws, jerking and thrusting with her hips. One more to come. He pauses. She hears his breath, the rustle of his clothing, feels the warmth of his left hand pressing on her shaking shoulders as his right arm inexorably rises. Back and back it lifts. The tawse pauses, then speeds in a final time to strike with a vibrant stinging splat against those alluring bottom-mounds which feature so prominently in his day-long fantasies at the office. The hot, hellish heaven of it hits her bottom like an explosion, vividly blazing, radiating exquisite sensations to the core of her being. Karina grits her teeth and jerks back her head, eyes tightly closed in a species of rapture she cannot define.

She is on her feet, panting. Her arms are around his neck. The same lips which have begged him to stop now seek his own for not having done so; the body which has bucked and burned beneath the weltering leather now writhes in myriad ecstasies which the punishing tawse has triggered. She feels intoxicated with primitive joy; physically aroused beyond imaginings, her spirit transcending for the moment its earthly plane.

He smiles, sharing her elation, aware that only he has this power to inspire such intensity of feeling, which now demands such consummation as only he, in the breathless union of their soul-bonded bodies and harmonised minds, can provide to the full satisfaction of the multiple releases she craves.

Later, much later, still devotedly holding, they prepare to leave for a subterranean rendezvous of music, lights and rhythms of a different kind, to dance and drink wine — for he is proud of her beauty and fortitude and aglow with her love. And, as they step together from the house, his hand cannot resist a prideful squeeze of his wife’s enchanting bottom, now snug inside her skin-tight pants — a bottom which tingles yet with prickly warmth.

It is a happy man who makes a woman happy, but the roads to that elusive happiness are varied indeed. Karina and her husband have found theirs, and will travel the route again and again. Suddenly the night is young.