Page 9 of House Divided
There was no reply.
Smack!
“Ow! Ow! Fine, I’m ready to behave, you prick.”
Enoch shook his head. “Clearly not, Madeline Marx,” he said and resumed his discipline.
Madeline tried one last time to free herself from his grasp, but she may as well have been struggling against stone. Worse, every time she attempted to get loose, he spanked her harder. She gave up and tried to simply wait him out.
Enoch moved to spank her on her sensitive sit spots and upper thighs.
“Please, please! No more. I’ll behave,” cried Madeline.
He laid his hand on her naked bottom once more. It was hot to the touch.
“What was that?” he asked calmly.
“I’ll behave.”
“And?” he demanded.
“And what?”
“I’m waiting for an apology for your bad attitude and misbehavior,” observed Enoch.
Madeline suppressed her first response. She didn’t think she could take any more spanking. Besides, if she was being absolutely honest with herself, her behavior upon waking had been nothing to be proud of. She took a breath.
“I’m sorry. I’ll behave better.”
“I hope so,” replied Enoch. “Otherwise, this will happen again.”
He paused for a moment. “All right. Let’s consider this a lesson learned, at least for the moment. You may get up and pull up your pants. There’s no time to waste. We need to pack, leave, and figure out our next steps. Do you need help getting up?”
“I’m fine,” said Madeline. Even though her legs were shaky, there was no way she was lettinghimknow that. She could also feel how wet she was, and looked down in alarm at the knee she had recently occupied.
There was a small wet spot. Madeline wished the ground would open up and swallow her.
Please, please, don’t let him notice,she thought.
She stood up, wincing as she pulled her pants up past her bottom. Enoch got to his feet. If he had noticed the stain on his pant leg, he gave no sign.
“In general, the heaviest things should go on the bottom of your pack,” he said. “The exception is water. You’ll want to clip those containers to the outside, where you can access them more easily. No point in digging through your whole pack when you want a drink.”
Madeline stood there looking at him, feeling uncertain. Was he really going to not even mention what has just happened?What am I supposed to say: “Excuse me, do you know that you just spanked me and turned me angry and horny at the same time?”
Fine,she thought to herself.He doesn’t want to say anything, then neither do I.
She crouched to continue filling her pack, hiding a wince as her pants stretched across her bottom. Enoch had finished his pack and was examining readouts on the pod’s small screen.
“Good,” he observed with satisfaction. “Atmospherics are within human tolerances, if a little thin. We’ll get out of breath more quickly, certainly for the first few weeks, until our lungs adjust.”
“First fewweeks?” Madeline burst out. “What are you talking about?”
Enoch turned to look at her. “We have no idea if Marc Duchesne kept a record of where these pods were supposed to go. Come to that, we have no idea if Marc is still alive. We could be on one of a dozen worlds, and we dare not broadcast a signal in case the same people who attacked us are out there looking for us. Best case: we find a settlement and make quiet contact on our own, or Marc finds us. Either way, we could be at this for a while.”
Madeline was stunned. Everything that Enoch had said made absolute sense, and the matter-of-fact way in which he had expressed it only added to the reality that was setting in. It was deeply disorientating. Madeline had rarely taken more than an hour away from being completely accessible to people like Cornelius, Aurelian, and Marc. Any longer than that, and she felt like she was missing out.
Now, she had no choice. Dire and consequential things may well be happening at the House, but she was in no position to even hear about it, let alone do anything about it. Instead, she was trapped on an unknown planet with an arrogant son of a bitch who appeared to be her best chance at survival. And—damn it—who had already made her so aroused once already as to leak onto his pants.
