Over the Knee (9 page)

Like a gentleman he helped me into my coat, only making the moment seem more unreal. He held the Selfridges bag out to me and I took it with shaky hands. Dazed, I glanced around at my surroundings.

‘I can escort you back to Bond Street if you like,’ he said. ‘That’s where you were heading, wasn’t it?’

I nodded meekly, reduced to a submissive little girl in need of guidance. ‘Yes. Thank you. I don’t know where I am.’

He offered me the barest hint of a smile. ‘No, I don’t expect you do.’

I stood for most of the Tube ride. And I was right about the marks. I had several wide red welts to show for the evening’s adventure. The individual stripes were about two
inches
wide, overlapping in a curious fan shape. Pink in the centre and a colour approaching burgundy along the edges. They shaded towards purple where the doubled end of the belt had struck my right cheek. An impressive display.

There was no way they’d be gone by the time I met Peter. How was I ever going to tell him about this?

Seven

‘I’M MEETING SOMEONE
here,’ I told the maître d’. ‘Peter Markworthy.’

After a deprecatory glance at my legs, he consulted the list before him. ‘Ah. Yes. This way, please.’ He gestured for me to follow him and I had to scurry to keep up as he led me through the restaurant.

I was ten minutes late and I was worried Peter would think it was deliberate. But it had nothing to do with fashion. I was fretting about the marks and agonising over which knickers to wear right until the last minute. I’d bought the blue ones for him, but I’d paid such a steep price for the red ones it seemed a shame not to wear them. In the end I decided on the red and I had just shut the door behind me when I changed my mind again and had to go back and change.

The maître d’ took me all the way to the back of the room, to a small table for two. A man with close-cropped dark hair and glasses sat with his back to me. The maître d’ pulled my chair out across from him.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ I said. And as I turned to face Peter my breath caught in my throat. It was the security guard.

I stood gawping at him until the maître d’ gave a little cough behind me. I sat hurriedly, wincing at the discomfort in my bottom. Peter smiled.

The maître d’ stood to the side of the table. ‘Something to drink?’ he asked.

Peter ignored him and reached for my hand. ‘Angie,’ he said. ‘You look lovely.’

Still dazed, I gave him my hand and he squeezed my fingers affectionately.

‘Which knickers did you wear – the red or the blue?’

I coloured deeply and glanced at the maître d’, who seemed completely unfazed by the exchange. He was clearly not going to leave until we ordered something.

Peter raised his eyebrows to prompt me.

‘Blue,’ I said softly, casting my eyes down at the table.

He smiled and released my hand. Then he turned to the maître d’ and ordered a bottle of wine. Something with an eight-syllable German name that he pronounced flawlessly. At last we were alone.

‘It’s interesting,’ he said. ‘You were so bold the other night. And now you’re blushing like a schoolgirl.’ He’d spoken with a bit of a London twang then, but there was no trace of it now. His accent was pure RP.

Still reeling from the initial shock, I forced myself to look him in the eye. ‘I can’t believe it. How did you …?’ I shook my head, not knowing where to start.

‘My dear girl,’ he said, laughing. ‘Didn’t I warn you about sharing too much information? You weren’t very difficult to track down.’

‘But you said you were out of town. On business.’

He shook his head slowly, amused by my naivety.

I blushed again. ‘Oh,’ I said. I replayed the events at Selfridges in my mind, marvelling at the planning that must have gone into it. ‘So how did you plant the red ones on me? It was that woman at the front door, wasn’t it? But how did you know it was me?’ I felt like a child demanding to know the secret behind the magician’s trick.

‘Well, you still have no way of knowing I’m not a serial killer, but that doesn’t invalidate the safety lesson.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘You gave me your first name, of course. And your university-based email address makes no secret of your surname. A bit of searching turned up a school photo of you on the website of a former Ravenscroft pupil. Your hair was longer then, but of course you’d told me in chat that you had short hair now. Remember?’

I nodded, biting my lip. I hadn’t told him the name of the school, but I must have unwittingly said something that confirmed it. He had probably led me into all sorts of unintentional disclosures.

‘My friend and I followed you to Selfridges. And when I saw you change your mind about the red knickers and put them back I told her to buy them and wait outside until you left the store. Then I simply trailed you and waited. I phoned her as you were buying the scarf and went out ahead of you. Then my friend slipped the knickers into your pocket when she pushed past you in the doorway.’

He was like Sherlock Holmes or Lord Peter Wimsey coolly laying out the facts of a case – the sequence of criminal steps.

‘You’d be an easy mark for a pickpocket,’ he concluded. ‘You never felt a thing.’

I was impressed. ‘What are you, a detective? A secret agent?’

Peter beamed proudly. ‘No, but I’ll take that as a compliment. Ah, here’s our wine.’

Peter tasted the wine and approved it while I considered his words, absorbed in retracing the steps.

When the waiter had left Peter raised his glass. ‘To head games,’ he said.

I clinked my glass against his. ‘To recklessness,’ I countered.

He inclined his head and we both drank.

‘Tell me,’ he said, looking serious again. ‘How did you know I was a Selfridges security guard?’

‘But – you’re not. Are you? What do you mean?’

‘When I told you I was store security, what proof did you have?’

I saw where he was going and I looked down at the menu, caught again.

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Are you normally that imprudent?’

‘But you knew about the red knickers,’ I offered lamely, knowing it was no defence.

His indulgent smile confirmed that it was pathetic. ‘Someone needs to teach you a firm lesson about not trusting strangers.’

‘Well, why on earth would anyone wear a security guard’s uniform and lie about working for Selfridges?’

He gave me a stern look.

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

‘Angie,’ he said, his voice low and serious. ‘If I’d suggested you meet me at my house instead of a restaurant, would you have done it?’

I was a hitchhiker being warned about the dangers of hitchhiking by the driver who’d picked me up. ‘Yes,’ I admitted. I’d done exactly that with Paul. He’d been harmless, of course, but one could argue that I’d been extremely lucky.

‘Yes what?’

Such a simple question, yet loaded with so much authority. I squirmed as I said, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then we’ll discuss this again after dinner. At my house.’

I squeezed my legs together, lost in the delicious mixture of fear and elation.

He was silent for a few moments. Then his expression softened into a friendly smile and he opened his menu. I followed suit and, by the time we ordered, the conversation had drifted away from my impending doom.

‘I always thought I was a freak,’ I said, still reeling over the simple joy of being able to talk to someone about it.

‘I think most of us felt that way at first. Just imagine how much harder it was in the days before the Net.’

‘You should see my thesis.’ I giggled, draining my glass.

Peter refilled it. ‘Oh?’

I grinned slyly. ‘What? You mean you haven’t already hacked into my supervisor’s computer and read it?’

Peter laughed. ‘Sorry to disappoint you. Some things are beyond my humble abilities.’

I found myself regaining my enthusiasm for it as I told him the title. And I was stunned and delighted that he not only knew about the flagellant correspondence column; he had actual issues of
The Family Herald
!

‘It’s mentioned in Cooper’s book,’ he explained as though it was common knowledge. ‘I had to see it for myself. I’ve quite a collection.’

‘I wonder if you have my favourite?’ I mused aloud.

He raised his eyebrows at me and I described the letter from A Hater of the System. His arch smile told me he did.

It was an embarrassment of riches. ‘I feel like I’ve entered some kind of parallel universe. It’s like every crazy thought and fantasy I’ve ever had exists in this other world as a reality.’

‘Yes, it’s a bit like a secret society,’ he said. ‘We all had the same strange feelings from certain movies and books when we were kids. We know what it’s like to worry that we’re sick or perverted. We’ve all been rejected or denounced by vanilla partners who just didn’t understand. And we’ve done a lot of self-analysis. Read everything we could get our hands on, as though it were some disease we were trying to find the cure for.’

I nodded eagerly throughout his description. ‘Yeah. But now that I know there are others just as sick as I am, I don’t want to be cured.’

‘Nor should you. There’s nothing unhealthy about it. It takes a lot of strength, trust and courage to submit. It sounds elitist, I know, but I think you reach a higher level of intimacy through this kind of power exchange than you ever can through ordinary sex.’

I knew exactly what he meant, though I’d never have been able to put it into words so easily. It was a truth I’d always known.

‘But it’s not just about sex,’ I said. ‘And, really, the scenes that turn me on the most are the
least
sexual ones. Does that make sense?’

‘Absolutely. I don’t want to spank a girl who
enjoys
it. You’re not meant to enjoy being punished.’

‘Oh, I know! It’s the ultimate paradox. Someone who finds the idea of spanking so arousing, yet only if it’s in the guise of non-sexual discipline.’

‘For your own good,’ he added, grinning.

I thought of the way he had tricked me into the alley. Lured me with the threat of arrest and the alternative of punishment. In retrospect it had been incredibly risky. As he said, he could have been Jack the Ripper. But he wasn’t.
I
knew I would pay the price for my foolhardiness later. And I would hate every minute of it. But I would love hating it. I was already savouring the dread, the way I loved the roller coaster’s slow climb to that first big plunge. But afterwards I would relish the marks and replay it in my mind for days.

‘You know what the real irony is?’ he asked. ‘The fact that you have to rely on mainstream fiction for the kinds of scenes that we find the hottest. Almost every publisher’s guidelines say that erotica has to be consensual. But you can get away with anything in mainstream.’

I shook my head in wonderment. These weren’t things I had shared in chat or email, but they were my thoughts exactly. ‘School stories,’ I supplied. ‘All those school punishments where no one is aroused by what’s happening. Dickens knew how to push my buttons, though I’m sure he intended those scenes to have the opposite effect.’

Peter laughed. ‘Yes, as did your Father Michael.’

‘And a certain security guard.’

‘Well, I can’t claim his motives were entirely disciplinary.’

‘But I didn’t know that. And that was all that mattered at the time.’

‘It’s a funny idea, isn’t it?’ he mused. ‘That vanilla discipline can be more exciting than overtly kinky discipline.’

‘But it makes sense. Mr Chancellor is the perfect example of that.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Peter said. ‘Your uninitiated headmaster.’

Finally spying an opening, I took it. ‘Was yours as uninitiated?’

He steepled his fingers and looked at me, a gleam in his eyes. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘No, mine was rather more of a disciplinarian than your Mr Chancellor.’

I waited for him to continue.

He smiled. ‘Very well,’ he said, as though indulging a child with a bedtime story. ‘At my school we had both boarders and dayboys. I was a boarder and dayboys were at the bottom of the food chain. The way we saw it, they had it easy. They went home every night to their families
and
proper meals and their own comfortable beds. I’m sure it’s the same in every school. It wasn’t their fault, of course, but there’s a
Lord of the Flies
mentality in every closed society, especially those dominated by teenage boys.’

‘Believe me, girls are just as bad,’ I said, remembering the cliques and popularity contests of my own adolescence.

‘I expect that’s true,’ he said, refilling our wineglasses. ‘Anyway, the dayboys were the perfect victims for bullying. Especially the younger ones who were still wet behind the ears and eager to be accepted. They got coerced into doing all sorts of things whether they wanted to or not. And, quite often, they got caught. But it wasn’t done to sneak. No matter how unfair, you took your stripes and you didn’t complain. And you certainly didn’t blub.’

I knew about this schoolboy code from the countless stories I’d devoured. I had always admired it. There was something very special about the boys’ school dynamic that was completely missing from the girls’ one.

‘Dr Litchfield, the headmaster, was a product of his time. A Wykehamist and a strict no-nonsense disciplinarian. It’s difficult to explain, but we feared him, respected him and liked him all at the same time.’

I understood perfectly. I felt exactly the same about Mr Chancellor.

‘There was one dayboy – Fletcher, I think his name was – who had bragged about nicking sherry from his father’s liquor cabinet. Said he did it all the time. So a group of lads in my dormitory insisted he bring them a bottle. He tried to get out of it, but they were very persuasive. In the end they sent him to Coventry until he agreed to it.’

‘Coventry?’

‘Made him invisible,’ he explained. ‘It was the worst thing you could do to a boy. Everyone pointedly ignoring you, pretending you don’t exist. For days. Weeks. It may not sound much, but it gets to you.’

My eyes widened in horror.

He lifted his shoulders in a guilty little shrug. ‘Fletcher was the one who boasted about his exploits. If he was
making
it up to impress us, he should have known we wouldn’t be satisfied with mere talk. In the end he did what we wanted. He nicked a bottle of sherry and brought it to school. And of course he got caught. He could hardly plead innocence; the Latin master caught him sneaking it in. We all knew what he was in for, but none of us felt very sympathetic. He should have been more careful.’