A Punishment Marriage Page 2

  Luke nodded. “We need to paddle her. I think it’s the best way.” He opened his center desk drawer and took out the clear paddle made of hard plastic with its five air holes to make the impact on a girl’s backside more painful.

  The policeman turned Lily and started to bend her over, not yet forcing her into position but making it clear how she would have to move. “Put your hands on your shins, miss,” he said. “The doctor is going to give you six swats. Then we’ll see if you can do as you’re told.”

  Lily had kept her silence to this point throughout the little scuffle, though her face had gone very red. Now she said, in a very distinct voice as if it were some kind of legal formula, which it wasn’t, “I do not accept this proceeding.”

  “It makes no difference to me, or the bureau—or even to the man who will marry you in a few weeks’ time—whether you accept it or not, Lily. You broke the law, and you are now under disciplinary circumstances. I didn’t really want to have to punish you today, because with your tendency to defiance you’re certainly going to get enough spanking and whipping from your husband to last you a very long while. But I’m going to do him a favor by seeing if I can teach you at least a little obedience this morning.”

  Johnson, on Lily’s right, had turned her so that she presented her back to Luke and now held her fast there. She looked back over her shoulder at him, bright tears in her eyes—but tears of anger and stress, of course. He saw her eyes go down to the paddle before she raised them again to his. “You can’t. He… he can’t.”

  Luke looked at her calmly for a moment, and then he spoke to Officer Johnson. “Bend her over, please.”

  She kept struggling for a moment, but the police officer had no trouble at all in folding Lily James up and holding her steady, as the exam gown parted naturally to reveal the whole of the girl’s very attractive backside. Luke took a step forward and placed his left hand atop her waist.

  “You can’t!” Lily said again when she felt his touch, and struggled again for a moment. Then, summoning more defiance—perhaps all the resistance she had, “Don’t you dare, you fucking asshole.”

  Luke brought his arm back at almost full length. This kind of spanking had to be given with great precision, and he certainly didn’t mind delivering it.

  “I can, Lily, and I must, for your own good. And I feel sure your husband isn’t going to take kindly to that foul mouth of yours.”

  Then he paddled her six times in quick succession as she yelped, then cried out, and finally screamed in pain, her red, squirming bottom putting on a show of unintentional lewdness as Officer Johnson held her still for her punishment.

  “Fuck! Oh, God, you fucking asshole!”

  “Put her in the restraints,” Luke said grimly.

  When she felt Officer Johnson manhandling her back onto the chair, Lily seemed to realize she had no chance of avoiding her examination, and she merely glared at Luke with eyes from which the tears had still not fallen, so obviously thinking the words fucking asshole that Luke almost heard them in his brain. She did not comply and she did not resist, as the policeman lifted her knees and fastened her calves in the stirrups, then put the webbing belt around her waist and bound her wrists to the belt in their cuffs.

  “I think you’d better put the neck strap on, too,” Luke said, putting some resignation into his voice to show Lily he expected better. Her eyes went wide for a moment, then narrowed even more as Johnson pulled the well-padded but stout webbing around her neck and fastened it just tightly enough that Lily wouldn’t be able to contort her upper body when Luke handled her breasts.

  “We’d better have the gown off before you leave, Officer,” he pronounced. “She’s forfeited her right to any modesty, I think.”

  “Definitely,” Johnson replied.

  “No!” Lily said, her face twisting much more with shame than it had even with the pain of the paddling that had left her bottom blazing red.

  But the policeman tugged the gown out from under the belt, and undid the wrist cuffs one at a time for a moment to pull it off Lily’s front, revealing a lovely young feminine body, knees raised and spread as if to offer her most intimate charms, still furred with raven curls, to the man who could take charge of her. Her breasts were on the small side, but beautifully formed, with sweet little brown nipples with which Luke thought her husband would love to play.

  “She’s a very attractive young lady,” Luke said conversationally. “It’s a shame she doesn’t know what’s good for her, isn’t it?”

  “I’d say so, Doctor,” the policeman replied, casting his eyes up and down the bound form of the girl destined for a punishment marriage. “But I’m sure her husband will know how to handle her, aren’t you?”

  “Of course,” Luke said.

  “But… but…” Lily said, as if understanding for the first time just what her hacking had gotten her. “But I still have another match!”

  Luke said to Officer Johnson, “I think you can wait outside now, Officer.” The man nodded and passed through the door. When it had closed behind him, Luke sat down on his rolling stool and looked into Lily’s brimming eyes. “I don’t think you were listening earlier, Lily. Your attempt to tamper with the bureau’s database invokes a specific consequence. You are going to be matched in a marriage under disciplinary circumstances, if you choose to stay here rather than to go off world.”

  “I can’t go off world! What would I do? I can’t afford a trip to another system. I’d have to go to the mining colonies.”

  “I’m sure you would, but you got yourself into this mess.”

  “But there are no jobs for coders there!”

  Luke nodded, trying to pretend to a sympathy he didn’t feel. “No, I imagine there aren’t. You would probably end up as a prostitute, quite frankly, unless you wanted to work in the mines.”

  Lily shook her head, her face despairing. Luke could see he might have a real opportunity to get through to her.

  “A punishment marriage will be hard, Lily, but the men chosen are good men. There’s a reason you were matched as you were, those first two times. You made a bad mistake today, but I promise you that it can come out for the best if you start to accept what you really need.”

  But Lily’s face had closed down, and Luke couldn’t tell if he had made an impression. She shook her head. “Your algorithm sucks, and you suck, too. If I accept this punishment match, it’ll only be so I can stay here. I make a lot of money, and I assume Mr. Punishment Match won’t mind that at least. And I don’t have any problem letting him fuck me, I guess. I mean, I was willing to let that ‘781 guy fuck me, wasn’t I?”

  Luke had to suppress a smile, now, because Lily’s real discomfort with her sexuality shone through so clearly.

  “Well,” he said, nodding gravely, “that’s a place to start. I’ll go ahead with the exam now.” He got a pair of rubber gloves from a drawer in the base of the exam chair and put them on. Lily flinched at the snap. “I’m going to start by assessing your sexual responsiveness.” Looking closely at her pretty vagina to gauge how readily she lubricated herself, Luke laid the tip of his right middle finger on the pink hood of Lily’s clitoris and began to rub with a circular motion.

  Lily took a sharp breath through her nose. Luke looked up into her face, to see that she had bitten her lip and a furrow had creased her brow. He looked down again and noticed that her arousal had begun to make itself known. With his left hand he penetrated the folds of her inner labia until he could feel her intact hymen, then used the two fingers he had inserted to stimulate her gently inside her vagina as with his right hand he continued rubbing the clitoris.

  Lily cried out, and her body began to writhe against the restraints. The sight of his fingers at their naughty work, while her paddled bottom squirmed and seemed almost to offer her sweet little anus to him, bewitched Luke despite his medical detachment.

  “Why… why are you…” she managed to gasp.

  “We need to be sure you’re a good match for your n
ew husband sexually, Lily. You’re a very responsive young lady, though I imagine you yourself may not have even known it. Sometimes a girl doesn’t really get aroused until she’s placed in a submissive position the way I’ve done with you.”

  “Oh, no… please…” Lily’s voice was strained, and it was clear that she was not happy to discover that the way to climax for her lay through a paddling and being bound in place in an exam chair while a man enforced pleasure on her body.

  “You may well be distressed to learn how responsive you get in this position. But your husband will be exactly the right person to take that distress away. When he has intercourse with you, he will—by virtue of being a husband under disciplinary circumstances—have the right to enjoy you any way he likes. As his wife under those same circumstances, you will be disciplined until you acknowledge that right and allow him his pleasure, whether he takes you vaginally, orally, or anally. As he punishes you and as he exercises his full conjugal rights, you will learn to cry out in pleasure at his mastery of you, as you cannot do here today.”

  No, she couldn’t cry out; she could only make a strangled little whining sound as her vagina contracted around his fingers and the rest of her body strained against its bonds in an unmistakable orgasm. She had closed her eyes, and her face had gone completely red. For a long moment the climax held her in its grip, and then she collapsed back into the chair. Her eyes opened and looked into Luke’s with a mixture of anger and shame. He returned the expression with a slow nod, to demonstrate to her that he knew what she would refuse to say: that that orgasm had almost certainly been her first.

  It won’t be the last, though, Luke thought, keeping the satisfied smile off his face. I know a man who can make sure of that.

  Chapter Three

  Eric Burton read the letter one more time, to make sure he understood the implications.

  Office of the President

  State House, Meliora City

  Dear Commander Burton,

  First, let me welcome you home to Meliora, with my warmest wishes for your success here in a more orderly environment than you’ve been used to for the past nine years. Your reputation precedes you in a very emphatic way, and though the particular skills you used to keep the peace in the colonies of course won’t be tested on the home world, men of your courageous and level-headed character are always the ones I believe best qualified to serve in our administration. I know you’ll want to take some time, perhaps even a year or two, to relax in the recruiting-post job we were more than happy to give you, but at thirty-five you have a long career ahead of you, in more vigorous service, should you want it. When you’re ready to discuss a real job—one that will make a difference, if you’ll permit me to be blunt—just let me know.

  Second, and more immediately, I imagine you haven’t paid much attention to Melioran sociological affairs while you’ve been gone, especially in light of the tragic loss of your wife so soon after your marriage, which as I understand represented the principal reason for your joining the colonial peacekeeping force. Indeed, you never had cause to interest yourself in the ins and outs of the marriage system very much at all, seeing as your first match seemed to have taken so well.

  Here’s the thing: the Global Socionomic Database works for 99.9% of the population (I imagine you know this part, but I’ll lay it out so that you have all the facts in front of you). That still means hundreds of men who have to undergo desexualization or go into exile, and hundreds of women who must either leave Meliora or enter into marriages under disciplinary circumstances (what are sometimes inaccurately called ‘punishment marriages’) so that they don’t pose a public safety risk.

  From the beginning of the system, we’ve had trouble finding qualified men for disciplinary marriages. Many men do apply, of course, because the attractions of the special circumstances (the freedom to master the bride in any way the husband sees fit short of nonconsensual penetration) are rather great for a certain class of man. The quality of these applicants, however, has never been what the administration would like to see, and a recent study of the male population indicates that some of the best candidates don’t apply because they (rightly, it must be admitted, in many cases) view the girls who must marry this way as a nuisance.

  Two years ago the bureau launched a program whereby we extend a special invitation, which comes with a stipend, to highly qualified single men. They don’t all get a letter from me, Commander Burton, of course, but because of your sterling accomplishments and the pleasure I was already promising myself in writing you this welcome-home letter, I’ve taken the liberty of extending an invitation to come down to the bureau and talk it over with one of the doctors there.

  I hope Melanie and I can expect the pleasure of a visit to the White House some time. Please just let Jacob Carmichael, my social secretary, know when you’d like to come by. For my own selfish sake in seeing a man like you happily settled back on your home world, I hope we might also welcome a young lady who’s learned to look up to her firm-handed husband.

  With all my best wishes,

  John Wanamaker

  President, Commonwealth of Meliora

  Eric couldn’t help feeling flattered, certainly, but his intention had been to slip away from the spaceport and into the spacious—but not opulent—house he’d purchased in the Western suburban outskirts of Meliora City. He had enough money from the bounties peacekeepers were allowed to earn to last him for at least three years without thinking about a second, more peaceful career.

  He had come back, of course, in order to find such a career. The mining colonies were a young man’s game. At thirty-five, his body certainly hadn’t let him down in any way, but his mind had started to tire. When his last bounty had almost gotten the drop on him in a watering hole on the far Northern continent of the distant moon called Colony Mu, after he had pacified the place Eric had looked around and seen not just the disgusting tavern, full of gamblers and whores, but the entirety of the peacekeeping life, for what it was—a distraction he no longer needed, and one that didn’t have room for the elderly, with their tendency to ruminate on the past and to find the present unsatisfactory.

  And old age in the mining colonies began at forty, more or less. Eric thought he had met a man who might be forty-two, but if you weren’t dead by that time you had left in one way or another for a different system, to set up lightyears away with the money you’d earned or, if you hadn’t earned any money, to offer yourself up for service on a world that took better care of its unmarried elderly than Meliora did.

  Or, like Eric, you went home because the reason you left had ceased to hurt quite so much. He couldn’t really even remember what it had felt like to hold Serena, the girl he had fallen instantly in love with on their first date. Thankfully, he also usually couldn’t remember what it had felt like to lose her, though returning to Meliora had brought more of the emptiness back than he had thought, and he found himself looking for homes in the Western suburbs rather than the Eastern side of town where Serena had lived and then, in the East Meliora Hospital’s oncology ward, died.

  Above all, Eric had planned that he wouldn’t think about going through the marriage system. He could take care of his sexual needs with his hand, perhaps aided by some of the ingenious ‘young man’s toys’ designed for the use of men during the difficult period of ages eighteen to twenty-five. Widowers such as Eric were welcomed back into the system, but they were also trusted to use their reproductive equipment responsibly on their own.

  After losing Serena, as a quickly rising lieutenant in the peacekeeping force, Eric had found plenty of sexual partners: life in the colonies had its roughnesses, but the lack of the strictly monogamous sexual morality of the home world, once he had started to get over his grief, had proved if not a consolation, at least a pleasant—and for a man with Eric’s sex drive an important—part of his self-imposed exile. His decision to return to Meliora had meant giving that up even if he chose to go through the marriage system, but he had decided he
could deal with that at least for a few years. If it drove him crazy, he could always take the much bigger step of taking one of his Terran friends up on his offer to bring Eric into the business back on Earth, where sexual matters had a much greater variety to them.

  The idea of applying to take on a punishment bride had not occurred to him at all. Indeed, he had barely even remembered that the marriage system had that odd little quirk. When he had first read the letter he had snorted, but the more he thought about it, the more he thought the idea at least worth discussing. He had been surprised, really, how unsatisfying even the more advanced of the toys seemed to be, when no prospect loomed of fucking a living girl who would look at his cock with the adorable wonder he had seen in Serena’s eyes on their wedding night, and which some of his mistresses (after a year spent mourning Serena, Eric had had five lovers, two of them for more than a year and none for longer than two) had also seemed at least to be able to simulate.

  He also, he decided, wouldn’t mind the companionship even of a girl whom he had married to a certain extent against her will. Eric had, he supposed, a great deal more experience in a great many more kinds of situations, with a great many more different sorts of people, than the usual Melioran husband did. He hadn’t thought of it this way until he got the president’s complimentary letter, but he could see how his guidance might be good for the young lady, too.

  Ah, heck, he thought as he reread the letter in the lobby of Dr. Quentin Thayer, the head of the disciplinary division of the Socionomic Bureau, it’s an adventure, is what it is. Eric had never been good at resisting the call of adventure. He had spent his premarital years (as the eighteen-to-twenty-five period was generally called) working construction as a carpenter during the week and climbing mountains on the weekends. He had gotten his pilot’s license in the mostly antiquated skill of aeronautics, just to be up as high as he could go, and he had even jumped out of airplanes and off mountains with a parachute on his back.