Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
“You’ll call me sir, girl,” he said, his voice flat and matter-of-fact, as if he intended not a command so much as a simple statement of the future. Mr. Carpenter knew I would call him sir because he would take the necessary steps to ensure it turned out that way.
I swallowed hard, trying not to think about Mr. Garrison spanking Frannie up against the gas station wall and finding that the effort only made the mental images all the more vivid.
I looked around nervously, to see if the other girls, still in the waiting room, had clocked it. To my dismay, they definitely, definitely had. They looked back at me, all of them, waiting to see what I would do, what I would say. For a moment I hesitated on a razor’s edge between trying to show Mr. Carpenter I could comply—the path I knew as the smart one—and trying to show my fellow victims of this insane ‘program’ that these fucks couldn’t tame me.
Instinct took over. Something about the way Mr. Carpenter’s expression made me feel—about that troubling, soft voice in my head telling me that he might actually have good reason to look at me with disapproval—refused to let me do anything but what I understood very well represented the wrong, dumb choice.
“In your dreams,” I told him.
The silence that followed, while I looked into his brown eyes as defiantly as I could and he gazed back calmly, one side of his mouth curving up into a tiny, terribly frightening smile, went on for long seconds. The receptionist broke it before Mr. Carpenter did.
“Frances Korda,” she said. “You can go back and see Mrs. Brown.”
Before Frannie even started to rise from her seat, though, Mr. Carpenter reached out his right hand and took hold of my arm, so firmly that I cried out.
“Ow! You’re… you’re hurting me!” I told him.
“I’m sure I am, girl,” said the man who suddenly seemed very much like a foster father. “But that’s nothing compared to how much your butt is going to hurt by the time you go to bed tonight.”
CHAPTER 4
Jake
Grace tried to plead with me on the way to the truck, twisting around to try to look me in the face as I marched her to the passenger door.
“Please… Mr.… I mean…” She swallowed visibly. She didn’t want to say sir; I could see it in her pretty green eyes. I reached out and opened the door of the trusty old F150.
Grace got a little frantic, trying to pull her elbow out of my grip. She’d started to tremble, too.
“Sir… please…”
I thought I could already tell that everything Mrs. Brown had told me about the girls the New Modesty Authority had sent to Grasskiln was pretty much on target. Grace Franklin had a tough exterior, but on the inside lay a sweet young woman badly in need of guidance from good people like Shelly and me.
Grace’s reaction to the knowledge that she’d soon get what seemed very likely the first whipping of her life definitely indicated that the other part—the sexual part—of Mrs. Brown’s description was also accurate. From my long experience of disciplining my wife the old-fashioned way, I could tell that Grace, like Shelly, had a complicated but highly sexual relationship with corporal punishment.
Grace Franklin had, that is, come to the right town to finish growing up, and to find a husband who could take her in hand and care for her properly.
“Get in the car, Grace,” I told her. “Don’t make it worse for yourself.”
“But—”
“What did I just say, girl? Did you not hear me?”
Another hard swallow. Tears had started to form in the corners of her pretty eyes.
“B-but—”
I cut her off again, squeezing her elbow more firmly and starting to push her, with my grip on her arm, up the step into the passenger compartment of the truck.
“Every time you say but, girl, it gets a little worse for yours. Don’t make me whip you right here in the street.”
That drew a cry of fear from Grace. She hopped up into the seat, looking around from side to side as if she thought she might be able to find some way to escape.
“Fasten your seatbelt,” I told her, and then I closed the door and started around to the driver’s side. When I got there and opened my own door, I saw that Grace hadn’t in fact fastened her seatbelt, and that her little hands hovered in front of her, reaching just an inch or two toward the handle of the door. She had obviously had the impulse to try to get out of the truck and run away, but she apparently also had a lick of sense, so she had ended up frozen in that position, clearly trying very hard to control herself.
I saw a chance to teach her a little something about me, and how things would be living with me and Shelly. I pretended not to notice that she had almost made a very foolish attempt to get away, and I started to sit down in the driver’s seat, taking my time to climb in.