Late Blooming Lily Page 7

  When she was ready, he took her by the wrist again, his grip hard and controlling, not tender like a handclasp, and led her to the back door. She was surprised until she began to understand. A "trip to the woodshed" wasn't a euphemism in this case, just plain fact. He was going to spank her in the woodshed like a naughty little baby girl.

  Inside the small, well-kept shed, half filled with firewood for the cruel winters, Rob turned on the light, then opened up a locked drawer, drawing out a large, thin paddle with holes drilled in it. He sat down, then said, "Come here, Lily."

  Lily approached, beginning to go over his knee, but he stopped her with a firm hand. "Not yet." Rob held the paddle up for her to see. "I made this for you, Lily. I did some research on the internet first. It's light, so it won't cause injury, and I sanded the holes really good to make sure you won't get splinters. The bunkhouses are on the other side of the house. Do you understand?"

  Lily took a moment to process what he was telling her. The paddle would hurt badly, but wouldn't actually hurt her. And even if she cried and screamed, no one would hear her shame. "I understand," she said in a small voice. "Thank you, Rob."

  "Then let's get this over with," he said grimly. He helped her over his left knee, then brought his right leg in to pin her firmly, and pulled her wrist behind her back so that no matter how much she struggled or kicked, she wouldn't be able to ease one iota of her spanking. She was tipped far forward, so that her head hung down and her toes couldn't quite touch the floor. Just a helpless little girl, with no choice but to take her punishment.

  Rob didn't give her the consideration of a warmup spanking this time, just rucked up her skirt, lifted the paddle, and brought it down on her ass with a painful crack. Lily jumped, her whole body flinching away from the painful impact, but she had no time to adjust before it was brought down again, and then again in a fast, remorseless tempo. Lily had meant to at least try and be quiet and meek for her punishment, to show she was sorry, to make things better, but the speed of it took away any slight control she might otherwise have had over her body. Her legs kicked, her body twisted, she shrieked and whimpered at each crack.

  Within maybe thirty seconds, tears were streaming down Lily's face as she wailed and pleaded. "Ow... ow, please... too hard, too hard, please! I can't, can't, can't... ow... I'll be good, good girl, please, sorry, sorry!

  "Who do you belong to, Lily?" Rob demanded roughly, not easing the spanks at all. Her fair skin was burning red already as he focused the hard blows right at the tender, fleshy undersides of her cheeks and the tops of her thighs, making Lily shriek helplessly.

  "You, yours, yours, please!" Lily choked out through the torrent of tears. "Please, please, good little girl...."

  "You will be," he answered ominously. "But you weren't. Who does your pleasure belong to?"

  "You," she wailed. "Rob, it's too hard, can't stand it—" she continued, begging frantically, the sense of her words gradually dissolving.

  "I don't care if you can stand it," he said sharply. "Bad little girls don't get a choice, so you can kick and wriggle all you want, but you're going to take it all. Mine," he said more loudly, giving an extra hard crack. "My girl. My pleasure."

  "Yours, yours, yours," Lily chanted mindlessly, and soon the struggles and kicks subsided as Lily let the pain open her heart and cleanse it of sorrow and fear. Then her spirit knew what her body was teaching it, and she just cried, miserably, beyond the frantic resistance, in a place of pure acceptance and pain.

  Finally, Rob stopped. He laid aside the paddle, letting his big hand come down gently, to soothe rather than hurt. He rubbed all over her fiery red butt. She was lightly bruised and had some swollen, raw places that would give her something to remember, but there was no real injury, for his lovingly made tool had delivered exactly the sharp, intense pain he wanted without hurting his little girl. "Okay, sweetheart. Good girl now." He loosed his grip on her and helped her stand up, and Lily almost flew into his arms, nestling there on his lap, careless of the pain, crying her heart out.

  "Sweet little baby," he whispered. "I'm so proud of you. I know that was hard. I'm so sorry you had to have that."

  She sniffled, pressing her hot, damp face into his neck. "Hurt so bad," she whimpered.

  "I know. But do you understand why you needed it?"

  "Bad girl," she whispered.

  "Yes, you were. You knew your pleasure was mine, and you took it anyway. I don't think you meant to be disobedient—if I did, your punishment wouldn't be done now. But your body needs to learn too. We were both very excited tonight, and I pushed you fast, but that's not an excuse. You're a quick study, sweetheart, and a very good, precious girl, but you still need some training. Understand?"

  She nodded a little, but the clutching arms around his neck didn't relax at all. "Just... what if you're done with me before I learn? What if I only get the hard parts?"

  He leaned back, looking down at her face in consternation. "What did you say?"

  "Don't hurt," she begged, panicked by the abrupt shift in tone. "Please, sorry, I didn't mean to be bad."

  "I'm not going to hurt you," he said, forcing his voice back to an even tone. "But Lily, I have no fucking clue what piece of nonsense just came out of your head. What do you mean, 'done with you?'"

  She relaxed just a little, but still trembled at having displeased him. "When I'm done with the house and you don't want me anymore," she mumbled.

  "Oh, baby." Her obvious hurt took the edge off his shock, and he cradled her closely, rocking her slightly, back and forth. "Why would you think that?"

  "B-because you never said..." she put forth timidly.

  "I said you're mine, Lily," Rob reminded her patiently. "I said I'd take care of you, didn't I? I guess I should've been more specific, but part of me has been waitin' for the other shoe to drop, for you to decide this wasn't really what you wanted. Just some crazy adventure you'd laugh over later."

  "Dummy," Lily whispered disrespectfully, hugging him tightly. "You make me so happy. Everything is good with you."

  "Never claimed to be a man of many brains, Lily. But I got a big strong heart that loves the hell out of you, and it tears me up to think I stole one piece of your happiness with doubt about that."

  "I love you, too," she whispered, nuzzling at his cheek. "With Brian... it was like a dream of how things should be. Husband and wife. None of it was... real, like it is with you. Maybe it was at first. But not for so long. I never, ever thought I'd find someone like you."

  "Then we'll get married, if that's what you want, or hell, I'll just go outside and howl it to the moon and stars, that you're my girl, forever."

  "Do that," Lily whispered, enchanted. "That's real."

  Rob gave her a broad grin, helped her up, leading her out of the woodshed and into the starlight. There were no other lights for miles around, just deep, velvety blackness, pierced by slivers of star fire. "This here's my woman, y' hear? You better hear! She's my woman until every last one of you burns away to nothing! You just watch."

  Lily beamed, ear to ear. "This is my man," she bellowed, feeling free and joyous. "And we're going to love each other forever!"

  Rob pulled her close, hugging her against his chest. "Forever, baby. I promise."

  Chapter Six

  For the next few days, Lily simply drifted in her happiness. Everything was easy. Rob began adding tasks to her chore list to help her prepare to make the final move out to Montana, and Lily hired moving men to get her things packed up, changed her mail from hold to redirect, and began cutting old ties. It was easier than she'd expected. The few friends she truly valued heard the happiness in her voice. They wished her joy, and promised to visit. The casual friends laughed at the idea of polished Lily in rural Montana and predicted she'd be back. Lily didn't care. She would have lived in the middle of the Mojave Desert with Rob, or at the bottom of the sea, or in a spaceship. That the little town had proved friendly and welcoming was just the cherry on the sundae.

 
; Neither was her work suffering in the slightest. With her new focus, and the addition of a virtual assistant, Lily was doing just as well before, and even finding a little time for a side project, beginning to transcribe and illustrate parts of the old housekeeping book. She could almost see the final product springing into life under her hands as whimsical drawings brought the wonderful strangeness of the past into a new immediacy. It was fun, exciting work, and Lily gave an hour a day to it, chafing only a little at the restrictions Rob placed on her work time. It was, after all, awfully nice not to have a headache every single day.

  After a few weeks, Rob had to make a trip into Billings to buy stock, and needed to stay in town for a couple of days. So, reluctant as a young bridegroom, he left Lily alone with a maintenance spanking and a number of stern cautions about her behavior.

  But Lily had no intention of misbehaving, or of being lonely, for that matter. She invited Harry and Laura to brunch on Saturday morning, and cooked up a veritable feast. It was a celebration of her new life, of new beginnings as she remorselessly hacked away the tangled dead ends of her old life.

  "What's the occasion?" Harry asked, as Lily expertly popped the cork on a bottle of champagne.

  "Does there need to be an occasion for champagne?" Laura asked pertly. "I think I'd swim in it if I could afford to and just drink my way out."

  "There doesn't need to be an occasion," Lily laughed. "But there is for this bottle. I've decided to stay out here." She waved her hands, silencing their chorus of questions. "Rob and I have decided... we've decided to do this. Properly."

  "You're getting married?" Laura exclaimed.

  "No, but we told the stars, and they live longer than any judge or minister." Lily smiled a little at just the recollection of the giddy elation of that night.

  "You crazy kids," Harry snorted, but not unkindly. "Try taking an alimony suit to the Pleiades."

  "Who needs alimony? I'm not with Rob for his money or his land, and he's not with me for mine. We're both the type who will work until we die—we're just going to do it together."

  "So romantic," Laura said, and she lifted her glass. "To Lily and Rob, then."

  Harry echoed the toast, then said, "Where'll you two live? Out at his place?"

  "I don't know. This works really well," Lily said honestly. "I have a quiet place to work, and we spend every evening together. I guess when we get really rickety we might simplify things a bit."

  "Sounds crazy," Harry opined, "but I have noticed crazy folks tend to be happiest. You look happy."

  "I am. I've never been happier in my life."

  "Well, Rob's a good man. I might have chased him myself, at one point, if I hadn't been his babysitter way back when." Harry gave a wicked grin.

  The three women ate and drank through the soft, late spring morning, talking about all manner of things. Laura recommended a book she'd been reading, Harry wanted to know what Lily was going to do in the old garden, and Lily showed them a little of her work on the housekeeping book. "I guess Pauline would've been tickled to death to see you working with that old book," Harry said. "You ever find that old painting of yours?"

  Lily shook her head. "I looked in the back parlor, like you said, but it wasn't there. Maybe she gave it away?"

  "She wouldn't. She was really proud of it. 'My niece the artist painted it,'" Harry mimicked. "But... now I do remember she moved a bunch of stuff up to the attic before she died. Said paramedics had sticky fingers, and she knew... well, she knew she didn't have that long." For a long moment, the older woman stared out across the unkempt fields, lost in remembrance of her friend.

  "Let's go find it," Laura said impetuously, standing up.

  "Oh, gosh. I haven't even started on the attic yet," Lily said. "It's been crazy enough getting the rest of the house into some kind of shape. We'd probably choke on the dust."

  "Please?" Laura persisted. "I want to see your painting, Lily."

  Lily couldn't help being curious too. Which painting had she sent to Pauline, so many years before? Which strange, alien younger self would she find tucked away there? And so, armed with clean dishcloths, the three women ascended the little flight of stairs up to the attic, Harry confidently leading the way. With her cloth held over her nose to protect from the dust, she flung up the trapdoor with a strength that belied her years.

  Lily and Laura followed, and Lily looked around her, marveling at the strange variety of objects that had been placed away for safekeeping, from a box of old lipsticks all the same shade, to piles of old books, and an antique sidesaddle. "It's like a time capsule," she said, wonderingly.

  "Funny, ain't it?" Harry said, beating down spider webs. "Most ordinary stuff becomes just fascinating."

  Laura was enraptured by an old set of apothecary's tools, set away on a high shelf. A mortar and pestle, little brass scales, old jars and bottles. "Oh, Lily, please let me buy these from you!" she burst out.

  "You and your witch's brews," Harry snorted.

  "They're herbal remedies," Laura said, lifting her chin. "Even my father asks me to make up a spring tonic for him every year."

  "You can have them," Lily said, interrupting the little spat. "Let's find a box."

  "Oh, no, I couldn't—they'd be worth a mint. I have to pay you something."

  Lily emptied out the box of red lipsticks, then threw it at Laura. "Pay me in honey," she suggested.

  Laura couldn't resist the generous offer, and soon she was gently tucking away each precious item, cooing at them rather absurdly. Lily smiled to watch her, but was distracted when Harry said, "Here we are. This is it, ain't it, Lily?"

  Lily joined her, then stopped short at the sight of the painting leaning against the wall. Pauline had put it in a frame, though Lily was quite sure she hadn't sent it in one. The colors painted on the canvas blazed all the brighter against the backdrop of the old attic, green and gold contrasted with the humble homespun of the foremost figure. "I painted it when I went to France for the first time," she said, very softly. "I'm... I'm surprised I sent her this one."

  Beneath the canopy of a sprawling, ancient beech that burst forth from a formal, medieval kitchen garden, was Joan of Arc, eyes rapt as she listened to her spirits. The sky in the background was all gray, but a single beam of light illuminated the beech, and within its leaves, Lily could see the celestial faces she had so labored over twenty years before. Though her experienced eye could note many infelicities and errors in the composition, there was a rough power to the whole; Joan's face was arrestingly painted, for she was not lovely in her strange visitation, but entirely consumed by unseen vision.

  Lily tried to laugh. "My Romantic period," she quipped. "I cribbed all the best bits from Bastien-Lepage." She lifted it up, rubbing her thumb over her scrawled initials in the corner, the signature of this strange missive from her past self, a visitation as unexpected and troubling as Joan's own.

  Laura set aside her treasures for the moment and came to look. "Why, it's beautiful. I didn't know you could paint like that, Lily. It's so... you can just see how it hurts her," she blurted out. "Almost like she's having a seizure. But she doesn't even know it. All she hears are them."

  Lily nodded silently, staring. Finally, she shook off the strange emotions the thing had roused in her, and returned to chatting pleasantly with her guests, helping Laura carry her things down, and pressing them to take some muffins home. But, when they were gone, she went into the old office, propping the painting up before her and sitting down cross-legged to stare at it. The long-forgotten work reminded her of its creation, and Lily could almost feel the forest around her as she painted the trees. She could hear the impatient sighs of the young girl she'd convinced to serve as her model. With her sharp jaw and strong brows, the girl had been a godsend, but in manner, she could not have been less like the exalted Maid of Orleans. Lily had paid her as generously as her student means had allowed, but the girl had been furious when she saw how "ugly" she looked in the final work.

  The painting
pulled her in deeper, and she could feel again the ardent desire to capture the enchantment of the French woods, the almost magical particularity of the people. She had gone to France the summer after her sophomore year, back when she still imagined a stirring career as a painter for herself. It had been before she'd met Brian, before she'd turned him into a vessel for her own dreams—such an unworthy vessel, as it had turned out.

  In every stroke, Lily could read her fever, her rapture as she tried to communicate the message from her own spirits, one expressed in light and shadow and color rather than sound. "Where did you go?" she whispered, staring at it. The thing had hit her like a physical blow, and Lily's arms crossed protectively over the ache in the pit of her belly that looking at it gave her, a hunger long-denied—or maybe an old wound.

  Lily sat with the pain and her memories for a long time, and she wasn't even sure when she started crying, fat tears pouring down her cheeks for everything she had lost—or worse yet, given away without a thought to its value. "What have I done? Oh, God..." The pain of it was excruciating, tearing at her, old nerves springing back to life only to communicate the agony. Lily sat on the floor before the painting, weeping.

  And then, when the afternoon sun had traveled quite some distance across the floor utterly unnoticed, Lily sprang to her feet and went to her big paint box. Not the lightweight set of watercolors that she carried with her almost everywhere, but the strong, heavy oils that she almost never used now, that were more luggage than tool. Now she rummaged feverishly. She must work. She must paint—if the pain was for anything, it was for that. To tell her the old, ardent Lily was not dead, but suffering, starving within.

  Lily was usually a meticulous worker, but now she laid paint feverishly on a medium-sized stretched canvas. "It should be bigger," she muttered, but it would do. It would do for now. She worked without method, without thought, letting the exquisite pain guide her hands, rapt and forgetful.

  Forgetful, indeed, of all, for Lily didn't stop for breaks, and when the sun dipped down and the room grew dim, she switched on a lamp and kept going. It wasn't an intentional disobedience to the loving, moderate rules Rob had laid down. In that frenzy to speak once more in color and shape, Rob was almost forgotten, except as a prop in the foolish dollhouse life she had made for herself when she had lost this. She worked until well past midnight, until her left eye was twitching painfully, and a growing pressure in her temple could not be ignored, and the very act of looking was agony.