Girl's Read online

  Chapter Five

  Meggy was good for two days following her switching. Two whole days without a single naughty girl spanking to redden her not-so-tender-anymore bottom. She hadn't even had so much as a single disapproving glare from her Daddy David. Not one. It was as if the severity of the switching had calmed something inside her. As if it had made it easier to relax and submit to Daddy's wishes, both the ones she like to obey, as well as the ones she didn't.

  It was amazing how quickly she got used to afternoon naps, curled up in her crib with Bear under one arm and her comfort blankie wrapped around her shoulders. And story times, as well, when she would sit with him on the couch, her head pillowed against his chest, listening to the harmonious sound of his voice as he read to her from Mother Goose, or Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends, or the Cat in the Hat, which she could almost remember Nanna having once read to her a long time ago.

  She loved being fed by his hand and drinking from her sippy cup, and though she still preferred her thumb over the binky that virtually filled her mouth, she was even growing accustomed to that. And to bath time, too, when she could play surrounded by her toys, the focus of Daddy's undivided attention, happily looking for the first covert opportunity to squirt him with her little pink water clam. And, soaping a thick, soft wash cloth, he would do his best to stay dry as he washed her gently, thoroughly, leaving no part of her uncaressed, untouched, or unloved.

  She still didn't like having to use her diapers, but because she had disobeyed that particular edict once already, Daddy revoked all her big girl rights and she wasn't allowed to use the big girl potty anymore. Not even once, although she still asked every time she felt the urge to go.

  And though it made her feel silly and embarrassed when he'd lay her on her back to change her, she did like the tender touch of his hand as he cleaned her, rubbed her soft skin with lotion and powder, and told her over and over what a good girl she was and how he loved taking care of her. Knowing that she pleased him made the embarrassment more than worthwhile.

  He made her feel beautiful and well cared for and special. She was special. She was the center of his world, and she had absolutely no doubts at all that he loved her. Just knowing that made her happier than she had ever been in all her life.

  But on day number five, for no reason that she could understand, Meg woke up grumpy. And two whole days of being angel sweet and good came to a screeching halt before even her first diaper change of the morning.

  Since Meg never woke up cheerfully, Daddy David didn't pay too much attention to her sulky pouting until he spread the changing pad out on the bathroom floor and motioned for her to come to him.

  "Okay, baby," he said, patting the pad in front of him. "Lie down."

  Having already been stripped from her pajamas, she stood in front of the sink in just her diaper, hugging Bear and rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  "Meggy, come on," he repeated and held out his hand.

  She pulled her arms out of his reach. "I wanna use the big girl potty."

  "No, not today. Now don't be stubborn. You know I want you to use your diaper."

  He took hold of her wrist, but she still didn't come gracefully, even going so far as to whine when he lay her on the changing pad and kicked at the floor with her feet.

  "Don't!" Daddy said sharply. "I am not going to tolerate your throwing a fit on me today. You've been such a good baby lately, let's not spoil it. You don't want to start the morning off with a spanking, do you?"

  "No." But her eyes flashed and her mouth turned down mutinously.

  "Then be a good girl for Daddy."

  She tipped her head back and shouted at the ceiling, "NO!"

  In the next instant, he had her rolled onto her stomach, her diaper was off and he was reaching for the hairbrush. He paddled her soundly, ignoring all of Meg's frantic wriggles and squirms, and her shouts and cries. He was very well versed in how little girls should be held down while the hardy slaps and whacks of the hairbrush literally painted her bottom a bright shade of red. But afterwards, though Daddy held and rocked her while she cried, her mood only seemed to darken.

  Breakfast was oatmeal, half a banana, and a slice of buttered toast that Daddy cut into triangles for her. He put milk in her sippy cup, which she glared at but knew better than to argue over. He even added a dab of brown sugar to her oatmeal, as if that would make it more appealing. Except that oatmeal generally needed a heck of a lot more than just a measly spoonful of sugar to make it edible for anyone, except maybe Daddy, who sat down to a big bowl of the stuff practically daily.

  He took a healthy bite. And he didn't even have sugar in his. Just butter and a little bit of salt.

  "Mm, good stuff," he said, picking up her spoon to feed her some of hers.

  Meg turned her head away. "Don't want it."

  "Eat some anyway," he said, chasing her mouth with the spoon. "My, we are in a mood today, aren't we?"

  Tipping her head back, she quickly dodged the spoon and turned her face in the opposite direction as far as her neck would allow. "No! I don't want it!"

  "Oatmeal is good for you. It's delicious and healthy."

  "It's yucky!" she argued, but he took advantage of her opened mouth and slipped the spoon past her lips, scraping the oatmeal off against her teeth and leaving a thick, slightly sweet lump in her mouth.

  "If you spit that out," he warned, "I'll take your diaper off and paddle your bottom until you can't sit down at all. And I won't be as nice about it as I was earlier."

  Meg blanched. Nice? She had two very tender spots from this morning's diaper defiance. What part of that very big, very mean hairbrush had been nice?

  Daddy scooped more oatmeal on her special spoon. "I don't like having my mealtimes turned into battlefields. Now eat."

  She made a face, neither chewing nor swallowing, but holding the oatmeal reluctantly in her mouth.

  "Eat," he warned.

  Trying not to gag, she swallowed her mouthful. She closed her eyes and shuddered. "Ugh!"

  By the time she opened her eyes, he had the next spoonful in front of her and a very determined look on his face. "Open wide."

  She kept her lips locked and shuddered again.

  "What is it with little girls and oatmeal?" He put the spoon back in her bowl and began to remove the toast, banana and her sippy cup from her tray. "I have never known a little girl to eat a bowl without at least one spanking and a hot, achy bottom to motivate her."

  "I'll eat the 'nana and toast," she wailed as he unlatched the tray from her highchair and put it on the floor. "I'll drink the milk!"

  "You're right, you will. And you'll also eat every bite of your breakfast because it's balanced and nutritious, and I am not a short-order cook." Scooting back his chair, he pulled her directly out of her highchair and across his lap. It took very little effort to tug her pull-up diaper down just far enough to bare her rounded bottom. He gave her twenty spanks, peppered all over her wobbly nether cheeks, each one delivered just as hard as he knew how. Without preamble, he then pulled her diaper back into place and plopped her bottom back onto her highchair. Bracing his hands on his knees, he eyed her sternly. "Are you going to eat your breakfast, or do I need to take your diaper down again and this time do a proper job of it?"

  Her lower lip thrust out. Breathing hard, she looked anything but penitent or even cooperative. Instead, she looked down right defiant. "Don't want no oatmeal!"

  "Young lady," he said in exasperation. "I don't know what's gotten into you, but I'm going to find out."

  He took her arm and marched her out of the kitchen and down the hall to the bathroom.

  Thinking he was intent upon retrieving the hairbrush, Meg locked her knees and grabbed hold of the doorjamb before he could pull her inside. "No-o-oo!"

  "All right, look!" He picked her up by the waist and pulled her into the bathroom. Setting her bottom-down on the counter by the sink, he braced his hands to either side of her hips and glared at her. "What's going
on here, Meg?"

  Pouting, she looked at her hands and fidgeted with her fingers.

  "Look at me," he said sternly. When she refused, he cupped her chin in his palm and forced her to meet his eyes. "Why are you behaving so badly? Because I'll tell you right here and now, anytime that I have to bare your bottom twice in one hour, you won't sit down comfortably for the rest of the day. Do you really want another spanking?"

  Meg shook her head.

  "Then what?"

  She stared at her hands, wishing she knew what to say. She felt...mad almost, though she couldn't say why exactly. Even knowing she was courting disaster, petulantly, she said the first thing that came to mind. "I want pancakes."

  He frowned. "We had pancakes yesterday. Today's breakfast is oatmeal."

  "Then I'm not hungry." She folded her arms across her chest and glared. She knew he was getting cross with her, but she couldn't seem to help herself. Unable to bear looking at him, knowing she was being troublesome and that he must find her behavior disappointing, she pulled her chin from his hand and glared at the floor again. She was being everything but his special little girl right now. He probably wanted to grab her things together, throw them and her both in her car and send her home a few days early. She blinked back her tears, wishing she could just cover her head with her arms and cry.

  Sighing, Daddy reached past her and opened the medicine cabinet. He removed the thermometer from its plastic case and the lid from the Vaseline jar. Sticking the thermometer into the gooey gel, he took her by the arm. He said, "Hop down."

  She did, but immediately put her hands behind her, very reluctantly allowing herself to be dragged to the toilet. "I don't want that in my bottom."

  "And I don't want to spend all day fighting with you over every little thing. So, since you won't tell me what's wrong, we're going to do this by process of elimination." He lowered the lid and sat down, setting the jar of Vaseline on the floor by his foot. "I sincerely hope, for your sake, you're running a fever."

  She stiff-leggedly leaned away from him when he tried to put her face-down across his lap. But Daddy was very experienced with naughty girls and, despite all her kicking and protesting, he quickly wrangled her over his strong thighs. She immediately tried to roll off, but her heel hit the wall and then his pinning arm was around her waist and there was no escaping that hold. His broad hand came crashing down on the backs of her thighs, spanking each one just below the diaper several times. "That's enough of that, my girl! You settle down right now or I'm going to make today your very first Punishment Day!"

  She instantly stopped kicking, but clapped both hands back over her bottom when he pulled her diaper down her legs. He captured her wrists and pinned them to the small of her back with one of his strong and very capable hands.

  "No, no, no! Don't want it!"

  "What you want and what you need are obviously two very different things right now." He bent to retrieve the thermometer, scraping a little of the excess Vaseline off on the mouth of the jar. As he placed the tip against her little bottom hole, he saw her entire body stiffen as she clenched down to keep it out. The effort was exceedingly ineffective. Small and narrow, he simply slid it past the puckered rim and buried it to the hilt inside her. Pressing with the tip of his finger, he kept it well seated within her despite her instantly wailed objections.

  "Take it out!"

  Daddy shook his head. "Baby girl, this is absolutely the worst behavior I have yet seen from you. I didn't think I'd ever find something to surpass your girls' night out misadventure in Vegas last spring, but this comes close. How fortunate for you that I'm in a much better position right now to paddle your bottom black and blue."

  Thoroughly invaded, all the fight went suddenly right out of her, and Meg dropped limply over his lap. She began to cry.

  Wanting to make good and sure that her temperature was accurately taken, he continued to hold her still and kept the thermometer deep inside her bottom, occasionally tipping his wrist to check the time on his watch, waiting several minutes longer than necessary before he pulled it out.

  He studied the results for a long, long time, then heaved a heavy sigh. "Nope. No fever; so you're not sick. This is all just obstinance and temper tantrum."

  Setting the thermometer on the back of the toilet, he let her go. He half-expected for her to jump up and continue her fit in full force. But Meg only rolled over to sit on his lap, her face red and wet from tears. She wrapped her arms around him, laying her head against his shoulder and sniffled sadly.

  "Talk to me, baby," he coaxed as he held her. "Tell me what's going on in this pretty little head to make you act like this?"

  "It's just bein' a very bad day," she sobbed.

  "How can I help make it better?" When Meg only shrugged and shook her head, Daddy sighed again. "How about you eat your 'nana and your toast, you drink all your milk, and you have five bites of oatmeal. It's a long time until lunch. If you don't eat all your breakfast, you won't get a snack to help tide you over. But, if you take five bites, we'll call it good, all right?"

  "Okay," she agreed, biting her bottom lip to stop its quivering. "Five bites."

  He kissed her forehead, but inside her the 'badness' grew bigger. Instead of getting better, she felt like she'd just gotten away with something awful, and the mad feeling got a little bit worse.

  After breakfast, hoping to cheer her up, Daddy dressed her in one of the fancier dresses. Baby doll white with a pretty pink bow in the back, it barely came down far enough to cover her diapered bottom. She wasn't sure she liked the Mary Jane shoes he buckled onto her feet, as she would much rather have run around barefoot, but the socks had lacy ruffles on them and a tiny pink bow apiece, and she liked them almost enough to want to tolerate the shoes. So she waited until he wasn't looking before kicking them off and hiding them behind the entertainment center. It wasn't that she wanted him to notice, but when he didn't, the mad feeling intensified even more.

  Daddy brought down some paper and crayons, and for a brief time, he left her coloring on the kitchen table while he went to his study to gather together a calculator and what paperwork he needed to pay some bills. By the time he was ready to sit down opposite from her, one glance at her artwork pretty much told him that her mood wasn't on the verge of improvement. The page in front of her was absolutely blank, but there were three tightly wadded up doodles not far away.

  After a moment of unenthusiastic study, Meg crumpled up the blank page as well. One sweep of her arm sent all four balls flying off the table, scattering them in all directions across the kitchen floor. One even bounced as far as the door and tumbled over the threshold into the living room.

  "Now you can pick them right back up again," Daddy said calmly, without even looking up from his checkbook.

  Dutifully, Meg got up from her chair and picked up the three balls in the kitchen. The fourth proved a little more difficult, but she eventually found it hiding under the edge of the sofa. She bent over to pick it up. As she turned to head back to the kitchen, not paying attention to where she was going, she misjudged the distance between herself and the coffee table and cracked her shin on the hard wooden corner.

  "OW! God dammit!" Dropping all four paper wads again, she half-sat and half-fell back on the couch and grabbed her throbbing leg.

  And realized what she'd said about the same instant that she heard Daddy's chair scrape back from the kitchen table. She clapped both hands over her wayward mouth, but it was too late. Daddy filled the doorway, a funny look on his face: dark but concerned, tinged with anger but in an oddly steady and controlled kind of way.

  "What happened?" he asked, his tone painstakingly neutral. One look at his spanking hand told an entirely different story, though. It was flexing, an ominous sight that made her bottom tingle dreadfully.

  Meg slowly took her hands from her mouth. In a very small voice, she said, "I whacked my leg on the coffee table."

  He knelt down in front of her, lightly touching the angry red spo
t where the pointy corner had obviously caught her. She winced when his fingers skimmed the area surrounding it as he looked for signs of swelling, but then relaxed when he bent forward and kissed her knee.

  "I think you'll survive."

  "Maybe I need a band-aid."

  "It's a grievous injury," he said solemnly. "Do you want butterflies or rainbows?"

  She almost smiled, but she knew she was already in trouble for saying such a bad word and right now she was a little too scared for smiling. "Rainbow."

  He stood up and held out his hand, and she limped alongside him to the bathroom. At the sink, he picked her up under her arms and her diaper crinkled softly as he sat her down on the counter. Administering his special Daddy's brand of first aid, he fit the rainbow band-aid over the tender spot and, for good measure, kissed it gently one last time. "This should make it better."

  Though she could still feel it throbbing and she'd likely have a bruise there by sundown, just his saying so almost made it hurt a little bit less. She traced the pattern of brightly colored rainbows with her fingertips. Funny, how Daddy could do that so easily with the outside owie. Why couldn't he do that with the inside one, too?

  Bracing his hands to either side of her hips, he leaned against the counter and looked at her. It was The Look, the stern Daddy expression that preceded scoldings and lectures and, sometimes even worse-Meg swallowed hard, her bottom cringing-spankings. Her stomach did a nervous little flip-flop and she began to wring the hem of her dress between her hands.

  "What am I going to do with you, Meg?" he softly asked. When her eyes dropped to her lap, he caught her chin and forced her to look at him again. "No, baby girl. You don't get to hide from me. I want an answer. I've been trying all morning to break through this temperamental shell you've surrounded yourself with. Nothing I've done is working. And now you've said a bad word. Two of them, in fact, and I don't see this shell disappearing. So tell me, Meg, what am I supposed to do?"