Fear No Evil

Chapter One-2

What happened next shocked me, alerting me to the changing nature of our once predictable relationship. As soon as Lydia hit the last step, Jack had our friend flung beneath his arm, his palm coming down hard on her bottom, giving her a spanking that made me shrink back in amazement.

What the fuck….

“Ooo, you miserable bastard!” Lydia yelled. She made every effort to wiggle from his grasp. I knew her fight was useless. When Jack was in a snit, no one got in his way, no one changed his plans, and for all her spit and fire, Lydia was going no where until Jack finally decided to stop. When he did, he set her back down, both of them huffing and puffing and out of breath.

“What the hell was that?” I asked, still trying to pick up my dropped jaw from the boardwalk.

“Exactly what she deserved,” Jack glowered.

A long prickly silence followed. What might have initially been a good-natured clash between the two—not anything particularly unusual—still gave off a testy vibe.

“So, that’s all the explanation I’m going to get?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s all you’re going to get,” Lydia said, and she sassily pushed right past me.

“Now wait! You two don’t keep secrets from me,” I declared.

Lydia turned abruptly, hands on hips. Her fleshy compact body oozed with a temperamental energy I’d learned not to mess with. I knew already that it wasn’t going to be placated that day. The two were up to something and I wanted to know what it was.

She had a scowl on her face that arrested our attention, then suddenly the scowl broke into a beaming grin. “You know, Jack, I think since the birthday girl is being so nosy, she should get that birthday spanking she’s owed. I mean, I got mine, and you sure as hell aren’t gonna take a swat. Maybe she should take your eighteen too. What do you think?”

“No, no no, wait!” I backed away. But it was too late. Jack already had me by the arm. My heart was thumping so fast that I could hardly catch a breath.

“Why that’s the best idea you’ve had since we stole Cokes from the Dairy Mart when we were eight,” Jack evilly replied. His twisted grin, his flashing eyes; I was in for it.

A couple quick maneuvers and he had me over his shoulder, carrying me into the boathouse, while I kicked and wailed and beat his back with my fists.

“Put me down!” I shouted.

Next thing I knew I was on my feet again, flung over the side of the old workbench, my butt bared.

“…Five…six…seven…eight,” Lydia was rattling off the number of years with a vengeance, striking me with a two inch wooden slat she’d picked up off the floor.

I struggled angrily.

“It’s just a birthday spanking, Priss. We didn’t want you to feel left out. She’d paused long enough to allow us both to catch our breath, and for just a few seconds caressed my stinging ass with the palm of her hand. Then nine… ten… eleven…twelve, all the way to eighteen. By the time she finished, I was panting hard and worried about the dreadful build up of feral energy that suddenly turned the vicious spanking into something quite different.

When Jack moved in and took her place, I could feel his masculine aura swoop around me in a most uncomfortable way.

“Haven’t I had enough?” I whined as my blushing face gazed into his. With Jack in command, the mood in the boathouse shifted, becoming more playful, no longer laced with the edgy anger that fueled Lydia’s attack. His bare hand was on my bare behind, squeezing the cheeks with a definite purpose in mind, although I had no idea what it was. Then, suddenly, Smack! His hand came down firmly on my warmed behind. Smack, again. I felt it all the way through my body, to toes and fingers and my jittery belly. Smack for a third time, I was dancing on my toes. But not because it hurt that badly. After every firm crack of his palm on my squirming bottom, he rubbed the sting away, then he smacked my ass again. By the time he got to ten, my mind was off somewhere beyond the present, my body flying through feelings it had never had, queasy, s****l and wonderful feelings spiked with a drunken exhilaration that would scare me just as soon as the eighteenth smack landed on my well-worked derriere.

“What a pretty color!” Jack exclaimed. He stood back admiring the sight, and I pretty much let him, until Lydia’s blunt observations suddenly brought me back to reality.

“Just think, Jack, we could have been giving the little brat spankings like this all along. Might have made this little b***h behave.”

I jumped upright and turned around, frantically trying to pull my shorts back over my sore behind.

“What do you mean behave?” I blurted out, fuming like a petulant child. “Like you two have ever behaved yourselves!”

Jack started laughing, then a sly Lydia joined him and I couldn’t help myself. Confused, furious and strangely elated, I dove into Jack’s chest pounding it hard. Then we had a threesome hug so filled with melancholy and hungering want, and a fear of the unknown future that it had us furtively wiping our eyes, clinging to one another, afraid to let go. It wasn’t uncommon that our threesome would descend into fits of laughter, or flaming rage. When we were younger we had no clue what these emotional events were about. At eighteen we were old enough to realize that just living made us touchy and irritable and stressed out, that we mourned our fatherless world even though none of us had any idea what it would have been like to have normal families and normal lives. Did anyone live normally anymore?

Our eighteenth birthday celebration began with a bang, not unlike celebrations in our past when our fired-up energies would violently clash. But unlike other birthdays, this one was set against a new backdrop, and a new reality that we all needed to accept. We hated the idea that the peaceable kingdom of our lives was doomed to fall away, but it would…in fact, it already had. Jack had signed on to the ‘four year road to hell’. So had Lydia, we’d just learned—which had been Jack’s justification for the punishing spanking he claimed he owed her. She promised him she wouldn’t sign up, just as I had promised. But Lydia has never been particularly good at keeping promises, and this one in particular was especially impossible.

For the next two years my two best friends would take a crash course at the university, guaranteed to be a peaceful, uninterrupted process. Then for the next four years they would be at the mercy of the country’s changing needs, enrolled in a four year government service program established fifteen years before to ensure that the military had enough bodies for the vast role it played in snubbing out dictators, controlling violent crowds and responding to the erratic tide of natural catastrophes. Most young people of eighteen were coerced into joining, rather than be subject to an erratically held draft that shipped everyone directly into the Army.

The alternate program, dubbed the ‘Four Year Road to Success’—which really lasted six years, would guarantee its participants a full university degree at the finish, and no more hassles, no more threat of a draft. That’s if the government didn’t change the rules.

Some were lucky enough to spend most of their time in school finishing their college work—that was what the propaganda lead you to believe. But those numbers turned out to be very few. Most spent plenty of time answering the ‘call to service’ on the mean streets of foreign countries, on battlefields and in threadbare cities along turbulent coastlines. The more realistic nickname, ‘Road to Hell’ quickly caught on once the first recruits completed their obligation and lived to tell their tales.

I’m sure that I would have signed up too, no matter what Jack had to say about it, but a bout of scarlet fever when I was a child had weakened my immune system, at least according to the standard tests, and I was permanently exempt from government service. ‘Lucky you’, I was told. I secretly wondered what I was missing. The ‘four year road to hell’ was the way life worked in the second quarter of the 21st century. I was destined to be left behind, the girl who kept the home fires burning…just like the women in WWII stayed behind while their fathers, husbands and brothers went to fight. What you did or didn’t do in time of war defined a life. That would be no different now. No matter how close I was to my two best friends, I would never share the imperatives they lived by, the rules that governed their waking moments, the thoughts and feelings that would sneak into their consciousness as they lay in a damp barracks, or slept in jungle trees or walked the streets of faraway cities. I knew the first two years would fly swiftly by and our days of frolicking joyously on our beach were numbered. Our cozy threesome couldn’t help but be jerked asunder and that scared me.

It scared us all, as we persistently hugged each other while trying to hide our tears, and this particular hug went on far longer than our normal hugs, until Lydia couldn’t take it anymore.

“I’m hungry,” she suddenly declared on pulling from our grasp, “I want cake and I want it now.”

“But we haven’t roasted the hot-dogs!” I protested.

Like women usually do, we scurried around the boathouse getting the food ready, while Jack sat back and watched us work, drinking a beer. This was the only significant change in our routine from years past. Beer was still a banned commodity for young people our age. But, my dad, being a bit of drunk, thought that the age restriction was pretty stupid. He suddenly showed up out of the blue with a case of beer to celebrate our birthday. I think even he understood its significance. “Don’t go out on the road,” he’d warned me, with stern and fatherly knit brows. ‘And don’t tell your mother.’

It’s okay, dad, we’re not driving and Lavinia will never know.

Sometimes when he smiled warmly and acted so fatherly, I could almost imagine him being just a normal dad.

***

We reclined on the mats inside the boathouse, looking out at the water through the big window, watching the red sun set and the sky grow dark and dense around it. For a time, the intense glow of the receding orb cast a pink light over our faces, making the mood sweet and tender and verbotenly erotic. We’d grilled hotdogs and roasted marshmallows and just polished off half of the enormous cake Lavinia made for us. For a long time we did nothing but complain that we’d eaten too much cake, too much of Lavinia’s sinful butter cream frosting.

We hadn’t planned on anything s****l, we never had and ever would as far as I knew. I sometimes thought erotic thoughts about them both, but they were firmly squelched behind layers upon layers of behaviors that defined the way we’d lived as best friends for eighteen years. You just don’t cross those lines. These were friends, not lovers. Friends are forever, lovers come and go. I don’t know where those mantras came from, but they’d repeated in my mind long enough for them to become firmly fixed protocols I’d never veer from.

The spanking incidents earlier in the evening were forgotten, at least I’d shipped them off to some Never-never-land in my psyche, their daunting effect ignored. The fiery heat of the spanking, the viciousness of Lydia’s brutal attack and Jack’s warm, squeezing palm on my ass had to be forgotten.

That was why I came up almost screaming when a playful Lydia pulled in behind me. I had been staring absently at the pink glowing room, tuned in to the shore birds cawing noises, the water splashing underneath the boathouse and how the light above was transforming minute by minute, from pastel to a heathen shade of red. Suddenly, my hands were drawn back, and when I bolted upright, Lydia had them pinned at my waist

For all my protest, she was unusually tender, but firmly fixed, and wouldn’t stop her tight hold until I let go my struggle.