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Chapter Two The History of Hugo Sands Part One Never Trust A Hippie

After graduating Harvard in the late 70’s with a degree in art history, Hugo Sands found employment as a cataloguing assistant at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

At 23, the future esoteric publisher was already a man of the world, with several summers of European travel and a decade of sexual experience behind him. Longer if you counted that he had been playing “doctor” and “house” with little girls since kindergarten.

And now that he carried the additional éclat of a Harvard degree, his school ring was proving more potent than the signet of Castle Roissy in compelling young women to shed their outer garments and submit to his whims.

“It works with everyone but that one, the only one I want,” Hugo complained to his companion, Van Milburn, of a tall, slim, young redhead sitting on a ledge by herself across the museum garden, with a book of Diane Arbus photos.

“Garda’s not the type to be impressed by Ivy League degrees,” Van informed Hugo on good authority, for the older man was a designer in the catalog department where Garda Hudson worked as a copy editor and knew her fairly well.

Van was 33, with refined features; short cropped, salt and pepper hair and a trimmed beard in the manner of a Greek coin. He and Hugo had become great friends due to their mutual interest in art history, but Van was just as happy to discuss the virtues of Garda, of whom he was also extremely fond.

“Do you know what makes her tick, Van?”

“I know that beneath that gauzy shift lurks a hardcore punk who spent the summer of ‘76 in London and owns a latex corset.”

“That is so arousing to me!”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Would you? I’d love to get involved with a girl who isn’t P.C.,” sighed Hugo.

“Why don’t you ask her out?”

“I have done. She keeps saying no.”

“Maybe it’s the ponytail,” said Van, biting into a baguette sandwich.

“Garda dislikes long hair on men?” Hugo asked in surprise. His straight, sandy blond hair was the proper length for the era, complimentary to his features and had contributed to his general appeal for young women since high school.

“Never trust a hippie is one of her favorite expressions,” Van helpfully revealed, amused to observe Hugo clutching his hair in a paranoid fashion.

“So, she’s anti-love and peace?”

“She’s a punk. Of course she’s anti-love.”

“Anti-drug?”

“No, actually. Now that you mention it, she was asking me where she could get some weed just today.”

“Oh really? What did you say?”

“I said I’d find out.”

“Are you going to?”

“I can’t just now. My guy’s out of town.”

“Tell her I can help her. At once!”

Around three that afternoon, when Hugo was alone in one of the archive rooms checking catalog annotations against hand written item descriptions of 18th century cameos, Garda entered the cool, quiet area on her dainty espadrilles with the pretty ribbon ties around each slim ankle. She brought the smell of frangipani with her and her creamy skin appeared to advantage under the milky globe lights.

“Hi,” she said uncomfortably and quickly, as one with business to conduct. “Van said I could see you about something.”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

"So, when?” Garda seemed perfectly desperate.

“Uh, whenever you like,” Hugo replied agreeably, then drew a lovely cocoa and cream broach from the drawer and showed it to her. “Isn’t this one pretty?”

“Beautiful,” Garda appreciated the cameo in moderation, then returned to the more important subject with impatience. “You mean, tonight might be a possibility?”

“Definitely. You can count on it.”

“Great! So, should I come to you?”

“Please!” Hugo couldn’t help but laugh.

“What? Are you teasing me? Is this for real?”

“Of course I’m not teasing you. Look, here’s my address,” Hugo wrote it on a tiny pad in his neat, architectural hand. “It’s right up the block from the Charles Street Steak House.”

“You’re kidding! I live on Beacon Hill too!”

“Where?”

“Myrtle Street. Two blocks up and one over from you.”

“That is convenient. Would you prefer I come to you?”

“No, that’s okay. What time?”

“Seven?” Hugo named the earliest time that would seem reasonable.

“That would be perfect. If I had to face another weekend in Boston straight I would have gone mad.”

Hugo smiled as she exited, murmuring to himself, “Little drug slut.” Then for luck he kissed the 18th century beauty on the broach before putting it back in its velvet slot. Like Casanova, he believed Venus to be his ruling planet and saw his life stretch before him as a series of romantic adventures with only the most interesting of women. This Garda Hudson counted. She was his first real challenge, who stood proof against all his usual charms and required extraordinary magicks to captivate.

Let the end justify the means, Hugo decided, stopping in at the barbershop on the way home.

Garda climbed the staircase to Hugo’s second floor flat above the Italian grocery promptly at seven. He had seen her from his window and opened the door.

“My god, you cut your hair?” she exclaimed, as he ushered her into the small parlor whose dominant feature was an old, brick fireplace, with logs in readiness, should the perfectly mild October evening turn chilly. “How did you find this place? This building looks two hundred years old. And you have kittens!” Garda fell to her knees before the basket beside the hearth.

“I adopted them last week,” Hugo said, handing her an exceedingly thick joint and lighting it for her.

“Kittens,” she murmured, tentatively picking up the grey one, then the black one. “You have this whole place to yourself?” she asked, touring the tiny apartment with the joint in one hand and the grey cat in other.

“You don’t live alone?” he asked.

“Yes, but I can barely afford it and I’m sure my place is cheaper than this one.”

“I have a second job translating French for an art journal,” he revealed.

“Why did you cut your hair?”

“Do you like it better now?”

“Is that why you cut it?”

“I’ll bet you haven’t eaten yet.”

“Don’t evade the question.”

“I’ll make some coffee,” Hugo decided. Garda followed him into the tiny brick walled kitchen to watch him grind some beans with a hand grinder.

“Hugo, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about why I came over,” she said firmly.

“Oh, I know why you came over,” he rejoined.

“What I mean is, I know you’re interested in me. But, haircut not withstanding, I must inform you that my affections are otherwise engaged.”

“I see,” Hugo murmured, unable to conceal his disappointment. “A long standing relationship?”

“Not a relationship as yet, but it might develop into one, in time.”

“Oh!” Hugo brightened. “Anyone I know?”

“Yes, it is someone you know,” Garda revealed, coloring.

Hugo mentally reviewed the rest of the museum staff with whom she might have come into contact and rapidly fallen in love, for she had only been in her position a few weeks herself when he had been hired. “Can’t think of anyone who seems like a match off hand,” he speculated, spooning coffee into his percolator. “Milk and sugar?”

“Uh huh.”

Hugo cut some bread, cheese and fruit and served it with the coffee in the parlor. While she cuddled the kittens and nibbled at the food he studied her after work look, not sure if he liked or hated it. She’d changed from her delicately printed shift into a pair of black pegged jeans, shiny black ankle collared work shoes, a plain white cotton tee (beneath which her small, perky bosom appeared unfettered) and a green and blue plaid flannel shirt knotted around her slender waist. Her straight, shoulder length hair had been drawn back in a ponytail, her earrings were two dots of black onyx and her mouth was an exciting dark, red slash.

“I just can’t think of anyone worthy of your notice,” Hugo finally concluded.

“It’s Van,” she revealed.

“Van? Are you serious?”

“Why? He’s a darling man!”

“Garda, you do know that Van’s gay?”

“What?”

“You didn’t know, did you?”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive.”

“How can you be so sure of a thing like that? Did he tell you that?”

“No, not exactly. But it’s true.”

“Oh, I don’t believe you. You’re just saying that because you want me for yourself.”

“If you don’t believe me, ask him yourself.”

Garda sat silently smoking, stroking the kittens and trying not to sob out loud. Finally she sprung up. “So, can I buy something now?”

“Here,” Hugo handed her a small wrapped parcel.

“How much is it?”

“I don’t know. Just take it.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing. It’s a present.”

Garda unwrapped what looked to be at least a quarter ounce of something green, heavily resinous and very pretty. “I can’t take this from you.”

“Not even to assuage your disappointment?”

“First of all, I’m not convinced that you’re right, so I’m not entirely disappointed as yet. Secondly, if I take all this weed I’ll owe you.”

“So owe me.”

“Damn it, why won’t you let me pay you for this?”

“Just take it as a present.”

“You’re not giving me all your weed, are you?”

“No.”

“Why do I think you’re lying?”

“Hey, Garda, on a different subject, was that you I saw in the audience of A Man With A Maid last week?”

Garda’s color deepened, which more than cancelled out the work boots in restoring her delicate femininity. “You mean that movie in Back Bay?”

“Yes. I thought I saw you in the audience.”

Garda reentered the kitchen, poured herself a second cup of coffee and looked in the refrigerator for milk. “Hugo, what’s this?” She came back with a tiny glassine envelope containing a small square of paper on which was imprinted a pink dot.

“That’s the stuff that dreams are made of,” he replied.

“Acid?”

“You bet.”

“Good?”

“I don’t know. Someone said you could regress to childhood on it. Someone else said past lives. I’m sure it’s speedy as hell.”

“So, you just have the one hit, huh?”

“You can have it if you want.”

“Seriously?”

“If I can be with you when you do it.”

“Oh, right! You just want to be with me when at I’m at my most trusting and vulnerable so you can fuck me with the minimum of resistance, if any!”

“No, I want to be with you when you regress to childhood, so I can spank you.”

“Look, I have to go now. I have to tie myself in knots over what you told me about Van,” Garda protested.

“Can I walk you home?”

“I suppose that would be wise,” she sighed.

Hugo and Garda climbed slowly up narrow, cobbled Myrtle Street, past a tiny playground, a small grocery, a laundromat and many close set thin, brick walk-ups.

“You never answered my question about whether you were at A Man With A Maid,” Hugo asked, as she preceded him up the three, tall, narrow flights of stairs to her top floor flat. From this angle he could appreciate the girlish contours of her bottom and thighs as never before. The snug jeans molded to her lithe form delightfully.

Garda let him into her obsessively neat and tiny one bedroom apartment. Her own two Siamese cats came in off the roof through the bedroom window and rushed into the parlor to greet her. She showed him around in a minute, ending with the rooftop access, from which one could not only see a sliver of the Charles, but also the landmark flashing neon Citgo sign.

“You shouldn’t leave your windows open like that. Someone will climb in and rob you at best and possibly do more,” he scolded.

“Maybe you should -- spank me the next time I do it,” she ventured to suggest. Hugo’s heart jumped in his chest, for had she not just said, “...you should spank me...” which meant that she wanted a spanking and then added the tantalizing “...next time” which meant that she planned to see him again and perhaps often?

“You can count on it,” he agreed at once, but smiled pleasantly with it, so as not to appear too anxious.

“People talk about spanking me, but no one ever does it,” she suddenly complained, sitting at her industrial wooden spool with the red tablecloth thrown over it to roll a joint out of the bag he had given her.

“Really? Who talks about it?”

“The person I saw the movie with.”

“I wish I’d been the one to escort you home after that flick!” Hugo said.

“So, what are you doing this weekend?” she asked him at length, for her cats were all over him and the bonding process begun.

“I’m at your disposal if you’re feeling adventurous about the windowpane,” Hugo said, rising to his reedy 6’2” stature and gently setting down both cats. They solemnly exchanged phone numbers.

“You do look handsome with your hair short,” she said, walking him to the door.

Hugo, having made such tremendous strides, only ventured to press her hand upon parting. The purchase of the acid had been a last minute impulse item, very much in the nature of Casanova ordering vast quantities of oysters and champagne in order to reduce a beauty to a state of reckless, sensual abandon. He had studied the master well enough to know that the way to a woman’s heart and soul was through all of her senses.

Hugo walked home in the chilly dusk on puffs of light and air. He had met an enchanting, abrasive girl who might truly be a fetishist, one whom he would not have to sneak the spanking by, but who might well regard it as the sacred aphrodisiac which he had always believed it to be. Congratulating himself for holding himself in check and not jumping her in either apartment, he stopped in at a pub and ordered a beer. Sitting at the bar, the friendly baseball game in progress above, the startling image of himself as clean cut in the mirror opposite and the fantasy of the weekend stretching before him, Hugo could not remember ever feeling more delight in being alive.

It was with additional titillation that Hugo pondered, a few moments later, his best opportunity of making a girl cry real tears from a spanking, without being a bully or cruel. On acid people cried, even when you weren’t spanking them. Like alcohol, it freed the emotions, but without making the room spin around. This girl was either marginally or deeply perverse. She owned a latex corset. She would certainly let him spank her. And while she was getting her spanking, the psychotropic would translate the entire experience into epic proportions, and she would most likely cry. After that, she would be his, especially if he completed the softening up process with a home cooked dinner. Hugo put down his empty stein and set off for the market.

He predicted she’d phone him no later than ten the following morning; she called at exactly ten am. He invited her over for coffee; she was at his door by the time it was ready. Today she wore her hair down, with a white tee shirt, pegged blue jeans and black, stack-heeled ankle boots that by Hugo’s lights made up for a multitude of sins.

“Those shoes are much more provocative than the ones you had on yesterday,” Hugo observed, handing her coffee with the windowpane on the saucer to one side.

“Well, you did cut your hair, so I figured I should make some concessions,” Garda smiled at him.

“Thank you.”

“Why don’t we cut this in half and both do it?” Garda suggested.

Hugo briefly considered the possible paranoia involved and shook his head, protesting, “One of us should be a grown up.”

“And that would be you?”

“Yes,” he replied cheerfully.

“What are you afraid of Hugo? The thought of not being in complete control on our first date?”

“Since you said first date, I’m prepared to throw caution the winds,” Hugo candidly admitted, cutting the paper in half and popping one half in his mouth.

“You’re doing the acid with me after all?” she cried.

“How could I not, you threw down the gauntlet, didn’t you?”

He took her coffee cup away to refill it. When he came back they finished their coffee, each playing with one of the kittens. Then Garda burst into giggles.

“What?” asked Hugo, smiling. “Don’t tell me you’re feeling something already?”

“Look, don’t get mad.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“I just kind of turned your experiment around.”

“What experiment?”

“The one where you planned to use powerful hallucinogens to break me down sexually.”

“Come on, Garda, give me a break.”

“You didn’t plan to do that?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Anyway, I decided not to take the acid.”

“Oh really?” Hugo felt his face growing warm.

“Yes. And I dissolved the other half of the paper in your coffee that you just drank. So you actually took the full hit.”

“Damn you,” Hugo said with admiration. “Are you serious?”

“Isn’t it delicious?” Garda actually crowed with laughter.

“You are naughty!” Hugo accused, torn between amusement and annoyance. “Aren’t you?” Suddenly Garda stopped giggling. “In fact,” Hugo said, “you deserve to be spanked!” He took away her kitten, placed it on the table beside the other one, who had buried his face in the cow creamer and reached for her wrist.

“What are you doing?”

“Something. While I still can!” Hugo said, pulling her across his lap with determination. “You said no one ever followed through before. Well, someone is about to.” He then brought his palm down on her slim, curvy backside a dozen times, spanking her on one cheek, then the other, evenly, like someone who had done this, not once, but many times before. “I’m sure you think you’re very clever!” he accused, beginning the second dozen with renewed vigor. “But you’re really very irritating!” Smack! Smack! Smack! His palm impacted against her taut, denim-clad bottom with a satisfying resonance. She gasped, panted and whimpered in response but did not dare to protest. “Of course I’ve longed to turn you over my knee, but I never dreamed you’d give me a reason to do so. I guess I should say thanks!” He finished with a final ringing dozen swats before letting her go. She staggered to her feet and started to stumble away but he pulled her back down to sit on his lap and taking her in his arms properly, kissed her wide, red mouth for the first time.

He was surprised to feel her cling to him so fiercely afterwards. Then, when she sprung off his lap an instant later, and refused to let him see her face, her obvious embarrassment both touched and aroused him. He was certain he could have her right then, but his muse told him to let the day unfold.

A few minutes later, as Hugo consulted the telephone weather report to determine how they were to spend the day, Garda had emerged from her romantic stupor and was amusing herself flipping through his record collection.

“King Crimson, Traffic, Pink Floyd, Moody Blues --Hugo, don’t you have anything that isn’t completely extinct?” she complained, lighting a cigarette as she recoiled at Hugo’s similarly Byzantine jazz-fusion collection.

“Shall we drive out to the country?” he asked her, determining that the day would be fair and fine.

“Oh, come on Hugo, do we have to behave like Druids just because you dropped acid? I want to go see that double feature at the Nu-Art this afternoon.”

“You don’t think we’ll have time to drive out to the country first for a few hours?”

“Oh forget that. It’s so clichéd. Since I’ve got you though, maybe you can do me a favor. There’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a few weeks now, but I’ve needed an escort.”

A few minutes later they had set off across the Common on the way to the Combat Zone, that seedy, red light district of downtown Boston, where adult bookstores, massage parlors and strip clubs nestled between discount sock stores, wig emporiums, dangerous Chinese restaurants and pawnshops out of the Twilight Zone.

Hugo couldn’t understand why they were spending a glorious autumn day in one of the worst parts of the city so Garda could experience the depressing reality of late 70’s pornography, but since she’d let him spank her and kiss her so prettily, he was ready to oblige her.

“You’re not going to like it, you know,” he said as they entered the shop twelve minutes later. He had been there before and went straight to the fetish section. Garda strode around the shop recklessly, then she came back to him at the rack of spanking magazines. Hugo showed her Crack and Sting. She drew back in repulsion. “These aren’t great, but they’re of some interest,” he told her, handing two issues of the English magazine Janus to the clerk to ring up. What he really wanted to buy was an anal plug to insert in her bottom. “Want anything else while we’re here? They have quite a nice selection of Doc Johnson vibrators.”

Garda wandered over to the wall full of dildos and vibrators. Hugo wished he knew whether she was truly intrigued or just fascinated by the freakishness of the display. He stood beside her.

“What do you know about vibrators?”

“Plenty.” Hugo told her, “My best friend in college was a lesbian.”

“Meaning?”

“She forced me to read a book about female self pleasuring to prove to me how useless men are. I learned a lot.”

“Enough to be useful?” Garda smiled at him.

“You’ll see.”

Garda colored and walked away. Hugo grabbed a few shrink-wrapped objects off the pegs on the wall and took them to the counter to be rung up with the magazines.

Now Garda wandered deep into the hardcore aisles, where only random males lurked, their eyes widening as she came into view. Hugo joined her and she whispered, “Is sex really that ugly?” directing his gaze to a magazine called Girls Who Eat Cum Vol. 6.

“Haven’t you ever seen hardcore before?”

“No.”

“Someday I’d like to put out my own magazine,” Hugo said as they walked away from the shop. “But it would be nothing like these,” he shook the bag containing the Janus magazines and the sex toys.

“What would it be like?”

“Oh, beautiful, tasteful and definitely something a woman would enjoy.”

“Think you know what women enjoy?”

“Some women,” he responded simply, for it was best to keep it simple when his brain had just clicked into Technicolor and Dolby sound. “But didn’t I tell you this was no place to go on a beautiful day?”

“What’s the matter? Can’t you take it?” she goaded him.

“Sure I can. I’d just rather not,” Hugo replied.

On the way to the movies they stopped back at Hugo’s apartment to check on the kittens, drop off the toys and smoke a joint. Hugo noticed Garda watching him closely and he laughed at her.

“What?” she demanded.

“I’m still amazed you played that trick on me. Why are you so suspicious of me?”

“I’m not. It’s just that every Ivy League guy I’ve ever met has been a total dick brain to me sexually. And Harvard men are the absolute worst.”

“The worst in what respect?”

“It strikes me you may be the exception,” she suddenly said, surprising him by placing a small kiss on his cheek.

“Of course I am!” Hugo assured her, returning her favor by kissing her hand.

“In fact, you’re showing remarkable restraint,” Garda complimented him, for she had noticed the effect she was having upon him.

“Maybe it will be more exciting for not rushing things,” he suggested as they strolled through Back Bay a few minutes later. Determining they had almost an hour before the show, they stopped at a cafe for sandwiches and hot chocolate. Then they looked in the windows of antique shops discussing which objects they admired.

“I want to buy you something,” he said.

“Hugo, where are you getting all this money?”

“All what money?”

“First you gave me all that expensive weed. Then you bought all those things at the sex shop. Then lunch. Now you’re talking about presents.”

“Hasn’t anyone ever spoiled you before?”

“No,” she said bluntly.

“Then I’ll be remembered as the first who did.”

Garda protested that there was no time to choose anything, but Hugo persisted and they quickly selected a gold tipped, white enamel, art deco cigarette holder for ten dollars.

And yet, five minutes later, Garda led Hugo remorselessly into the double feature of Todd Browning’s Freaks and David Lynch’s Eraserhead, not to emerge into the fresh air again until over three hours of desolation and degradation had marched before their eyes.

“Are you trying to kill me?” Hugo demanded, after they escaped into the late afternoon. “Or just drive me mad?”

Garda could not help laughing gleefully, “Didn’t you enjoy that?”

“Sure, the parts where I was planning what I’m going to do you later.”

Garda tried to put off going back to his apartment for as long as possible. She persuaded him to walk through the public garden and into the Mother Goose graveyard, so they could contemplate the old stone markers, with their irregular spelling and droll punctuation. The leaves were on the ground and the clear, crisp, blue day was waning as picturesquely as it had begun.

There being virtually no one else inspecting the tiny graves in the cemetery, Hugo boldly seized Garda by the arm, pulled her over to a charmingly positioned low, stone bench and sitting upon it, drew her down across his lap. “This is for drugging, mentally torturing me and attempting to deprive me of my reason,” he told her, giving her a second spanking on her jeans, twice as hard and long as the first. In fact, only the entrance of several tourists with cameras into the graveyard finally stayed his hand. “That’s just a prelude to what’s coming when I get you home, young lady!” he promised her, putting her off his lap. She did nothing but blush furiously.

They continued their walk home and he received no reproaches for spanking her in public. He himself was amazed he’d been able to pull it off, considering that the entire time he was spanking her he felt as though they were hurtling through space together on a diamond bullet. Somehow the tourists peripherally entering the park had brought him back to reality and he had shown enough restraint to abort the spanking and transport his lady beyond the reach of prying eyes.

Although outwardly cool and collected, Hugo’s brain was none the less overflowing with romantic sentiment for this sylph who had twice let him spank her without question, and indeed seemed to regard such treatment with awe rather than resentment.

“You know what would make me really happy, Hugo?” Garda asked as they climbed his stairs to his flat.

“What?”

“If we could go to see The Cramps and The Damned tonight. They’re playing in Cambridge together.”

“Okay, I’ll make a deal with you,” said Hugo, knowing she couldn’t possibly do his brain a worse turn than she’d already done with the David Lynch movie, “I’ll go with you to see The Cramps if I can see you in your latex corset before the show.”

“All right,” she agreed. ”I’ll go on to my place right now, feed my cats and put it on. You come by in a half hour, okay?”

“Okay, but don’t forget this,” he handed her the bag of toys and magazines they’d bought earlier that day. She grabbed it, kissed him quickly and ran off down the stairs.

“So far, so good,” Hugo thought, trying not to pay attention as the kittens strobed before his eyes around their water dish, metamorphosizing into Tinkerbells. “Anyway, it’s bound to start wearing off soon.”

When he got to Garda’s house she had uncorked a bottle of white wine. She was wearing the black latex corset, which had a row of thin, buckling straps up the front. Over the corset she had on blue jeans and a different pair of black boots, with higher but thicker heels. Obviously this was her club outfit from London. Her red hair was loose around her shoulders, a black, thin, studded leather collar ringed her slim white throat and her small, round, high bosom was displayed to maximum advantage by the skintight foundation.

“That suits you, Garda,” Hugo complimented her casually, squeezing her waist as he lightly kissed her lips.

“The sun is going down. Want to watch it from the roof?” she asked. They took the bottle and some cigarettes. The two beige and brown cats joined them and began to jump to the neighboring roof top as the eighty year old buildings were extremely narrow and close together on that part of the hill. Garda put her Sex Pistols album on so Hugo could learn the error of his musical taste. It had the effect of making him want to fuck her immediately and hard. The Cramps album was even more sexually incendiary and before it was half over Hugo had dragged her back through the window, into her tiny bedroom, onto her tiny bed and began to pull her shoes and jeans off.

“Hugo, can I tell you something?” she asked, when he held her pretty foot in his hand.

“Tell me anything,” he encouraged her, admiring her long, slim legs for the first time, then rolling her over on her tummy to behold the bare curves of her bottom revealed by the hip length corset. Besides this she wore only a g-string.

“How adorable you are,” he rolled her back over. “But what did you want to tell me?”

Garda sat up against the windowsill and lit another cigarette. “This isn’t easy for me to talk about,” she explained. “But I’ll start by saying that you’re the first boy who’s ever come close to doing something I like. I mean spontaneously.”

“Really? I would have thought between Berkeley and London you’d have met your share of deviants.”

“I won’t say I haven’t made a few converts,” she smiled, then added fiercely, “but it’s not the same!”

“I see your point. Of course I’ve always spanked my girl friends, but you’re the first who ever seemed to want me to do it before I did it.”

“I’ve always been this way.”

“Me too.”

“Do you know what I would really like?”

“Tell me.”

“To be treated harshly,” she replied candidly, going pink with embarrassment.

“That would no more than you deserve,” Hugo said, altering his tone to suit her endearing request. “After what you put me through today, a lesson in basic civility is in order for you, young lady.” In so saying, Hugo seized her by her bare forearm and positioning himself on the edge of the bed, drew her face down across his lap. "Although it’s not just today you should be punished for,” said Hugo, spanking her slim, exposed cheeks sharply as he scolded her. “You wouldn’t have even gone out with me if I hadn’t scored for you. Isn’t that so?” Smack! smack! smack!

“Ow!” she cried, putting one graceful hand back to shield her pinkened bottom. “That really hurts!”

Hugo paused to rub her satiny cheeks in light, hypnotic circles, wondering whether this was her first real bare bottom spanking. “Mmmmm,” she said, beginning to grind on his lap, then suddenly thinking better of it, modestly closing her thighs.

“I like them better open,” Hugo told her, slapping her inner thighs sharply until she spread them again. He also pulled off the g-string and tossed it aside. “And I would have preferred you in actual panties. Please remember that.”

Continuing to spank her firmly, Hugo looked across the tiny room and saw the bag from the sex shop on a small chest of drawers to the side of the bed. He reached out, grabbed it and dumped its contents on the bed beside him.

“So freak shows amuse you?” Hugo spanked her from pink to magenta over several minutes.

“No, not really,” she finally cried, gasping for breath.

“You seem to prefer them to peak foliage.”

“Just to push your buttons, since you’re such an aesthete,” she returned, in spite of her vulnerable position.

“Yes, well, now I get to push your buttons,” he assured her, ending with a volley of six hard swats.

“Ow! What are you going to do now?” she craned her neck around to look at him and then at the bag from the sex shop he had grabbed.

“Embarrass you,” he said, freeing a standard, 6” vibrator from its shrink-wrap and showing it to Garda. “By putting this in you while you’re over my knee and spanking you until you come.”

“No, that would be too humiliating!” she protested without attempting to escape.

“No, this will be the humiliating part,” Hugo cheerfully explained, showing her the second toy he had grabbed, a 4” anal plug. “As you can see, it’s designed for insertion in the rear.”

“No!” Now she tired to wriggle off his lap, but he held her fast. “That’s too much!”

“Just enough for the likes of you, my dear,” Hugo replied, resuming spanking her.

“Did I not tell you to keep your legs spread?” he warned her, separating her thighs. “I want to see you.” He pressed her pink cheeks open with his hands and spanked her in between them.

“Oh god!” she cried, squirming as he firmly tapped his palm against her two most private parts. “It’s too much!”

“You protest, but you’re wet, you naughty girl.”

“Hugo?” she twisted the right way around on his lap and sat up, “I’ll die if you do all that to me at once! Couldn’t you just take me? Now?”

Hugo tightened his arms around her, kissed her, nibbled her ears, bit her shoulders and nuzzled her throat, all the while lightly squeezing her pert bosom through the corset. He felt her tension ebb away quickly as his hand closed upon her dewy Venus mound and a finger slipped into her glove tight vagina.

“I need to teach you about foreplay,” he murmured against her ear.

“Hugo?” she suddenly looked at him. “Are you not potent?”

“Silly,” he said, placing her hand against the rampant bar of iron in his jeans and causing it to theatrically throb as she touched it. “Don’t worry, he’s waiting for you. But tell me, when was the last time you indulged in anything like serious petting, junior high?”

“You’re right, Hugo,” she smiled ruefully. “You seem to know all my secrets.” Garda stroked Hugo’s erection through his jeans then tried to unzip them. “Don’t you think it’s very submissive for a girl to give a man head?” she asked. He captured her hands in his own and kissed them.

“Yes, very. But that’s not what we’re doing right now,” he told her firmly, pulling his belt from the loops of his jeans. “Because I have a habit that I doubt I will ever give up.” He placed her two pillows in the center of her single bed and summarily bent her over them thus elevating her bottom. Then he went in front of her and bound her wrists by looping and buckling the belt around them and then securing it to the shiny black wrought iron rail at the foot of her bed. “When I have to do with a girl I really like, it’s a compulsion with me to get her off first.”

Once Hugo had Garda face down on her little bed, over her little pillows, all the resistance left her and she surrendered herself to his whims.

The potent psychedelics still at work, Hugo was touched beyond expression at her complete and charming passivity. “She must really trust me,” he thought, but at least had the presence of mind not to sob aloud at the gift of her delicate pre-Raphaelite beauty spread out before him like a sacrifice. Coming to, he remembered that he was not there to stroke her bottom as though it were a kitten’s head. Her one request, that uncompromising demand, that he be harsh, reasserted its dominance in his brain.

Hugo scolded Garda for being arrogant and unapproachable at work while slapping her bare bottom vigorously. Then he forced her thighs apart and inserted the larger dildo into her vagina, while holding her down by the waist. Garda whimpered and squirmed but Hugo ignored this and let her feel her own, small, wooden hairbrush on her bottom while her pussy was filled. Garda yipped and wriggled. Hugo took the dildo out of her pussy and replaced it with the smaller one, but only long enough to lubricate it for her bottom, into which it then was inserted. Garda whimpered and squirmed even more violently. Knowing from experience that her climax was only moments away, Hugo untied her hands to have use of his belt, doubled it and began to first lightly, then harder, strike her across the exact center of her filled bottom with it.

“And another thing,” he told her, bringing the strap down harder, in order to leave light pink marks, “you should never be rude about another person’s record collection, to their face.”

Hugo held her down with his hand in the small of her back and strapped her bottom just a little harder than he had ever strapped any other girl friend before. He would have gone on a good deal longer as well, had she not succumbed, as predicted, to an intense orgasm. After which she was embarrassed enough to die during the delicate extraction of toys from her ultra tight and still pulsating orifices. For Garda it was too humiliating. The last twelve strokes of the strap had been effective enough, post-climax and three minutes later to cause her to cry several real tears. Of course, from such a poignant punishment, her eyes could only be expected to fill up once or twice. But those six or seven tears thrilled Hugo madly. He touched her face just to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating and found they were adorably real. Hugo thanked his ruling planet Venus for helping him to make her come so fast. Now she wouldn’t notice just how fast he was about to climax while fucking her for the first time, as he could never remember being quite so excited in his life.

Hugo cleared the bed, efficiently unbuckled her corset and had her naked and up on all fours in a minute.

“No head?” she asked, turning to see his impressive erection emerge from his jeans then become quickly sheathed in a condom.

“Some other time, darling,” he gently pushed her head down, took her by the waist and proceeded to enter her tight, creamy vagina, still faintly throbbing from her own strapping induced climax. He nudged his large cock in slowly, gratified to feel her instantly clamping him tightly inside her. She was squeezing him so tightly he almost came at the moment of entry.

“Relax, Garda,” he told her, “or I’ll have to spank you some more.” He smacked her once on each cheek. She loosened slightly, allowing him to penetrate her more deeply and finally, fully. “Good girl,” he told her, pistoning his cock in and out, for she was wet as a young girl can be and the additional spanks set her afire afresh. She looked back at him, with a coquettish pout he would not have thought her capable of, as much as to say, there is my bottom, right in front of you, are you going to waste this opportunity to spank me? “Or should I say, bad girl?” Hugo spanked her rhythmically as he thrust his cock into her pussy. She virtually melted at this, coming a second time, as he achieved his first effusion in Garda’s honor.

Then he was enormously hungry and they went back to his kitchen to cook. After which they saw The Damned and The Cramps and Hugo spanked and fucked her two more times that night.

After that, they were inseparable for the next ten months. They did everything that young cosmopolitans couples do, plus spanking; and never quarreled, unless Garda became unreasonably jealous. That was when the disagreeable side of the restrained beauty emerged to the full and Hugo felt compelled to beat her for it, which of course made her that much more his slave. But the idyllic relationship came to an abrupt though not unfriendly end when Garda was accepted to law school the following year and returned to California to complete her education. And that was pretty much the last he heard from her.

Then, one windy winter afternoon, twenty-two years later, Hugo Sands was standing behind the counter in his shop, about to make some phone calls, when he noticed a tall redhead enter through the front door and pause to look at him.

“My god, is that Garda?” he cried, coming from behind the counter to meet her, his heart contracting with excitement.

“You actually recognize me?” Garda cried, astonished. She was still slim to a fault, with pale lips, no jewelry, a smart suit and expensive shoes. “Hugo, your flaxen hair -- it’s gone all sandy!” She allowed herself to be squeezed tightly and hugged him back hard. “But how handsome and urbane you’ve become!”

“How dare you not write me?” he asked, pulling away. “I should spank you for that right now. And hard!”

Garda put her hand to her throat. “Hugo, don’t start with me the first second.”

“What? You felt something just then, didn’t you? Something here?” Hugo pressed his palm against her tummy.

“Hugo, how could you be just the same after all these years?” she laughed and let herself continue to be hugged.

“You found me by accident, didn’t you?” he asked, releasing her and enjoying the delicate blush that suffused her cheeks. “God, you’re still beautiful. But I don’t like the pale lips. I remember that dark red lipstick you used to wear. So sexy.”

“Yes, I found you by accident. I’m in town on business and I found your lovely little B&D journal in my room at the Inn. Naturally I devoured it and was agog to see you were the publisher, and right here in the village. Too good to be true!”

“See, I told you I’d make a magazine.”

“I think I need to put an ad in it.”

“Let me put up the sign and we’ll have lunch.”

“You own this place too?” she asked as he ushered her out.

“Yes, shortly after you departed I had a favorite aunt leave me some money and I used it to go into the antique business. The magazine is just a sideline. It barely pays for itself.”

“You should charge more for it.”

“Everyone’s going on-line these days.”

“I got off to some of the stories and illustrations last night in my room.”

“Naughty girl!”

They strolled back to The Bone and Feather Inn and had lunch in the pub.

During the cocktail stage Garda confided that she had never married but had been in a series of failed relationships with highly competitive though not technically dominant men. She had tried attending local support groups in San Francisco and Los Angeles but never felt attracted to the people she met at their parties and was profoundly bored by their interminable meetings. Once or twice, out of curiosity and desperation, she had answered a male dominant ad in a local paper, but was consistently disappointed.

“Who are you in town to see?” Hugo asked.

“Randy Price. You know him? He’s letting the studio I work for shoot at his estate and I’ve brought contracts for him to sign.”

“Yes, I know him. He’ll come on to you, but don’t succumb. He’s not our kind of people,” Hugo counseled.

“Hugo, this isn’t Ally McBeal. Mega millionaire clients do not come on to female lawyers old enough to remember life before pantyhose.”

“You don’t look your age,” Hugo promised her, squeezing her leg under the table. Again she blushed. Then Hugo thought, “What am I doing?” and withdrew his hand.

“So what about now?” he asked, “in a relationship?”

“No,” she said helpfully.

“Maybe you do need to place an ad.”

“How about you, Hugo?”

“Well, I couldn’t wait for you forever, so I finally did get into a relationship.”

“Would she mind your squeezing my leg under the table? Is that why you suddenly withdrew your lovely hand?”

“Yes, I suddenly remembered Laura, who is conveniently out of town for a few days, but who deserves to be mentioned.”

“Wife Laura?”

“Girlfriend. My illustrator too.”

“For how long?”

“Well, I met her five years ago, but temporarily lost her to another. It took a few years to get her back, so I’d say we’ve been together about two years.”

“Live together?”

“No. She lives up at the Cliff House. Her little sister landed the composer Anthony Newton for a lover off my introduction and he took to Laura as well.”

“Convenient,” she said.

“And rent free,” he grinned.

“Oh dear,” she frowned, sipping her cocktail.

“What?”

“I’m feeling that horrible jealous feeling again.”

“Really?” Hugo couldn’t help but be pleased that Garda still loved him. “You’re so bad. You probably haven’t had a good spanking in years.”

“Hugo, stop, you’re making me blush and I haven’t done that in years either.”

“Come visit me later. I have a great playroom.”

“I have to have dinner with Randy, but I can drop by afterwards,” she promised.

“With dark red lipstick and earrings on.”

“Just as you like, Hugo,” said Garda agreeably surprised that nothing had changed between them.

After lunch Hugo took Garda through the village on foot, stopping at a small, chic looking dress shop on Main Street. “A friend of mine owns this shop and my former-girl Friday works here,” Hugo said, ushering Garda into the smart boutique. Inside they found one small and elegantly shapely brunette in her late 20’s or possibly just 30, clad in a close fitting gray wool dress steaming the wrinkles out of some hanging suits while a second, taller and still more slender brunette, in another version of the grey wool dress, in her middle 20’s, with her hair in a shiny black French roll, stood meticulously folding cashmere sweaters behind one of the counters. Both women looked up but only the smaller one smiled.

“Hi girls. Damaris, Pamela, this is Garda Hudson.”

Garda said how do you do and shook hands with them while Hugo explained to her that Pamela, who had until recently been his own assistant at the shop, had just signed on with Damaris as a custom seamstress.

“She’s got art and fashion degrees and was wasted behind my counter,” he disclosed, smiling at Pamela, who returned the smile but faintly. “So for her own good, I let her go,” he continued.

“My good too. I love my new assistant,” said Damaris, delighted to be running her own business in Random Point with such a suitable partner. Indeed, the two women with their nipped waists, black hair and pale olive complexions might have been sisters.

“And I love my very first girlfriend in the scene,” Hugo said, squeezing Garda’s slender waist.

“Your first, Hugo?” Damaris seemed to appreciate the poignancy of this declaration much more than did Pamela and beamed with affection at the visiting redhead. “How unspeakably sweet! How long ago was that?”

“Please don’t ask,” Garda protested, responding charmingly to Damaris’ warmth.

“Years and years before I met even Marguerite,” Hugo confided, glowing in a way that made Pamela ill.

“Who is Marguerite?” asked Garda.

“She writes as Alma for my magazine.”

“Do I get to meet her too?” Garda asked.

“Luckily for Hugo, she’s in New York with Laura right now,” said Damaris impertinently.

“Yes it is, but you oughtn’t to have said so,” Hugo agreed, thumbing through a rack of cocktail dresses.

“She would have been intolerably competitive with Garda,” Damaris observed, “And it all would have ended in tears. She’s a redhead too, you see and there’s never been a second one in Random Point.”

“Girls, won’t you find me a perfect corset for this lady?”

“We just got some incredible ones in!” Damaris cried with excitement, going behind the counter to pull out a tissue packed box containing several black lace over beige nylon sewn full corselets, echoing the glory days of the Irving Klaw studios. “This small should fit Garda perfectly. Come with me, and we’ll try it on,” Damaris took Garda by the arm and led her to the lavishly appointed fitting rooms.

“You’re buying me a corset, Hugo?” Garda asked over her shoulder with a bemused grin on her face.

He winked at her as she disappeared with Damaris. Pamela folded sweaters and sulked behind the counter.

“Well,” she said, “I’m sure you hardly miss me.”

“Sweetheart, of course I miss you,” said Hugo gently, “but we couldn’t go on working together. Things had gotten out of control. And by things I mean you.”

“If I didn’t love my new boss I’d hate you now,” said Pamela. “As it is, I feel hurt and rejected! And now this, flaunting some blue-eyed redhead in front of me! Torturing me by forcing me to see her in a beautiful corset before imagining you together!”

“Pamela, I haven’t seen Garda in 22 years. She was my first submissive. She’s only in town for the weekend and she still likes me. Can you blame me for being happy?”

“Yes!”

“Pamela, you’re not being reasonable. You belong to Sloan. What you are feeling for me is some sort of mild infatuation brought on by me spanking you.”

“And fucking the daylights out of me!”

“Just that once.”

“I haven’t been able to forget it.”

“That’s why we couldn’t go on working together.”

“I thought when girls had sex with their bosses they got to keep their jobs,” said Pamela recklessly.

“You’re lucky we’re not somewhere I could give that remark the reply it deserves,” he said forcefully.

Damaris came out with a smile. “It’s a perfect fit. How about a glorious new cocktail dress to go over it?”

“Do bring her something to try on, Damaris,” said Hugo, unable to fully enjoy the experience because of Pamela’s sulking. When Damaris disappeared with another dress over her arm Hugo lifted Pamela’s chin, forcing her to look at him. “You’re behaving like a very wayward girl,” he told her.

She glared at him defiantly, her full red lips forming a Bardot-like pout.

“Give me your hand,” he said sternly, picking up a small wooden ruler. When she saw that he was quite serious, she extended her trembling left hand towards her former employer. Hugo took it and turning her palm upwards smacked it sharply with the flat side of the ruler. She tried to pull her hand back but he held her wrist fast in his other hand and struck her two, three, four more times across her palm, hard enough to sting her and bring tears to her large, dark eyes.

“Wipe your eyes,” he ordered, letting go of her hand. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for acting like such a brat?”

Looking in the mirror behind the counter Pamela delicately dabbed her eyes with a white handkerchief. He came around the counter and hugged her briefly to him, his own heart beating fast at the enormity of having made her fall in love with him.

“Pamela, I’m not going to let you disturb your beautiful relationship with Sloan or mine with Laura, but that doesn’t mean I plan to neglect you,” he said, examining her hand, which was pink now. “Now go and run that under water,” he told her. “And we’ll continue this discussion at a later date.”

Pamela was in tears and told herself severely in the bathroom mirror, “You have no pride.” But when she looked at the palm of her hand she felt a terrible thrill of excitement.

Garda came out in a square necked, long sleeved, wasp waisted, straight skirted, flounced cocktail dress of which Hugo entirely approved. He handed Damaris his credit card.

“We thought we’d let you discover just how charming the corset looks later, yourself,” said Damaris, and Hugo smiled, glad that Pamela had left the floor. That young lady’s temper tantrum had almost cast a pall on the evening but the solution had been very much in hand and now a kind of order had been restored.

“I might as well give up even trying to do the honorable thing with regard to my buddy Sloan,” Hugo confessed to Garda, while walking her back to the inn. “Basic chemistry is making that impossible.”

“Sloan is?”

“Pamela’s boyfriend. He runs the bookshop across the way from my store and he’s a very good friend of mine. Anyway, he’s got a pretty assistant who was driving our Pamela crazy with jealousy. So I decided to take her mind off that entire situation by being the boss from modern Gothic hell, kicking off the program with a spanking.”

“And she promptly fell in love?”

“I would call it a crush that has developed over several weeks.”

“I see the distinction,” Garda laughed.

“Stop by my house on the way to Randy’s and I’ll get you stoned,” Hugo promised, writing down the address on the back of his business card.

“Oh Hugo,” she replied, fondly squeezing his arm, “nothing has changed, has it? I’ll come now!”

Garda brought all the things she needed to Hugo’s house in the woods and dressed for dinner in his playroom, in front of a gold scalloped cheval glass, while sharing a joint with Hugo as in the old days. He helped her hook the form sculpting new corset while sitting on the edge of a leather sofa, with Garda standing in front of him, enjoying their reflections in the mirror.

Garda said, “I think we look better together now than we did before, Hugo.”

“Marvelous the way you kept your figure,” he complimenting her, giving her a pat on the bottom before pulling her down on his lap to embrace her properly. “I’m glad you live in California. I could easily fall in love with you again,” he told her. “Now put your stockings on and I’ll hook the suspenders for you.”

“You certainly know your way around foundations,” Garda remarked with admiration.

“You were the first girl I ever met who owned anything even remotely fetishistic,” he told her.

“Oh yes, my rubber corset. It always made me dizzy after twenty or so minutes.”

“You never told me that.”

“You wouldn’t have let me wear it.”

“That’s true.”

“You were so paternal with me,” Garda smiled, seating herself on a leather pouf to pull on the seamed stockings gracefully.

“Goes with the territory,” Hugo told her, entranced by the way she put on her ultra high, black velvet, tapering, stack heeled pump and extended her long leg to admire the effect.

“Is that why all the girls in town follow you all around?” she gently mocked him, slipping on the blue gown.

“Not all, but maybe one more than is necessary at the moment,” Hugo replied, zipping her up then hooking the suspenders to the tops of the real silk stockings he had bought her as an additional present.

“I wish I didn’t have to go to this dinner,” she pouted, sitting down on his lap and impatiently wriggling her slim, muscular bottom while winding her arms around his neck. “Oh, it’s so good to feel you just as you were, only more so!”

“Make it a short dinner and come right back to me,” he ordered, patting her bottom through the velvet gown again.

She purred against his ear, “I love it when you tell me what to do.”

A few minutes later, while putting her into her rental car Hugo allowed her to take a last hit. “You’re so sweet,” she murmured, checking her makeup in the mirror. She was back to dark red lipstick and her russet hair was twisted up and held in place by a velvet clip.

“Remember what I told you about Randy, Garda. If he makes a move on you, brush him off. He’s developed the knack of pressuring women into giving him sex better than anyone I know, but there’s nothing in his bag of tricks to interest the likes of you.“

“Hugo,” Garda laughed, “do you even know how old I am?”

“Are you saying that in L.A. no woman over a certain age gets the make put on her?’

“Yes, Hugo. That is what I’m saying.” But Garda drove off gaily, merrily lit and looking forward with intense pleasure to the later portion of the evening.

Garda took the narrow coast road to Randy’s estate, warmed by Hugo’s compliments, but never expecting his predictions to come true. Randy Price was five to seven years her junior, frighteningly rich and according to Hugo, a ruthless operator. She expected to dine briefly, tour the shooting areas, get her contracts signed and leave without much ado.

Randy was tall, arresting and detached, but not unfriendly, as he showed Garda around and introduced her to their only other dining companion, his sister Marnie Price, a tall, raw boned blonde, very much in the New England mode, good looking, butch and crudely charming.

“I notice a remnant of an ex-punk past,” said Garda, tapping her own earlobe, which like Randy’s, bore the faint, ancient perforations of four piercings. “I’ll bet you used to have a Mohawk, huh?”

Randy admitted he had and stories of bands and clubs were exchanged. Garda thought, “What was Hugo talking about? Randy’s not so bad. And I love his sister!”

But less than three hours later, when she lightly rapped on Hugo’s front door, he opened it to a badly shaken redhead.

“You warned me, but I didn’t believe you,” she confided a few minutes later as he took her into his prettiest sitting room and handed her a glass of burgundy. “I feel stupid!”

Hugo felt a terrible arrow of jealousy pierce his heart. “Garda, you didn’t let Randy take advantage of you?”

“It all happened so quickly,” she explained, gratefully accepting a cigarette. “One minute he was showing me his signed copy of the Necronomicon and the next thing I knew, he was jamming his dick down my throat!”

“Oh, Garda!” Hugo snapped with real annoyance. “Why in the world did you let him?”

“I felt pressured, as though if I refused he’d kill the shooting space deal.”

“You let yourself be pressured into sex over something as trivial as that?”

“I’m not sure how it happened. I’m only sure it happened fast. He seemed to instinctively know all my vanilla buttons and pushed them in a row. The earlobe nibbling, the bosom squeezing, the digital penetration.”

“Preceded, I imagine by liberal inhalations of cocaine?” Hugo accused, remembering that this was Randy’s drug of choice, which also accounted for his general greed and irascibility.

“Gee, you know him well.”

“Gee, I know you well,” said Hugo cynically.

“Hugo, I feel wretched.”

“It’s the cocaine and cheap, meaningless sex. Smoke some weed, take the thrashing you deserve from me and you’ll feel better.”

“Hugo, this never happens to me,” she explained, curling up on the hearthrug in front of the fire.

“Maybe if you wore blue velvet and corsets instead of austere business suits it would happen more often,” he pointed out, sitting down beside her and removing her ultra high-heeled pumps one by one.

“Thank you!” she cried.

“I’ll find you another pair to set off your corset,” he said, disappearing upstairs and returning to her a few minutes later with a pretty pair of lower heeled black brocade pumps with high vamps. “You’re the same size as Laura,” he told her, slipping the 18th century style shoes on Garda’s graceful feet. “Turn around, I’ll unzip you,” he told her. She let him help her out of the dress, which revealed her charmingly corseted, long, slim torso.

”You’re just as delicious as ever,” he told her, holding her waist between his hands. “But I’m highly incensed at your letting Randy Price see you, no less have you in this!” Hugo declared, pulling her across his knee and giving her eight or ten quick smacks on her fully pantied bottom, which appeared as taut and smooth as ever under the sheer briefs. “You’ve behaved shockingly, young lady, even for you!” he said, with a half dozen more spanks, before letting her up.

Garda, blushing furiously, took her wine across the room. He laughed at her embarrassment. “Has it been so long since you’ve been turned over somebody’s knee?” he asked.

“About 22 years,” she admitted, pretending to study his bookcase and presenting an elegant rear view.

“Is this true?”

“I kept trying out different masters. But as you know, they don’t often specifically spank.”

Hugo smiled, “I binged on slaves for a while myself.”

“Really?”

“I kept meeting girls who’d grown up on The Story of O. I had three girl friends in a row who virtually wanted to be told when to go to the bathroom.”

“What happened?”

“It warped my character. I started taking the scene too seriously and wound up alienating someone I really cared for.”

“That would be the lady with the good taste in shoes?” Garda asked, extending her well-shod foot.

“Had you returned just a few years ago, you would have found me insufferable.”

“I’m sure that even at your worst you were never as grisly as some of the creatures who’ve lured me into their dungeons. I’ve been suspended, hogtied, hot waxed, prodded, pinched, clamped, cinched, everything but wrung out and hung up to dry.”

“No corporal punishment?”

“Oh, I’ve been able to obtain a few dreamy floggings from ripped leather men over the years, but I was never lucky enough to meet a straight one with the proper looks and brains to interest me.”

“That’s insane, Garda. California is probably the spanking capital of the world. I’ll have you set up with a spanking boyfriend within weeks of your returning to L.A.”

“You seem incredibly sure of your powers,” Garda smiled.

“Trust me.”

“It seems like I’ve been sublimating this need since the last time I saw you,” she mused.

“I can’t think why. You were always such a self starter.”

“I’ve been remiss,” Garda admitted.

“And should be punished.”

“Hugo, this wine is lovely, but do you know what I’d really adore?”

“Tell me.”

“One of those luscious Irish coffees you used to make us before we went skating at night.”

“Come with me and I’ll show you how it’s done,” Hugo said, leading her by the hand through the house to his rustic kitchen, with its wonderful hearth.

Garda watched Hugo grind the coffee beans, sitting on the wooden table and swinging her long, slim legs. “You always took such good care of me,” she said fondly. “Remember that day we pretended that I was a baby and I crawled around the floor and talked baby talk all afternoon and you spanked me I don’t know how many times?”

“That was fun,” he agreed, measuring out a jigger of Bushmills.

“You used to literally spend hours spanking me. Remember?”

“Can you blame me?”

“And you’re saying there are really others like you?”

“Can you honestly doubt it? You saw the magazine. Why don’t you answer some ads while I begin researching my California resources? I promise you’ll be playing regularly before you know it,” he guaranteed her, pouring cream into a bowl and placing that under a blender.

“The truth is, I’ve become a boring corporate lawyer,” Garda sighed.

“I still can’t understand how you could have allowed Randy Price get the better of you!” Hugo exclaimed, remembering her lurid confession with annoyance. “He’s not even your type.”

“Hugo, you don’t understand. Men just don’t come on to me that often. I give off a spinster or dyke vibe. Or maybe it’s that I don’t flirt. Anyway, I seem to be seldom pursued these days. So I was flattered into submission.”

“Oh, that’s nonsense! What else did you do with him?” Hugo snapped, while whipping the cream.

Garda shrugged, “I just gave him head, let him finger bang me, trivial stuff.”

“I can’t believe you went down on your knees to Randy Price!”

Garda bit her knuckle.

“You’re hopeless,” Hugo declared, pouring coffee into a mug, adding the jigger of Bushmills and the whipping cream. Garda took the cup and a spoon to stir it. “Bring that with you and follow me,” Hugo said, grabbing the whiskey bottle and a glass along with her smoking materials and leading her up three pairs of stairs to his attic playroom.

“Wow,” Garda said, peering out of the porthole window and catching a glimpse of the half moon through the swaying boughs. Then she noticed the skylights, the sophisticated furnishings, all suitable for playing on and the looking glasses to reflect it all.

“All the dungeons in Random Point are traditionally located in the attics,” he informed her.

“What are you going to do with me?” she asked, drinking her coffee fast.

“You mean to you, for making me angrier than I have ever been with you before! And after being back in my life just one afternoon!”

“But, you always said you’re not the jealous type,” she smiled.

“I’m not jealous, I’m just irritated as hell that you squandered the divine gift of your submission on Randy Price. After I warned you, Garda. That’s what makes it so insulting.”

“See, you shouldn’t have warned me like that. You’ve heard of the Bluebeard Syndrome?”

Hugo ignored her flippancy and lifted the lid of a large toy chest to select implements. She came over to look in.

“Finish your drink and your smoke while I find the proper restraints,” he advised her.

“Restraints? What for? I’ll always stay in position for you, Hugo.”

“Maybe I think you’ll look good in restraints. Some black leather wristlets, linked by a couple of boat hooks, should be perfect for your wrists behind your back. And then, I can easily have you reach back and spread your bottom for my crop.”

Garda pouted while she watched him gather toys. She smoked a joint while touring the room. Inevitably she kept coming back to the expensively upholstered table with the carved and varnished wooden legs in the middle of the room. Hugo demonstrated, at the touch of a button, that the elegant bondage bed could be tilted. Rather than sticky leather, it was covered in a smoky blue velveteen fabric, suitable for a lady to repose upon. Soft blue suede restraints were tucked into pockets at each corner and there were recessed o-rings around the perimeter at all the necessary points to make bondage possible in a variety of classic positions.

Hugo let her finish all her stimulants then summarily took her by the ear across to a long, high backed wooden bench, carved in the same style as the table, and with a padded seat covered in the same smoky blue plush fabric and turned her over his knee. “First, a good, hard spanking, to make you very sorry!” he promised, bringing his palm down on her trim backside, so glamorous through her sheer black on beige lace nylon briefs.

Hugo held her by her ear lobe while spanking her vigorously for ten or fifteen minutes. This worked the way it always had done. She squirmed, panted, whimpered and ground against his lap, lubricating copiously.

He lowered her panties and saw with satisfaction how pink she had already become. The texture of her skin was still smooth and fine.

“If I weren’t so incensed at the way you’ve behaved, I would compliment you on your figure and skin more,” he explained, running his hand across her slim hips, still girded by the charming corset he had bought her that afternoon. “However, it can be still pinker,” he decided, commencing the spanking again. For her naughtiness, he wanted her bottom a solid color field of magenta against her snowy skin when he lay her face down on the table.

“Hurts you?” he asked, several minutes later. She was wriggling and panting but scarcely protesting. Distantly, she knew it must hurt, but she was floating in a heavenly sphere of submissive bliss. It had always been this way with Hugo. They’d play for hours, the next day she’d be as sore as if she’d athletically trained and not remember why. Then it would come back to her, the spanking that had lasted an hour in the woods, or during the entire Oscars. The way he paced his smacks, and how he placed them, was quite an art, she had always felt. She felt it then and now, that Hugo spanked with symmetry.

“Now that you’re entirely pink,” he observed, transporting her to the table and placing her on it, face down, “we can continue in the place that seemed to intrigue you.”

Hugo thrilled Garda by roughly spreading her ankles as wide as they would go and binding them with the soft suede straps.

“Remember how I told you I wanted your hands, Garda?”

She obediently put her wrists behind her and allowed him to enclose them in the soft leather cuffs and link them together loosely so that she could turn them either palm up or palm down. First Hugo turned her palms up and very sternly spanked each of them once. She whimpered more at this than all the hard spanking that had come before. “Are you going to obey me tonight, Garda?”

“Yes,” she murmured sincerely.

“And please me?”

“Of course, if I can.”

“Show me your bottom,” he ordered. Garda slowly responded by turning her hands palm down on each cheek and faintly spreading them. “Is that the best you can do?” he asked, pushing her hands up so that her forearms folded against each other and rested on her lower back. Now he selected a small, oval shaped paddle of varnished red teak, about a half an inch thick, and began to apply it firmly to either cheek. She squirmed and yipped. Finally he stopped, unfolded her arms and placed her hands on her cheeks again. Without being told she pulled them apart.

“That’s just the way I want you to stay, Garda, dear,” he told her, selecting a short crop with a two inch square leather spanker at the end. “Because of all things you really need to have your bottomhole disciplined tonight.”

She made some inarticulate noise of protest, but timidly kept herself spread as he began to methodically spank her anus.

“Oh god!” she cried, feeling bitterly ashamed and on the edge of an orgasm at once. “Please!”

Hugo took this to mean, please don’t stop, which he didn’t intend to. “This is only the beginning, darling,” he promised, cropping her quickly. Then he laid down the crop. Again, he removed her hands from her cheeks and folded her arms up on her lower back above her pink cheeks. “Don’t move,” he told her, touching the button and causing the table to tilt up 30 degrees, to elevate her bottom and drop her head.

Then he went to a console where he’d left the whiskey, poured himself a shot, drank it, then decanted a cigar from a silver tube. But he didn’t light the cigar. He screwed the lid on the tube and returned to Garda. Placing one hand on her wrists on the small of her back, he inserted the smooth, rounded end of the cigar tube into Garda’s exceedingly creamy pussy.

“Oh! What are you doing?”

“You’ll feel it in a minute,” he warned her, withdrawing the fully lubricated cylinder from her pussy and inserting it firmly into her freshly pinkened bottomhole.

“No! Oh please!”

“I’m sorry,” he said insincerely, twisting the tube deeper into her rectum until only a few inches of it protruded. “But nothing short of total humiliation will due tonight. Now don’t move,” he told her, reaching for a thin leather strap. Bound, with her thighs apart and her anus filled for her strapping, Garda was incoherent with embarrassed confusion.

“I’ll be good,” she promised wriggling with shame. Again and again the strap came down, scoring her dark pink bottom rose. He would only stop every twenty or so strokes to roughly, deeply fingerfuck her pussy. The third time he paused to do this she came.

But that was not the end. He removed the tube, unfastened her bonds and ordered her to set herself to rights. When she returned to him, still in a sort of daze he took her to a couch, turned her on her tummy, pulled her up by the hips, inserted his cock in her pussy and drove into her with the robustness that she so fondly remembered. She came again as he held her by the waist and pistoned into her relentlessly for ten or fifteen minutes, until expiring in a flood of personal pleasure himself.

The next morning, while Hugo’s large black tomcat lay heavily against her, Garda was served her cappuccino in bed by her host. Meanwhile, Damaris and Pamela, again in two similarly styled, smart woolen dresses, their shiny black hair perfectly groomed, were enacting the rituals of opening the shop.

As Damaris set the steamer opposite a rack of sleek, short suits and Pamela started the coffee, the doorbell tinkled and Laura Random entered, the picture of a New England tomboy in cords and a tucked out plaid shirt layered over a solid one. She was in her early 30’s, exceedingly pretty and youthful, with an extremely long, chestnut brown ponytail and dark eyes. Her voice was softly pleasant as she cheerfully greeted them, placing a small but heavy looking carton on one of the glass countertops.

She announced, “I have our second book!” Opening up the carton she pulled out a thick, elegantly covered graphic novel. “And Anthony didn’t even have to finance this one. Susan and I were able to pay the printers ourselves out of what we made from the first one.”

“Laura, it’s spectacular,” said Damaris, leafing through the thick, all color pages, from back to front.

“Damaris, you’re not reading Hebrew, start from the beginning!” Laura cried, happily, for she and her sister had just published their second book and it would soon be in the stores, which brought an intense feeling of happiness to the artist-author.

“Yes, it’s beautiful,” echoed Pamela, her own pulse racing with that mixture of jealousy and excitement she always felt when she encountered Hugo Sands’ lover.

“Can I leave some in the store with you?”

“Of course!” Damaris agreed.

“You keep half of everything you sell, okay?”

“Deal!”

Pamela gazed at Laura and Damaris with bafflement. How could Laura Random be so cordial to the woman who now lived with her ex-husband? Then she reminded herself that Laura now had Hugo Sands all to herself. Except for the redhead.

“Listen, Laura,” said Damaris, suddenly remembering the redhead too. “Something came in yesterday that you have to have. Here, try this on!” She thrust a size 6 cocktail dress in cranberry silk into Laura’s hand.

“That is pretty,” Laura said, obediently walking into the fitting room.

The instant she disappeared, Damaris dialed the phone.

“Who are you calling?” Pamela demanded.

“I’m warning Hugo to get homegirl dressed.”

“Why? Don’t you think it would be more fun to let nature take its course?” Pamela suggested.

“P., have you forgotten he spent five hundred dollars here yesterday? And that we love him?” Damaris chided. The phone was answered and Damaris delivered her important news into Hugo’s ear.

Hugo felt his heart jump as he gazed as Garda looking so handsome in Laura’s grey cashmere dressing gown with her light red hair down on her shoulders. “How thoughtful of you to let me know that,” he told Damaris, looking at his watch. It was already a quarter to ten. He could see he wasn’t going to open the shop on time today and longed wistfully for the not so distant past when he had an assistant to rely upon.

“So, what do you want me to do?” Damaris asked.

“That’s a good question,” he mused, feeding Garda a small piece of buttered toast.

“I can keep her here at least an hour if you need time to think of a good answer,” Damaris said helpfully.

Hugo laughed and said, “Just tell her the truth, that a dear friend of mine was in town yesterday doing business with Randy Price and I brought her to visit the shop before sending her over to him.”

“I didn’t know she was meeting Randy,” said Damaris, distinctly repelled by the name.

“She met him alright,” Hugo disclosed in a tone that spoke volumes.

“He can be so loathsome. Was he rude to your darling?”

“Let’s just say you made her look a little too good.”

“Oh my god, you don’t mean he tried to take advantage of her?”

“Since when did Randy Price ever just try to do something?”

Damaris hung up and reported to Pamela, “Hugo said that Garda saw Randy last night.”

“Randy Price?”

“I think he may have forced himself on her.”

“No, Mr. Price doesn’t rape. But he knows how to take better than any man I’ve ever met,” said Pamela bitterly. Never had she given in to a man so quickly and for so little reason.

“Tell me about it! You have no idea what misery that man caused me at one time,” Damaris replied, heading for the fitting room with a copper silk dress over her arm.

Laura had put on the cranberry dress and was admiring the effect in the three-way mirror when her friend joined her.

“So guess who was in yesterday?” Damaris begin.

“Who?”

“Hugo and a very old girlfriend.”

“An old girlfriend?” Laura stared at Damaris in the mirror, her heart contracting painfully as she sat on an upholstered pouf, her legs gone to sand.

“A pre-1980’s girlfriend. Just about the same age as Hugo, give or take a few years,” Damaris said soothingly.

“A leggy redhead?”

Damaris nodded.

“Garda,” Laura sagely concluded, for she had been Hugo’s companion long enough for him to have told her about all his important lovers. “Still a beauty I suppose?”

“Very cool, smart and slim.”

Laura took off the red dress and exchanged it for the copper one as Damaris told Laura of Garda’s encounter with Randy Price. Like Damaris and Pamela, Laura had also been had by Randy Price, knew Randy for the extraordinary piece of work that he was and felt a pang for Garda, of whom Hugo had always spoken so fondly.

While getting back into her clothes Laura asked Damaris, “How come Pamela is here? Did Hugo lend you her for a few days?”

“He gave her to me permanently.”

“You mean she’s working here now?’

“Has been for a week.”

“But, why?”

“She won’t say.”

“What about Hugo? What was his reason for sending her to you?”

“He claims her talents are better suited to my shop than his. And he’s right. She’s been to design school you know.”

“There’s got to be more to it than that,” Laura guessed. Damaris lead her back out to the shop with the two dresses over her arm. “Did you want these?”

“Yes, please,” said Laura, getting out her credit card.

“You’re not to pay for anything, per Anthony,” Damaris said, refusing the card. “He said I was to send all of your and Susan’s bills to him.”

“How sweet,” Laura smiled. “I’m sure he’s delighted to encourage your new enterprise.”

While Damaris was zipping the dresses into a smart carrying bag Laura wandered over to Pamela, who was behind one of the counters folding bias cut silk slips from Paris with extreme care.

“Pamela, I was surprised to hear you’ve left Hugo,” Laura said.

“Yes, me too,” said Pamela, without raising her eyes.

“You don’t mean he dismissed you?”

“I think I was beginning to get on his nerves,” Pamela observed not completely untruthfully.

“This is very mysterious,” said Laura to Damaris as her friend walked her out of the shop. Overhead lightning was striking. “Why do you suppose Hugo fired her?”

Damaris shrugged, though she had already formed a good idea.

“Do you think I should call Hugo before going over today?” Laura asked as thunder struck noisily above.

“Most definitely,” Damaris counseled.

“So it’s like that between them, is it?”

“She was his first scene girlfriend, Laura.”

“I know. I suppose she was amiable?”

“Laura, she has an important job in California to return to forthwith,” Damaris reassured her as the rain began to fall in the street.

Laura took the dresses and hugged Damaris. “Maybe I won’t call him until tomorrow,” Laura mused, getting into her car.

“Yes, I’d worry about this one more than that one,” said Damaris, jerking her thumb towards the boutique where Pamela was still brooding and folding slips.

Hugo Sands was thinking along the same lines as he put Garda into her car and watched her drive out of the village in a windy, driving rain, later that afternoon. He walked aimlessly back from the inn to his shop, glancing at his watch and wondering if it was even worth it to open up that day. If Pamela were still in his employ, he wouldn’t have given a thought to taking the entire day off. Why had he fired her anyway? Pausing with the key in the door of his shop he abruptly put it back in his pocket.

He looked at his watch. It was three. “No, it’s too late. And no one will come out in this rain,” he reflected, walking across the cobbled street to the bookshop.

Hope Lawrence was wiping down the wooden coffee bar and Sloan was ringing up sales behind the back counter. Hugo waved at him, Sloan waved back and Hope began to automatically prepare a double cappuccino. Hugo slid onto a stool and brooded at a copy of the Boston Globe as Hope produced her usual stream of cheerful chatter. Something was nagging at Hugo. And he wanted a cigarette. If Pamela were still working for him, he could get one from her.

Laura’s return troubled him not at all. He’d already spoken with her over the phone, told her about Garda’s visit and promised to cook her a welcome home dinner that night in his own kitchen. She’d asked him at once about why he’d dismissed Pamela and he’d replied at once and frankly that it was because Pamela seemed to have developed a crush on him. These were not words calculated to do anything but please and soothe a worried girlfriend and Hugo realized with a start that although he had ostensibly given up continuous access to Pamela out of respect for his friendship with Sloan, Laura provided an even stronger reason for exiling the willowy beauty from his immediate realm.

But who deserved the real blame for what had occurred? It wasn’t Pamela. It was himself, for being a wise guy. He retraced the sequence of events as they had unfolded. First Pamela had returned to Random Point after a year away. At which point she’d been shocked and violently jealous to find that Sloan’s new assistant was the remarkably beautiful Hope Spencer Lawrence. Desperately, Pamela had asked Sloan to let her exchange work places with Hope, putting her in the bookshop and Hope in Hugo’s antiques shop across the street. But Hugo had firmly objected, on the grounds that, charming as she was, Hope talked too much to bear as an assistant.

Also, he took exception to Pamela deciding who was to work for him and being so disloyal as to want to leave him and punished her for her temerity with a good spanking, thereafter behaving towards his employee in a fashion that could only be described as Gothic.

Hugo had been cold and harsh to Pamela for several weeks, overworking and stretching her to the limit in every possible way. The result was that she fell in love with him and when the feeling built to such a fever pitch that it could no longer be ignored by the sensitive girl, she declared herself to him, with some embarrassment and he was forced to do the confession the honor it deserved. He made love to her, in his usual style, which only inflamed her more. The situation rapidly becoming untenable, in a panic of conscience and common sense, Hugo decided that the only possible solution was to dismiss Pamela.

He told himself he was actually doing Pamela a favor. Damaris had promised to make her a partner if Pamela designed for the shop, and this after all, was what she had gone to school for. But after seeing her beautiful eyes filled with tears yesterday and knowing that it was his fault, he spent the entire afternoon feeling restless, guilty, angry and desperately aroused by the tall girl’s passion for him.

He finished his coffee, borrowed an umbrella from Sloan and walked back across the village in the rain to Damaris’ shop. Pamela was standing outside the shop under the bottle green awning in a beige wool dress, moodily smoking a cigarette. She gave a start at seeing him, followed by a trembling smile.

“Can you get away for an hour?” he asked without preamble.

“Yes,” she replied, crushing her cigarette underfoot and running inside to get her raincoat and umbrella. A young woman who lived by the weather report, Pamela had on smart black thigh high boots that disappeared under her skirt and gave Hugo a romantic notion.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said, leading her several blocks across the village and then along the brook that ran behind it. The rain had lessened to a fine mist and the gusts of wind had died down. “Do you know about the marble summer house?” he asked. Pamela shook her head. “Very few people do,” he told her as they walked along the gravelly bank.

This open structure, nearly a hundred years old, overgrown with ivy and lined with marble benches stood in the woods about a half-mile out of town.

“What am I going to do with you?” he asked, drawing her to sit down beside him on the driest bench seat he could find. Taking her gloved hands in his, he kissed her full mouth lightly. Then he peeled off her gloves, examined the palms of her hands and kissed them. His act of tenderness washed through her like a balm, soothing away all the hurt and confusion of the last week.

“You’re a willful girl who doesn’t know what’s good for her,” Hugo scolded, slowly drawing her down across his lap. He curved one hand around her tiny waist and used the other to push up the skirt of her raincoat and wool dress. Pamela had on black panties of Calais lace through which her pearly flesh gleamed. These he promptly rolled down to her thighs, which caused her to gasp as the chill air touched her satiny skin. Then he began to spank her and the sound of his slaps rang through the woods for many minutes to follow. “Players ought to be able to separate spanking from sex,” he reasoned during a pause, as he smoothed his palm across her bare pink cheeks and white thighs above the boot tops. “You never should have come on to me the way you did that day in the store room.”

“I know,” she assented meekly, and was duly rewarded with additional spanking, this time on her tender, creamy thighs. “Oh god! That really hurts!” she cried, wriggling on his lap. He caught her hand to her waist and held her fast, but proceeded to again spank her rhythmically, first on one cheek, then the other, until both were colored rose.

Presently he pulled her back up into a sitting position. “No, get those off,” he told her sternly as he saw her attempting to pull her panties back up. “You heard me,” he told her, briskly assisting in this operation, matter of factly folding them up, putting them in his jacket pocket and then pushing her back down on the bench, on her back. “Get your skirt up,” he told her, yanking his zipper down and freeing a condom from its foil. Straddling her he captured her wrists and drew them together up over her head as she lay looking up at him in passive though breathless expectation.

“Keep your hands above your head,” he told her. Her complete submissiveness to his will caused his cock to throb like an unruly fire hose in his hand as he nonetheless coolly rolled the rubber down over its lengthy shaft.

Before penetrating her, Hugo paused to undo the top two chunky buttons of her dress. Pulling it open he squeezed each small, firm round breast through the black lace under wire brassiere that supported it so elegantly. She gave a little whimper and he responded by spanking her breasts once each, which caused Pamela to gasp. He pinched her nipples lightly as she gazed at him with huge black eyes.

“Don’t take your eyes from mine,” he instructed her, guiding his cock between her creamy labia and penetrating her one inch at a time. This requirement making the act unbearably erotic, Pamela succumbed to the confluence of stimulations to which she was currently being subjected and whimpered her way through the first face-to-face orgasm she had ever experienced. As he felt her climax, squeezing his imprisoned cock madly, Hugo also orgasmed copiously before pulling out, rolling off and lying on his back beside her on the broad marble bench. It was natural at that moment, after making themselves more decent, to loll decadently on the cool, moist stone, gazing out at the rain drenched woods all around them.

“Cigarette?” she asked, lighting one. He took a puff then handed it back to her and relaced his fingers under his head.

“Hugo, thank you for not ignoring me today,” Pamela said softly. “Between Garda’s leaving and Laura’s return you still managed to find this perfect hour for me. I will never doubt you again.”

“I want you to get over me, not go into a decline over me. Is that understood, young lady?” Hugo leaned up on his elbow and looked down at her.

“Yes,” she nearly sobbed, receiving a momentary flash back of him forcing her to gaze straight into his cool blue eyes while he took her. He pressed his hand against her flat tummy, just above her Venus mound through her clothes. “Oh!” she cried, as he reawakened her g-spot simply by resting his hand there.

“You’re so responsive,” he said, continuing to pat and rub her through her clothes. “I could make you come again just doing this.”

“Will you?”

“No,” he said, sitting up. “I’d rather leave you worked up so you’ll have to go see Sloan.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” she admitted, sitting up herself and checking her lips in a pocket mirror.

“No? Why not?” Hugo took her hand and they left the summer house.

“I don’t believe we’re seeing each other, as such, anymore.”

“Oh Pamela, you told him didn’t you?”

“I had to.”

“Oh, you did not.”

“I couldn’t deceive him.”

“Well? What did he say?”

“He said he understood perfectly, reminding me he’d done pretty much the same thing with his boss, Mrs. Branwell, last year.”

“Then, he wasn’t upset?”

“No, simply detached. He said in view of my confused emotional state we ought to take some time off from seeing each other.”

“If he said that last week, perhaps enough time has elapsed,” Hugo suggested encouragingly as they began the misty walk back to the village.

“Hugo, may I have my panties back?”