The big fat F was written in red and Cassie felt sick. Her last paper had been a D, her third that semester, and she had been sure that even in the worst case scenario she would have scraped an E minus at minimum. Okay that wasn’t exactly great, but her grade average was still above a B, or had been before this damn F and she still had time to raise her game, didn’t she?
The problem with an F is that it automatically generated a letter home to her folks and she would have to contend with concern and even a berating from that quarter.
“Darn it,” she sighed dropping onto her bed and blowing her wayward copper fringe out of her eyes.
The girl in the make-up mirror wore an expression she hadn’t seen since her teens. It was a look Cassie had developed for herself after years of practice. Now that bygone face stared back at her for a moment; the almost metallic green eyes lapsing into a stare of practiced hard-done-by injustice, which was complimented by that old sullen pout. Then Cassie shook her head and focussed on the fact that she was now near 22 and a woman.
Back in her first year in college an F had gotten her a resurrection of some old family customs and she actually felt oddly queasy as her buttocks clenched. Getting a spanking at home during Thanksgiving had been a shock. The bottom blistering she had gotten in her dorm room had been downright mortifying.
Finally her folks had engaged the services of Mark Tillman, an old friend from mom’s home town who worked as a professional educationalist and mentor. He had been more used to delinquents and Bible Belt brats gone off the rails, but for the French family he had made an exception.
An early rebellion from Cassie had triggered a spanking from him that had set the agenda for the rest of her freshman year. Even now she blushed at the embarrassment and intensity of some of their encounters. Thank God she was too old for all that now and it had been a year since she had needed him and more than two since he had last spanked her. Well, she guessed she had deserved it; after all she had only been a kid back then.
Cassie picked up the letter and began to rehearse excuses in her mind. Maybe if she got a B minus on her next paper she could… then she saw the date on the letter. It was over a week old.
“Shit,” she exclaimed aloud.
She had been off partying during the long weekend and must have forgotten to check her mail before she set-off. So why hadn’t her mom or dad phoned?
“Shit, shit, shit,” she muttered as she frantically gathered up some books and prepared to hit the library.
Then she remembered she had to meet Jones and the others down at Fandangos and sighed. It took her almost 10 seconds to decide that tomorrow would be soon enough for study.
“Why did you have to be an F?” she cursed the note that now lay discarded on her bed.
*
The next morning her head didn’t hurt much at all and she worked her mouth as her eyes stole a look from her slumber at a blurred bedside clock. Despite the lack of pain something was drumming in her head and she sat up. No, not her head, it was the door to her room.
“Hold up,” she called and swung her legs from under the duvet.
Looking down she saw that she had one sock on and one half off, neither matching, and although she had gotten as far as putting on a short sleep-shirt, the lower half was still in a tangle on the floor and she was still wearing her panties.
The door hammered again firmly and Cassie yawned.
“Wait can’t you? I’m coming,” she growled at the unwelcome visitor.
She could see now that it was almost 11 and for a moment she wondered if she had missed something. But a glance at the calendar showed a reading day or as she and her fellow student’s called it, a free.
The shirt just covered her panties so with another yawn she staggered to the door and opened it.
The man outside was a head taller than she was and wore a medium dark brown leather jacket, like one a pilot might wear. Under that he wore a check shirt that reminded Cassie of her rural home and for some reason she first checked out the shoes to see if work boots completed the picture. They didn’t.
Instead she saw strangely familiar academic brogues under dark green denim pants. So when she looked up she wasn’t surprised to see a tinning mop of well-cropped curly salt-n-pepper hair and steel grey eyes regarding her with a look positioned somewhere between disappointment and disdain.
“Mr Tillman,” Cassie said in nervous surprise.
“Your folks called me,” Mark Tillman said in a stern baritone voice.
“Oh… eh… yah, I meant to call them,” she replied, belatedly raking her hair with her fingers and tugging at the hem of her shirt in front.
“Is that a fact?” Tillman drawled easing his way passed his former charge and taking in the room behind her.
“I haven’t had a chance to… ah… clear up,” she muttered, her voice trailing away as his eyes fell upon an empty vodka bottle.
Then as she watched he crossed the room and ran a finger along her unopened laptop and inspected the dust he had collected on his fingertip.
“I was… eh… away for the weekend…” she explained.
“It’s Wednesday,” he replied bluntly.
“Yeah, I… eh sort of got back yesterday afternoon,” Cassie told him with a growing sense of unease.
“I dropped off at the faculty building on my way over,” Tillman said casually. “I still have that letter from your parents countersigned by you, remember?”
Cassie nodded dumbly. She did and blushed as she remembered the circumstance in which she had signed it.
“So how are your grades going would you say?” Tillman asked suddenly rounding on her with that old-fashioned demeanour of his.
“Not too bad I guess. I have a B average…” she said more brightly than she felt.
“Try D plus,” he shot back, “As for the rest…”
“Well it’s nice of you to look in on me but…” Cassie began.
“You firing me?” Tillman growled, “Is that what I have to call your folks to say?”
Cassie gulped.
“No I… that is…” she felt the heat rise as the floor seemed to sag.
It was embarrassing to be back where she was last year then she saw that Tillman was staring at the hairbrush on her make-up table.
“I think it is time I reacquainted you with the basics again, don’t you?” he drawled.
*
The moment she had seen Mark Tillman Cassie had expected a scolding and even a crackdown on her behaviour. After all, even she knew things were out of hand and that she was in veritable freefall. The realisation was embarrassment enough. But the moment Tillman picked up the hairbrush and patted against his hand she knew what ‘reacquainted with the basics’ meant.
“Come on,” she wailed as she took a step backwards. “You can’t possibly… I mean…”
Tillman ignored Cassie’s peony gaping and said, “No roommate these days I see, that makes things rather easier doesn’t it?”
“But you can’t… I’m… I’m over 21,” she said miserably, her thoughts a cascade of denial.
“Then it is time you started behaving like it, isn’t it?” Tillman said sharply. “Do you remember what I told you last time?”
Cassie’s eyes dashed back and forth in her head as if her mind were racing ahead for an answer to her fate.
“I was just a kid back then, 19 and… and…” Cassie protested.
“You were 20 I think and I seem to remember a certain promise, in writing yet,” Tillman said calmly as he reached out for her to take his hand.
Cassie gulped as her head dizzied with hot blood that throbbed at her cheeks until it reached her ears. She remembered what ‘in writing yet’ meant. She had written out 500 times the convoluted legend, ‘reckless lazy brats are never too old to be spanked, is a sentiment I share.’
She had signed off on every page and the thick bundle had spent the rest of the semester pinned to her peg board. It had been a bitch to obscure with other notes and a dried flower, but she had dared not remove it on pain of a spanking. She was damn sure her then roomie Marlene had seen and read it. She had prayed for months that no one else had.
“Were you lying when you thanked me for my efforts and signed off on that rather tedious exercise?” Tillman asked.
“No Sir,” Cassie said quickly, “But…”
Tillman was still extending an arm out to her and this time she meekly took a step towards him and allowed him to tumble her across his knee. With the curve of her pantie-clad bottom in his lap she suddenly remembered something.
“The door, please, I didn’t lock it,” she gasped.
“Who would be so rude as to burst in unannounced?” he told her sternly, “Not everyone is as badly behaved as you are.”
With these words he drew her panties down her thighs and lined up the flat of the brush.
Oh my God, she thought, as wild thoughts whirled through her mind. This is…
“I do hope you still have that paddle I bought you.” His words broke into her thoughts.
She had once been required to hang it on the wall in plain sight.
“It is just an old sorority paddle,” she had had to say more often than she cared to, before praying that no one asked which sorority she belonged to. Only her roommate studiously ignored it. A sure sign that she knew exactly what it was for.
Her mind raced now as she struggled to remember where she had put it. But she hadn’t forgotten what he had said he would do if she lost it. Luckily, in her position her nose was just inches from the carpet and she spied the beastly thing under the bed and hastily told him.
“It goes back on the wall as soon as we’re done and next time you’ll feel it,” he told her sharply.
“Yes Sir,” she agreed, her voice edged in panic.
The hairbrush swept down and landed squarely on her sit-spots. It was far worse than she remembered, but she was still more concerned about the embarrassment just then. The harsh crack rang back off the cheap thin walls and as the next landed it was a cert that her neighbours either side would be in no doubt as to the origins of the sound. She only prayed that they were out.
“Oh-yah,” she gasped at the third and thereafter she had to bark out in distress at each spank as the shame of it quickly made way for the burn.
The spanking quickly became a continuous blast of heat and sound until Cassie was kicking and bawling as much as she ever had.
“Mommy he spanked me,” she had told her mother over the phone after the first time, “Right on my bare bottom.”
“Good,” had come the reply, “I don’t care if he spanked you in front of all your friends or in that nasty diner of yours. You’ve been far too big for your boots young lady.”
It had been foolish to complain, she knew that even before she had. After all as her mom went on to point out, she had agreed to in writing when Mark Tillman had become her mentor. Originally it had been preferable to the hot homecoming alternative and besides, until it had happened she had never believed that it really would.
At least with Mark, there had been decidedly less public embarrassment than at home and the worst he had even threatened her with was corner time outside her room in the corridor. After a while, and as she saw and embraced the improvement in her grades and life in general, she had come to prefer Tillman’s guidance to the old-fashioned welcome she had to contend with at the end of each semester.
All this ran through her mind as she bawled, bucked and danced across Tillman’s knee until she was thoroughly sorry. Even so the hairbrush blazed its painful tracks across her bare bottom for a good 10 minutes before he finally let up. By which time she was lost in hearty sobs and felt as if her tail end was fit to melt.
“You know I’ll give you more than this don’t you?” Tillman drawled.
“Yes Sir,” she wailed.
She had dropped to a crouch at his feet now and was claw-rubbing at her bottom as pulling off fire-wasps. Even from the corners of her eyes, which she dared not take from Tillman, she could see her bottom curves were a deep strawberry red as if she had sat in gloss finish paint.
“Next time I come around and you’re in this state. Next time I hear you dropped a grade to anything less than a B, and if you’re not a B plus grade average at the end of the semester, there will be hell to pay. Frankly you are a straight A student, and I won’t be off your case until you show me that.” Tillman was speaking low and tight, with a velvet-glove menace.
“Yes Sir,” she sniffed.
“Now since you don’t want to work, you can go stand in the corner for an hour or two while I assess the damage and make certain arrangements to have your last three essays re-submitted,” he told her, nodding at the only relatively clear space in her room. “Then in your spare time you can write 1,000 times: I am a lazy reckless brat and I am not too old to have my bare bottom spanked. Now tell me the rest.”
Cassie had already got halfway to the wall when she stopped and gaped at him. Then seeing he wasn’t joking she swallowed and reluctantly whispered, “I have to sign every page and put it on my peg board.”
He cocked an eyebrow.
“And hang the paddle back up,” she murmured.
He nodded and half smiled, saying, “Good girl. I’ll be phoning you every night to make sure you aren’t out. And I’ll be back on Saturday to check on all your progress.”
Cassie sighed and turned back to the wall and felt her heart sag. It was so embarrassing, she thought miserably, and the door still isn’t locked. But the chance to re-write her last few essays would put her on track and suddenly she wasn’t in freefall anymore.
“I don’t expect you’re off the hook with your folks yet,” he added as she clasped her hands in the small of her back just above her exposed red bottom. “They are desperately worried that you are returning to the bad old days.”
Cassie rolled her eyes where he couldn’t see them. It would take a year at least to get Mark Tillman off her… backside and she wouldn’t be surprised if he was called upon him to see her through her masters.
“I bet they are,” she said ruefully, “I just bet they are.”
