The Naughty Silence of Carly’s Angels

By Woodsy

I’d felt the craziness coming on for a while. It had started as a kind of chill – you know that unsettled, churning coldness you get when you know something’s not right?

It had started as a charge in the atmosphere, a slow storm, gathering itself around the place where I stood, like clouds pulling up the outer skirts of their billow dresses and preparing for battle.  And at first, it was limited to my alone times, like the walks I used to take when Jo needed some of her precious broody sulking time after a spanking and a cuddle.

But it was not just an outdoor thing anymore. It was everywhere.

I carried it around with me in everything I did, everything I said…

and then I pushed it down, hid it, so Jo wouldn’t know.  She was doing so well these days, after all that pain she had to deal with.  So well. This was the last thing she needed.

As I watched her out on the balcony of the flat, however, I suddenly felt a huge wave of coldness sweep through the core of me. It actually terrified me, to feel myself reacting this way to seeing her so happy.

She was leaning on the balcony rail, watching a little bat doing its zigzag hunting flight over the communal green space behind the flat, and she looked adorable in those snug little shorts of hers – though maybe I’m biased, given my abiding interest in her bottom.

She’d wrapped a piece of tinsel around her like a scarf, and was swirling the end of it in a kind of sparkly applause as the bat continued to delight her with its acrobatics. 

As I watched her wriggle her hotpanted derriere just a little too provocatively in the fading evening light, clearly well aware that I was watching, and clearly enjoying the tease, I found myself envying her freedom.

I remembered her first few weeks in Tide Haven, when I could see she needed more than anything to feel the breeze on her legs, but some deep wounded part of her felt terrified of exposing them if anyone else was around.

Now, watching her clearly revelling in both the touch of the breeze and my gaze, I should have felt thrilled, honoured even, to be the source of such abandon.

But instead, I just felt bereft, as though some part of me had lost that same sense of liberation.  I knew why. I could feel the gazillion different ways in which this trite new fix-everything, sort-everything Carly had been eating away at the girl I once was – and I hated it.

Turning to our Christmas tree to switch on the naughty star lights (as Jo loved to call our blinking fairy lights), I  saw my reflection distorted and distended in the scuffed gleam of a bulbous red decoration. It looked like some twisted version of myself, some alien mutation that had stolen me while I slept like something from a sci-fi movie.

“I see a bottom wriggling its way straight into a good spanking!” I called through the balcony door, trying to cover my unhappiness by throwing myself into character for the fun session I knew Jo was angling for.

From the way she giggled, it was clear she hadn’t noticed the dark turn in my mood.

***

So, just as she wanted, Jo got her good-girl spanking.

She got her time in that special embrace which only finds her when she’s over my knee.

She got her chance to drum her fingers on my legs with the thrill she only feels when I’m warming her bottom.

She got her special treat – and I, as ever, got the privilege of watching her tremble and shudder with delight; of feeling her curl herself around my lap; of knowing her joy in a way nobody else could, feeling her pour her vulnerability over me like soft fire.

She wrote enough about my “torch hands”, as she called them.  If only she knew the power of her own flame.

For what seemed like the longest time, it had been all I needed to sustain me. In fact, with that sad but delicious twist of irony you often get at such moments, this was actually the best fun time we’d had in months.

But I was still restless.  Not Carly restless anymore. Not quietly lost and yearning anymore.  No, this was a wilder thing altogether.  I was Jo restless, supercharged… I  was restless with a passion.

Jo was curled up on the couch next to me, nursing her stinging backside like it was an unexpected gift screaming to be unwrapped.  This was always such a precious time, just after the spanking, when she was trying to decide whether to dive into another cuddle, nestle herself in my chest or simply nurse her aching bottom across my lap. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, the way she pouted and smiled in the same moment, the way her hands worked the tight seat of those shorts like soft dough.

No bread, however freshly baked, would ever smell as precious to me as her thighs did.

I wanted to stay there forever.

I wanted to pinch her cheeks (both sets)… to squeeze her… to cuddle her…  probably even to spank her again, and then to massage that glorious backside of hers.

But I also wanted – needed even – to get the hell out of Dodge.

“Why don’t you make yourself a brew?” I asked, giving her one more firm but playful swat.

“Would you like one?” she shot back, feeling me start to rise and uncurling herself so as to beat me to my feet. “It’s ok, I’ll make it.”

Wow, was she beautiful!

“I… No, you have one.  I’ll have one when I get back. After all that paddling, my arms are tired and my legs are stiff from having a super adorable brat over my knee.  I need my stretch.”

“Want me to come with?”

“No, you chill awhile. I just need to sort out a few errands in my head – very dull, toppy stuff…”

I reached over to the tree, plucked a cute little fluffy ornament from one of the branches and booped Jo’s nose with it.

“You stay here and think about fun stuff while I’m gone – and behave!”

“That sounds like a challenge, ” she winked.  

***

So I sat there, on our favourite piece of beach.

I wanted to kick off my shoes, hang my legs off this rock, feel the tide swirl around my legs the way it always did when I came here with Jo.

But wouldn’t ya know –

wouldn’t ya just know the tide would be out tonight?

At least I had some cloud.  It was the glowing kind, too, lit up by moonbeams, burning like a billowy angel over my head. It was the cargo from something that had floated clear across the ocean just to empty itself here… on me. It was a cloud well suited to stillness.

Yeah, I had my poetry, too.  Maybe not quite like Jo’s but no less forceful. For years I had carried it deep and strong, like an underground  tide. But now Jo had come, her voice had dug under my skin, and all those phosphorescent angels had reawakened.  

So why was it dying here, on this cosmic shore with the luminescent cloud? Why was it dying in this heart that Jo loved so much?

What had happened to the girl who used to sit with Jo on this rock and hug her like a long-lost sister?  When did she turn into Jo’s new mum?  When did she become the sensible, home-making one?

I didn’t want this.

I didn’t want to be Carly the lovely one, who everyone thought was so damn sweet.

How could I be the lovely one? The kind one? How could I be these things when I felt so churned and angry all the time?

So lost.  

I wanted a road out of this place – and not a road that a million other people had already hiked so much more successfully than I could. Not a second-rate cast-off from Jo’s road, a little hand-me-down pond, drained off from her mighty river for me to paddle in (both literally and figuratively).

Hell, no – I wanted my own damn road, before everyone else’s need for a piece of Carly kindness stole any more of my soul.

I wanted enough to make my hands bleed, which was why my fists were beating on that rock…

which was why I was screaming out at all those invisible, unreachable shores beyond the darkness, just like Jo used to do –

screaming for something I’d somehow lost in myself while filling the gaps in other people.

***

As I walked back to the flat, I could see the lights of naughty angels winking in the window, and suddenly the only thing in the whole world I wanted was to feel Jo in my arms –

to feel the way she wrapped herself around me when we kissed…

to feel her warm backside against my palm and rub away my handiwork as we hugged. 

My own bottom was stinging furiously now – the aftermath of some phantom spanking that she had conjured in me without even realising it.  My hands were shaking so much, I could barely put my key in the door. 

For all that tideless stillness, it seemed my wings could still rekindle themselves in the light of one particular angel.