To Sleep...

I couldn't get to sleep. Insomnia is not usual for me, but occasionally it grasps me and shakes me awake and won't let go. The last time it was this bad was when my Dad died. Getting three or four hours of sleep a night when I regularly require nine makes me cranky and grumpy at best, which is not my usual persona at all.

I know I'm keeping you awake with my tossing and turning, which just makes me feel that much worse. Finally, I end up on my back, sighing in exasperation, close to tears of pure frustration.

I hear you roll towards me in the dark, yawning loudly then swallowing. "Still awake, Muffin?" The soft, tender words hurt almost more than your anger would.

Close enough to out and out sobbing, I nod my head vigorously - forgetting that you can't see it in the dark. I force a watery "huh-huh" out while hugging myself, praying that you don't want to hold or touch me, because then the dam will let loose and I'll embarrass myself again with a huge flood of tears.

Without another word, you slide down my body so that your mouth is at hip level, touching my knee in quiet command.

My leg flinches as tears spill down into my hair. "No," I say as softly as I can, hoping you won't hear it and somehow also won't notice that I'm not obeying. Fear at my own little rebellion drives the tears from my eyes.

This makes you sit up just a little, your hand both possessive and familiar on my thigh, as I worry and wait for the inevitable scolding - maybe even a spanking.

But I'm resigned to my fate, stuck in that eternal loop of bratty, fretful stubbornness.

"I know you're pretty strung out, hon, so I'm gonna give you another chance." Your voice is exquisitely neutral - neither condemning nor cajoling, merely stating.

I appreciate the second chance - they were almost never given - but I can't obey you. I simply can't. It's beyond me right now, despite the fact that everything in me has always wanted nothing more than to be your good little girl, even when I make the occasional mistake. I'm almost never blatantly trying to be bad; punishment is usually a sin of omission or miscalculation. I am not bratty by nature at all. I seek support and approval, which you gladly provide by the heaping bushel, not that it ever seems to be enough.

Discipline, too, is provide just that regularly, if and when you deem it necessary.

And you are just about to deem, since my legs remain where they are, tightly closed.

"Go get me your hairbrush," you say almost sadly, as if this is something you would rather not have to do, but you're too much my Daddy to relent. As if to illustrate the seriouness of your order, you move just a tad away, removing your warmth as an impetus for me to do as I am told.

My brush is a big wooden paddle brush - solid and hefty in the hand, and devastating even on a panty-protected butt. It's not the one I use in the morning to rearrange my curls because I have so much hair that the bristles don't get to the tangle underneath. But sometimes, when I'm deep into littlegirlspace, you sit me infront of you and brush my hair and it's positively mezmerizing for the both of us - quieting and calming and so perfectly Daddy/littlegirlish.

But that's not what's going to happen with the brush this time, I'd be willing to bet on it. Nothing anywhere near that pleasant. I am slow - much too slow, and I know it - slow to move, to get off the bed and cross the cool, rug-scattered hardwood floor to my pretty oak vanity. The brush is where it's always supposed to be - innocuously on display on a unique, mirrored oak tray you brought back from an antique shop one day.

I deliver it to you with my head down, lip pouted out, with an almost defiant air that cannot be good for the health of my rear. "C'mere." With the head of the brush, you pat the spot on the bed next to you that I just vacated. I climb over you and fall into place on my back as you turn on the touch lamp on the nightstand next to the bed. When you roll back over to me, all it takes is one bushy, raised eyebrow to get me to sigh exasperatedly and move onto my stomach, some safer amount of inches away from you.

"Get'cher butt back here." A serious order, idly delivered. When you're relaxed, the facade of the urbane businessman fades and the country boy peeks out, complete with soft twang.

One look at your face confirms that you were not fooling around. How I could have the audacity to be grumpy with you when you have the brush in your hand, I don't know. I can only plead sleep-deprivation. I sigh in a manner that leaves no doubt that I am doing you a considerable favor in obeying you as I scooch over a little bit more, then a little bit more, until my side is plastered to your front, stretched out shoulder to toe.

The sigh was not a smart move. Not at all.

If I had been the contrite, weepy little girl I'd been when you first realized I was still awake, I would probably have gotten no more than a few slaps - probably even with your hand - that would have made me cry and gotten some of what I bottle up out, then you could kiss and cuddle me and perhaps bring me off and lull me to sleep in the aftermath.

But the easy way is rarely what I choose, by word or deed, and with you the hard way means being forcibly reduced to tears by an implement in your hand, ruthlessly applied to the area on my body that seems to have been specifically designed to receive such correction. Just as we fit together so perfectly in other equally intimate ways, so our compatability also extends to this.

It is a gift, a depth of communication that I will not come to appreciate until after you're out of my life. A hard, humbling depth of trust.

You need. I give.

I need. You give.

In spades.

The sound of that thing as it bruises me is something I will never forget. It's not the artifical *snap* or *crack* of so many wannabe-spanked authors. It's a dullish, and unbelievably painful thud - on my butt and my heart at the same time, and I'm never quite sure which agony is worse. I hate to disappoint you in anyway, but seem to inevitably, regardless of my good intentions.

I'm supposed to lie still while being punished. It is an impossible task, but one I do my best to manage because I know full well that I do not want extra bonus swats - even from just your hand. You are scrupulous about covering all of what you - in your military-esque style of thinking - would consider the target area - every inch of my rounded cheeks and down the backs of those poor, innocent thighs.

Sitting tomorrow is going to be an adventure in pain - no flopping into a chair for me, and no tight jeans.

As the spanking continues, I feel as if I would give anything I owned - sell years off my life, if necessary - to stop another connection between flat, unforgiving wood and cringing butt. My fists clench; I have my pillow locked in a death-hug, squeezing the stuffing out of it with every yipe and yelp.

But no tears. Where have they gone? Always helpful, they desert me in my hour of need. I'm obviously hurting but dry-eyed.

"Please, Sir - no - more," I pant. "Ow - uh - ssssssssss - umm - please - no -"

Your answer is to increase your staccato tempo and cup my face in your palm.

It was the hand that did it, and not the one holding the brush.

Hairbrushes, belts, canes, paddles - these kinds of tantalizing distress I can bear - I crave it; it craves me, not that I don't feel its physical effects - I most certainly do. For days after.

Tenderness, compassion, understanding - those I cannot endure. They are anathema to me.

But the gates had been opened by that simple gesture of love and affection. I bury my face in the pillow, my whole body tensed and defensive against them, but the battle is lost.

Six more swats, delivered in a mind-numbing set that marks me well in every corner of my backside, and the brush is dropped to the floor and I am in your arms.

You hold me as tightly as you can, kissing my face, letting me cry as you know I need to, rocking and hugging and rocking more. But well before I've cried it out, while I'm still sniffling and weakly compliant, you drift down my body to the area between my open legs. I can feel your chest hair dragging over my skin, over the already exposed flesh between my legs.

My groans immediately take on a different quality entirely as you dip your head to the heart and heat of me, that open, wet mouth trapping my straining clitty and surrounding it with your unbearable heat, laying the flat of your tongue directly on top of that not-so-little bud. One hand reaches up to capture a nipple, milking firmly, insistently, while two fingers of your right hand find their home inside me, still having to press hard to open me for your invasion, even after all this time.

In this manner, I am taken - filled and licked and pinched and rolled, at times praying for you to stop, other times acknowldging humbly that I will die if you do. You know me too well for me to be able to deny you any response. Your hand reaches deep inside me as I arch to your mouth, inadvertantly impaling myself further. You take my action as an invitation - and whether or not it was is of no concern - adding a third digit and forcing me to accommodate it, knowing how I love to be stretched by you, how much I enjoy submitting to you this way.

That is the icing on the cake, as you knew it would be, just that slight pinching pain as I try to relax and accept the girth of your triangled fingers while your lips and tongue worry that nub constantly, driving me towards my end with a frightening single-mindedness.

My body demands the utmost tension, hips rising and privates clamping down on your hand, holding you locked in place as I begin to keen that soulful, wordless song that hearlads the inevitability of fulfillment. In contrast to my frantic gyrations, your movements become more languid, making me take it slow and experience every long second of the ultimate pleasure, drawing out those few droplets of time before the first blissfully painful contraction, when my mind is free of every thought save that of unbearable, prickly anticipation.

When it comes, when I mindlessly obey the dictates of my body and spasm and jerk and clench and literally SCREAM with it, in an ungainly and entirely uncontrollable display, you will not let me get away from you - from those plunging fingers or your ravenous mouth - until ever drop of ecstasy has been coaxed from me and I collapse, spent and exhausted onto the bed.

I am still panting, barely beginning to recover, when you wrap me in your arms, kissing me tenderly on the lips. I can taste myself on you, and your acceptance of that taste is comforting to me.

"Sleepy?" you ask, rubbing my back lazily.

"God yes," I mumble, barely coherent.

"I was hoping to make you faint again," you casually throw out, knowing what an institation it will be.

Too tired to smack you like I should, I settled for tugging on the nearest tuft of chest hair, quite satisfied with the yelped results.

"Sleep," you command, kissing me on the top of my head.

And I do.