before his wife had died, in fact. But though he believed he had done a very good job to this point of making it seem like he had had this sort of tutorial with some other hypothetical tutee at some point in the past, he had never actually had the conversation with anyone. Indeed, he never truly supposed he ever would have this conversation, though it had featured prominently in a great many fantasies he built up over the years.
When he had presented the domestic-discipline contract to Miriam, what seemed like a thousand years and a different life ago now, it had been "Here's a contract I thought might be fun to play with," and (from her) "Yeah, OK–this could be fun," and signing it. It hadn't been real, even though from a documentary point of view, that contract and this affidavit were directly related. The contract for Miriam had been a greatly shortened redaction of an earlier version of the document he was now, to his astonishment, about to give to Sarah Harshaw.
But he lived in Corbin's Bend now, and she was from Corbin's Bend, and everything was different here, at least for a man who had always longed to try the kind of lifestyle that had brought all the families of the community there to live. Certainly the first spanking he had witnessed in Colorado, that first Sunday at St. Michael's, had emboldened him.
Sitting in his office with Sarah, her hand still on his lap because she apparently hadn't thought to remove it, waiting for the correct moment to answer her question ("sir... what do you mean?") in the wake of the incredible surge of arousal he had felt when she had actually called him “sir”, he thought back to how excited he had been when the Rector of the little parish had said, "And, since you're a Head of Household, I'll need to familiarize you with our practice of penitential spanking. It usually makes sense for a new HoH to witness one of the single girls' sessions. Are you free after coffee-hour this Sunday?"
And then he had been hard all the way through Mass, looking about him and wondering whether any of the pretty young things there had confessed their sins to the Rector the day before.
One of them had, it turned out, and had been sentenced to the church strap for offenses known only to her confessor. During coffee-hour, he–Father Henry, a wonderful elderly British priest–had led Dunn and another member, Jake Tuttle, back to a room adjoining the Rector's study, where, to Dunn's astonishment, there was a sort of padded wooden bench, to which were attached at the base, leather straps, and fastened by them, around her tightly-closed knees, a young woman. Her skirt had been tucked up to reveal her panty-covered backside, but the rest of her was hidden from view behind a black curtain lowered from the ceiling and draped over her just above her waist, so that Dunn could see nothing but her shapely bottom and lovely, white-stocking-covered legs.
To his momentary, reflexive embarrassment, Dunn realized he was disappointed her modest pink panties hadn't been pulled down–so that Dunn had no chance to get a peek at the secrets between her thighs. He was surprised, though, a moment later, to realize that being in Corbin's Bend, and in a church in Corbin's Bend where clearly the strapping of young women was a regular practice, had caused his embarrassment to pass away. He felt a need to think further through this emotional turnabout, but at that instant he felt he had become more himself than he had been in years–or, perhaps, ever. He was a man who strapped the panty-covered bottoms of young women, when called upon to do so. In the process of administering punishment, he looked upon those bottoms. As a man still in his sexual prime, how could he not want to see more of this young woman's charms?
"St. Michael's," said Father Henry, "is a very special parish, because we have, as a parish, decided that corporal punishment is a way of discipline acceptable to the Lord, and to us. We maintain consistency