The Conjugal Clock

by Ashley B. D. Zacharias

1. The Tradition of Discipline

“That’s a clock?” It looked like an ornately carved grandfather clock, but had only a single hand and no numbers on the plain white face. “It looks old. Is it an antique?” Veronica ran her fingers lightly over the haut relief figures carved into the dark wooden pilasters that ran up the corners, but was embarrassed to examine them too closely – the carvings depicted men and women engaged in all manner of sexual activities, from kissing to copulation. Even if it was a wedding present and family heirloom, there was no way in hell this obscene thing would have a place in her new home.

Anja, her soon-to-be sister-in-law giggled. “It’s a very special clock. It goes in your bedroom. Your husband winds it.” She giggled again.

Anja’s uncharacteristic bursts of giggles were getting on Veronica’s nerves, but because the entire female side of her fiancé’s family watching her, she had to suppress her annoyance. She told herself that Anja was probably as nervous as she was in the presence of three generations of dour matriarchs.

Wilma, the oldest and most dour of the clan, spoke for the first time. “This is an important family tradition. Though he would not like to admit it, the clock is more important to Cary than you realize. It will take some time for you to understand the role that it will play in your marriage, but you will come to appreciate it, I assure you. For now, we ask only that you trust us and accommodate our tradition.” Her German accent was heavy, but her words were clear.

“Of course,” Veronica agreed, vowing silently to ditch the ugly thing at the first opportunity.

“We all know exactly how you feel,” Clay, Anja’s mother and her soon-to-be mother-in-law, said in a sympathetic tone. “Every one of us felt exactly the same way, the day before our wedding when we received our own clocks.” She laughed. “Every single one of us promised ourselves that we would throw the clock in the garbage as soon as the honeymoon was over.”

Veronica blushed. Clay was reading her mind.

“But every one of us changed our opinion when we saw how the clock served to maintain our marriages. In seven generations, there has not been a single divorce in the Hobard family. That does not happen by luck or because we force ourselves to suffer through bad marriages; that happens because every marriage in this family is a happy one. These bedroom clocks make our marriages happy. I think it’s fair to say that every one of us has grown to love our clocks, no matter how much we disliked them at first.”

Anja giggled again.

Veronica looked at the clock again, trying to see it differently, but it still looked big and ugly and obscene. “How does it work?”

Wilma answered, “Like Anja said, Cary will wind it for the first time when you return from your honeymoon and he will continue to wind it from then on. It is important that you never let the clock wind down. You must make sure that he winds it often. Remember that. You must make sure that the clock never stops.”

“What if it does stop?” Veronica was puzzled. If Cary were winding it, then how was it her responsibility to make sure that it did not wind down?

“We will discuss that if it happens. If you are a wise woman, we will never have that discussion.”

Anja giggled. “I let mine wind down once and I sure regretted it, let me tell you. If you’re smart, you won’t let it wind down. Then you’ll never have to know what happens when it does.”

Wilma looked at Anja with disapproval, and then turned back to Veronica. “It’s important that you understand something before you take your wedding vows. The Hobard family believes in one aspect of traditional marriages that is too often forgotten today. Tomorrow, you and Cary will swear to forsake all others. This means that you will engage in relations with each other exclusively from that day on. The modern woman is fond of the explicit part of that vow; she loves the idea that her husband will never again make love to another woman until the day he dies. But there is an implicit part of that vow that many modern women prefer to ignore. It is only reasonable to expect your husband to forsake other women for the rest of his life if you are willing to satisfy him fully yourself. Hobard men do not stray because Hobard women keep their husbands satisfied. Completely. If you are not prepared to give your husband what he needs to keep him happy within your marriage, then you should not take your vows tomorrow. No one will think less of you if you change your mind today.”

Veronica was insulted by the implication that she might not be sufficiently eager to please her husband and snapped back, “You mean that you expect me to spend my life barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen?”

Clay, her soon-to-be mother-in-law, replied in a reasonable tone, “Hobard wives have closets full of shoes, cooks to prepare our meals, and exactly as many children as we want. You will find more variety in our life styles than in most other families and you will have a degree of freedom that feminists should envy. I don’t think you realize how many of us hold senior positions in Hobard companies. You can be a corporate executive if you are willing to do the work. Most of us, though, prefer to let our husband earn the money while we devote time to charitable service. Similar work, similar hours, different ends. No one is going to oppress you. All we are saying is that you have a duty to your marriage. The duty of fidelity creates a reciprocal duty of service. If you find the idea of keeping Cary happy in bed to be unreasonable, if you think that is oppressive, then you should not marry him. All we are suggesting is that you think about this before you allow Cary to bind himself to you tomorrow.”

“I think that we’ve said enough for now,” Wilma said with a tone of finality. “We hope to see you at your wedding tomorrow and we will be pleased to welcome you into our family.”

The women filed out of the room, leaving Veronica alone with the weird, silent clock.

The wedding was excessive in every way: a wealthy family putting on an extravagant show for their assembled friends and business associates. For average people, the wedding day is the bride’s day, but for the wealthiest, the bride is merely the excuse sitting at the centre of a business affair that has been disguised as a social event. Veronica was not ignored, but she was well aware that, though she was the one standing at the altar, she was not the most important person in the cathedral.

The honeymoon – a week in Hawaii – was far more enjoyable for her. She loved Cary dearly and could think of no better way to spend her time as a new bride than lounging on the beach in the sun next to him.

She forgot about the clock until she returned home. Then, when they went upstairs to change after their long flight back to Minnesota, she saw that it had been moved into their nuptial bedroom. No one had asked her permission or had even asked where she wanted it placed. It was not discretely tucked into a corner – as she would require if she really were forced to have it at all – but stood tall and ugly in the large area between the bed and her bureau.

She shrieked at the sight. “Cary, what’s that thing doing there?”

He looked at her curiously. “I thought that Mom told you about the family tradition. Every Hobard home has a conjugal clock in the bedroom.”

She sneered at the man she adored. “Not smack in the middle of the bedroom. You can move it over into the corner behind the door.”

“Actually, I can’t. It’s been installed. It can’t be moved.”

“Of course it can be moved.” She pushed on it, but it did not budge. She tried to push it over, but found that it was firmly affixed to the floor.

“I’m afraid not. It’s bolted to the joists. Actually, the stress is spread over several joists. You could climb to the top and hang your entire weight off one side if you wanted. It would support you just fine. In fact, it would support both of us at the same time. It’s very well constructed.”

Their bedroom was huge; she had ample room to walk completely around the hideous thing. The carvings on the back were even more lewd than the ones on the front. She took the time to examine it more closely than when it had been first presented to her more than a week ago. “Hey, these are our faces carved on these figures. Every one of the women is me! And every one of the men is you!”

He nodded blandly. “Of course. It’s our clock. It was custom made for you and me.”

“Well, I’m not going to have our friends see carvings of you fucking me!” She used crude language to shock her mild husband and convince him that she was serious.

“Of course not. This is our bedroom. We won’t be inviting any friends in here.”

Veronica wanted to scream in frustration. Her new husband’s reasonable responses only served to increase her ire. “The stupid thing doesn’t even tell the right time,” she snarled.

He shrugged. “Not in the usual sense of telling time, but it is a clock of sorts. I’ll show you.” He tugged on one of the carved male figures on the front of the clock and it popped away from the woman that it was screwing from behind. His motion was casual; he knew exactly what he was doing. Veronica looked closely and saw that the woman who was bending over from the waist being screwed was her. The little statue’s face had an expression that could only be described as adoration as it turned to look over her shoulder at the male figure who was screwing her. Presumably that was Cary, though his face was not visible from this angle, When the male figure was pulled away from the female, she could see that, where the male figure’s penis should have been, there was, instead, a heavy steel shaft entering the clock at the point where the female’s vulva should have been. Cary walked around the clock, pushing and pulling at the carved figures here and there. When he returned to the front, he twisted the male figure around several times. She could hear clicking as the shaft wound a spring mechanism somewhere inside. As he turned it, the single hand on the face advanced clockwise until it had moved almost all the way around the dial. When the figure could turn no more, he pushed it back into position so that, once again, it looked like nothing more than a wooden carving of Cary frozen in the act of screwing the carving of her from behind.

Both husband and wife stared at the clock silently for a long minute, each consumed with private thoughts. Entirely different thoughts. There was a slow, quiet ticking, almost too soft to hear – the sound of a finely crafted machine performing its intended function.

Finally, Veronica said, “Now what?”

“Now we get on with our lives. This house has been temporarily furnished with only the most basic necessities. They all have to be replaced, so you’ve got a lot of work to do. The clock is mine, but you have to furnish and decorate the rest of the house to your taste. I have the number of an interior decorator who’ll be available to help you. You should call her tomorrow.”

The honeymoon was over and Veronica was too tired after the flight to want to make love to her husband that night.

The next night, she thought that they ought to christen their marital bed properly, and Cary was looking at her rather wistfully, so she let him make love to her.

She was shocked when, as soon as their lovemaking was finished, Cary climbed out of bed and engaged in the ritual of winding the ugly clock. She noticed that the single hand had moved to a position almost straight down – what would have been somewhere near six if the clock face had numbers on it – before he wound it back toward the top – about where the ‘one’ would have been if there had been numbers on the dial.

“Why did you do that?”

He looked at her in surprise. “Do what?”

“Play silly buggers with that ugly clock.”

“That’s the rule. Whenever we make love, I have to rewind the clock. Hobard men have been doing that for seven generations. I have to follow family tradition.”

“What if you don’t?”

“Then it would wind down. That can’t happen.”

The penny dropped. Veronica exploded in fury. “What in hell are you saying? Are you telling me that that damned clock is timing how often we make love?”

“Of course. I thought that you understood that.”

She stared at the dial. “You mean that anyone who looks at that clock can see exactly how long it’s been since the last time you screwed me.” Her voice was low and dangerous.

He shrugged nonchalantly. “Well, yes. That’s why it’s called a conjugal clock. But nobody is going to see it. Our bedroom is our private place.”

“The maid will see it.”

Cary looked puzzled. “So what?”

Veronica never before realized that Cary did not think of the household staff as people. To him, they were part of the furnishings. “I don’t want the maid to see this clock. Eventually, she’ll figure out what it means.”

“Okay. If that’s a problem for you, then we don’t have to let the maid in here. If you want, you can keep this room clean yourself. Or I will. I may be rich, but I’m not helpless, you know. If you want, I’ll vacuum and dust. I don’t mind.”

She was getting sidetracked by this discussion about housework. “That’s not good enough to ensure that nobody sees it. I’m not nobody. I’m somebody and I’m going to see your damned clock every time I come to bed. I don’t want to have to look at any clock telling me how long it’s been since I got screwed. I don’t even want such a clock to exist.”

He shrugged again. “Well, we don’t have any choice about that, really. The family is really good about letting everyone live their own lives however they want to, except for the conjugal clock. If we don’t follow that tradition, then they won’t consider us part of the Hobard family any longer. They are absolutely rigid about that. Remove the clock and we’ll be disowned. Don’t make me choose between you and the rest of the family. I love you and there’s no question that I’d choose you, but it would be a terrible thing to have to go through. Please, for my sake, just put up with the clock. If there’s some other reason that you can’t tolerate them, if you think they are treating you badly in some other way, then I will gladly turn my back on them. But not over the clock. I’m asking you to do this one thing for me.”

She loved him. Surely, for the sake of love, she could put up with a single ugly clock in the middle of their bedroom.

But, as she lay in the dark, trying to fall asleep, she remembered the gathering of the Hobard women when they gave her the clock the day before the wedding. They had warned her repeatedly against letting the clock run down.

Now that she knew what she had to do to keep that from happening, she wondered what would happen if she failed. And she wondered just how long she would have to abstain from sex before it ran down completely. Judging by how far the hand had moved in one day, it would not take long.

Over the next few months, she was as busy as any lady of leisure could be. Cary worked long hours, doing his part to manage the family businesses, but Veronica never felt alone. Clay, Anja, and the other Hobard women were always ready to help: giving suggestions about setting up the household, providing introductions to the cream of society, helping entertain Cary’s business acquaintances, getting her involved in the most important volunteer activities. Yet they never seemed to be intruding. A phone call here, a luncheon there, a suggestion for a caterer or florist was as far as they went; Veronica never felt that they were involved in her personal life at all and she gratefully accepted their assistance in charting the deep and dangerous waters of high society. Without their help, she would have been at a total loss.

Veronica had a fine pedigree and a good upbringing. Her family was definitely upper middle class. Her father was a lawyer who had been appointed to the bench and now served in one of the state district courts. Her mother was a partner in a management consulting firm that specialized in business process re-engineering of back office operations of mid-sized retail businesses. Veronica had graduated from Cornell University and earned her MBA at the University of Chicago, going the extra distance to acquire accreditation as a certified financial accountant in the process. As a child, she had never lacked anything and never had to miss any opportunity for lack of money. As an adult, she had been earning a good salary as an accountant for a major national firm.

But none of that had prepared her for the ocean of wealth that she now had to navigate. Being upper middle class is a far piece from being filthy rich; and merely dating the wealthy young man that she had met in graduate school imposed far less demands on her than being married into his family.

The other women never mentioned the conjugal clock again; and she never raised the subject. But the clock never wound down. Cary was a kind and gentle lover but he almost never asked her to make love. He left it to her to decide when and how she wanted to make love to him. And she invited him to bed frequently because the clock kept her aware of his needs. It was not so much that she was afraid of the consequences of letting the time run out as it was being aware that everyone, including Cary, expected that she would make love to her husband often. As the hand drew near to the midnight position – that was how she thought of the hand pointing straight up no matter what time of day it was in reality – she became concerned that she was going to disappoint her husband if she did not accommodate him soon. If she let the hand get too close to midnight, then she began to feel anxious because she felt that she was failing to be a proper wife. She loved her husband deeply and, when she looked at the clock and saw the hand pointing to the last quarter of the dial, she found herself overwhelmed by an urge to fuck him. She had timed the mechanism and estimated that it would take about forty-five hours to wind down. Making love to Cary every second day – every forty-eight hours – was not quite often enough to maintain the schedule, but she did not have to make love to him every day. She could screw him in the evening, take a full day off, and then screw him again the following morning before work and have plenty of time to spare. Once in a while, she even let it go to the second afternoon, letting the hand advance dangerously close to midnight.

Though he worked long hours, he punched no time clock and had no fixed schedule. All his meetings were held at his discretion – he was subject to an endless parade of people who all wanted something from him. He told her that she could call him at any time and he would be home within a half hour; she learned from experience that he could keep that promise. They developed a code phrase, “I haven’t seen you for a while,” that meant, “Please rush home and screw me as soon as possible.” And, of course, he was rigorous about rewinding the clock every time they finished making love.

Once in a while, he had to go out of town on a business trip. Before he left, he did something to the figures around the clock and it halted; when he returned, he fiddled with it again to restart it.

Veronica had explored the clock in detail, but its function remained a mystery to her. Almost every figure carved on the sides moved in almost every direction, making little clicks before springing back to their original positions. There were dozens of figures, making countless possible combinations of moves; she quickly realized that she would never discover how to halt the timer or reset it from blind trial and error. She soon stopped fiddling with it.

Once she tried following Cary around to the back as he rewound it. He laughed and gently asked for his privacy. But there was an underlying ring of steel in his voice; he had no intention of allowing her to see how to work it.

She still hated the clock, but she loved her life with Cary. When he had wound it for the first time, he had implied that living with the hideous thing would be a small price to pay for a perfect life. He had been right.

Of course, eventually she let the clock run down. And, of course, it was entirely her fault. They had been married for almost eight months when they had their first real fight. He wanted her to go to a play – Titus Andronicus – with a business associate and his wife but Veronica disliked Shakespeare in general and Titus in particular. She found the gang rape and subsequent mutilation of Lavinia nauseatingly sadistic. Rather than simply saying that she disliked the play, she had told Cary that he was thoughtless to expect that she would be willing to attend Shakespeare’s goriest blood fest. She had screamed that he was a bully and she was having none of his abusive behavior. It was all nonsense, of course – he had never been anything but thoughtful and considerate – but she was feeling bored and wanted a little drama at home instead of having to go to the theater for it.

She was soon to get more drama than she wanted; she had lashed out at him without realizing that she was forcing herself into a trap.

When she stormed up to her bedroom, she glanced at the clock out of habit and saw that the hand was nearing the forbidden midnight position; she remembered that she had not made love to Cary the previous day, which may have been the reason for her boredom. But what could she do now? How could she make love to a man that she had just called an abusive bully?

There was nothing for it but to say, “Fuck that hideous clock,” and let the time run out. And that’s exactly what she did.

She was still in the room three hours later when she heard the clock’s last tick. Its mechanism was almost silent. For months she had been unaware of its slow, barely perceptible tick-tock. But now that it was completely silent, she was sharply aware of the absence of sound. The bedroom was preternaturally quiet. But nothing happened. The clock had stopped and doom had not fallen on her head. She regretted the fight with her husband, had regretted it from the moment that she had stormed out of the room, but found no reason to regret the clock winding down.

Cary went to the play without her. When he came home, he found her already in bed with her back turned, pretending to be asleep. He climbed into his side of the bed and pretended to fall asleep, too. Eventually both fell into fitful slumbers.

The next morning, the storm had blown over; she spoke softly to him; he spoke kindly to her. He apologized, though he had nothing to apologize for. She magnanimously accepted his apology, though she was keenly aware that she should be the one begging his forgiveness.

She still did not feel like making love to him and did not offer. He did not ask. It would have made no difference. Though she did not yet know it, once the clock had stopped, it would not be restarted without outside intervention. He had no power to restart it now.

At ten o’clock, intervention arrived in the form of Wilma, Clay, and Anja. They knocked; Veronica admitted them and rang for tea to be served in the living room.

As soon as they were seated, Wilma came directly to the point. “You allowed the clock to run down.”

She shrugged. If she had not apologized to Cary, who deserved a full measure of her contrition, she was certainly not going to apologize to this old lady. “How do you know?”

“We were alerted immediately. The exact mechanism does not matter. What matters are the consequences.”

“What consequences?”

“By tradition, you have a choice between two options. The first option is to leave your marriage. Under the terms of your prenuptial agreement, you can leave at any time, but you will leave empty handed. No alimony, no support, no remuneration of any kind. You just walk away.”

Veronica did not want to lose her marriage. Apart from the practical issue of having to move back into her mother’s house and look for a job, she loved Cary. Losing him would hurt worse than losing his wealth. “And the other option?” she asked, watching Wilma through narrowed eyes.

“Accept a whipping as well as undergoing a training regimen.”

“What?” Her mind refused to believe what her ears had heard.

“The punishment for letting the clock run down is a whipping. Do not be misled. The whipping will not be merely symbolic. It will be a punishment. It will not leave any permanent scarring, but will be a painful experience. You must accept that pain or leave your home.”

Veronica digested this for a moment, and then flushed with anger and spat, “I won’t do either. I won’t let myself be whipped and I won’t leave my husband.”

“Refusing to make a choice would result in more severe consequences. If you try to stay without submitting to chastisement, then Cary will be told to leave you. One of two things will happen. Either he will do so, in which case your prenuptial agreement leaves you in the same position as if you had walked away, or he will stay with you and be disowned. What you may not realize is that none of our husbands, Cary included, owns anything. Everything, including this house, the businesses, even your furniture is held in trust by the family. If Cary is disowned, he will be left as penniless as you. Really there are only three possible outcomes, you submit to a whipping, you leave without anything, or you drag Cary into penury with you. You have two days to decide. We will return the day after tomorrow, at noon, prepared to administer your chastisement. If you are not prepared to accept it, then you will leave this house immediately. If that is your choice, then I advise you to arrange transportation for yourself as we will not provide cab fare.”

The three women stood as one. “We will show ourselves out.”

Veronica spent the following day in a quandary. There was no way on earth that she would submit to anything as barbaric as a whipping. The idea was medieval. But how could she force Cary to abandon the life that he had always known just to save her an afternoon of pain and humiliation? He was smart, educated, would have no problem finding a new job, but they’d have to start from nothing. No matter how hard they both worked, they would have so little for so long, how could he not end up hating her for her pride.

Her doorbell rang in the early afternoon. She let the maid answer it. A minute later, Clay, her mother-in-law, walked into her family room. Before Veronica could speak, Clay held up her hand and said, “I know that you don’t want to see me, Veronica, but please let me be a mother for a few minutes. I’m here to plead with you on Cary’s behalf. I know how much he loves you. I know that he would let himself be disowned rather than lose you. I don’t want to see him suffer through that. And I don’t want to see you suffer through it, either. Every time you look at him going to work in some tedious job that grinds him down day by day, you’ll feel that you let him down. That you forced him into a life that he never wanted. And that will grind you down, too. You and he will end up resenting each other, no matter how hard you try.

“I know how awful the idea of letting us whip you sounds. It sounds like we are winning and you are losing. Try not to think of it that way. Think of it like an initiation into some secret society. Think of it as a few minutes of pain that you are willing to suffer for your love of your husband. Think of it as being like a medical procedure or childbirth. I’ve suffered through childbirth three times. The whipping is less painful than that and it ends a lot more quickly. If I could, I would gladly suffer the whipping on your behalf, but I can’t. All I can do is beg you to go through with it regardless of your distaste. You aren’t alone, you know. Sooner or later every one of us slips up and lets the clock run out. We’ve all faced exactly the same choice that you’ve been given and we’ve all had to grit our teeth and suffer through it ourselves. None of us are going to think any less of you for doing the same. And I can tell you one other thing in confidence. You kept your clock running longer than most of us did the first time. As Cary’s mother, I’m grateful to you for that. I’ve never seen him happier than he has been for the last few months.” She took Veronica’s hand in hers, looked deep into her eyes and said, “Please, for the sake of your love of him, for the sake of his happiness, do this thing tomorrow and let us be done with it and get on with our lives again.”

Veronica could see the fear in Clay’s eyes – fear that Veronica would make the wrong choice.

Clay said no more, but rose and left the room. Veronica heard the front door slam a minute later and she was alone with her choice once again.

That evening, she received a phone call from Anja. “Veronica, it’s Anja. I know that you don’t want to get whipped tomorrow, but I’m hoping that you’ll be brave about it. I love having you as a sister-in-law and really, really want you to stay in the family. Let me take you to lunch on Saturday and I’ll tell you all about when I got my whipping. We’ll laugh about it. Really. It seems horrible now, but afterwards, it’s kind of funny in a way. There’s a ridiculous side to the whole thing that you can’t see now, but, I promise you, it’ll turn out all right in the end. I’ll be here for you. I promise.”

Veronica did not know what to say, apart from, “Thank you.”

“Saturday lunch. Remember. I’m looking forward to it. See you tomorrow. Love you.” The phone clicked in Veronica’s ear.

See her tomorrow? She meant, “See you getting soundly whipped.” Some way to show how much everyone loved her.

Cary had not said a word about the clock since it had stopped, though he was certainly aware of it. They had not had sex in five days – the longest period of abstinence since their wedding day. She wondered if he was being driven mad with horny frustration.

Over dinner, Veronica watched him eat, listened to him chatter on about the last meeting of the family’s charitable foundation, and wondered if he had any idea what she was going through. He appeared to be utterly ignorant about the dilemma that was tearing her apart. Surely if he knew that she was contemplating leaving him tomorrow, he would look at least a little bit worried. Surely if he knew that his family wanted to whip her, he would look either outraged or sympathetic. Instead, he looked like a man at peace with the world.

He looked utterly ignorant.

Six women stood on Veronica’s porch waiting patiently to see if she would answer the bell or if she had moved out of the house. Wilma, Clay, and Anja were joined by Clay’s younger sister, Adalgisa, her sister-in-law, Crystal, and their son’s wife, Lise. Veronica had only met the latter two women a couple of times; they were almost strangers to her.

Anja was twitching with anxiety, but Clay was so terrified that Veronica had made the wrong choice that she could barely breathe. Wilma looked impassive, but there was always uncertainty at this point. The family myth was that no Hobard marriage had failed in seven generations, but that was a lie. Wilma knew of a half dozen failures – three of them because the wives had failed to submit – one a Hobard by birth and two wives by marriage. The true Hobard woman had had the honor to leave alone voluntarily; one of the others had forced her husband to expel her and the third, most tragically, had convinced her husband to leave with her. He was disowned and, after a decade of suffering through an increasingly intolerable marriage, had committed suicide at the age of thirty-five.

In all those generations of marriages, only a half dozen failures was a remarkable rate of success, but the three wives who refused to submit were enough to give Wilma and Clay ample reason to be afraid. Both were certain that if Veronica left, Cary would follow her and be disowned; they could see that his love was that strong. The women on the porch could only hope that Veronica’s love for him was strong enough to protect him from that choice.

Clay wanted to cry in joy when Veronica finally opened the door and said, “Come in.” Veronica’s decision was clear from her appearance. She was wearing no makeup and her hair was tucked out of the way in a French braid. She was wearing a simple white cotton dress with a high collar and long full skirt. Anja was reassured by the deliberate symbolism of innocent martyrdom. Veronica was approaching this with an attitude of ironic cynicism that would serve her well. Everything was going to be just fine.

As the women filed through the door, Veronica smiled wryly and explained, “It took me a minute to get down here because I had to answer the door myself. I’ve dismissed the maid and cook for the day. I have no intention of entertaining them with my screaming and crying.”

“Take us to the clock,” Wilma intoned. Veronica immediately understood the reason for the pretentious formality. The women were going to follow a prescribed ritual in order to remove, as much as possible, any personal feelings that might give rise to later recriminations and bitterness.

Veronica led the parade upstairs and into the master bedroom. It was large enough accommodate all seven women. She had made the bed, anticipating that at least one woman would need to come up here to reset the clock and had not wanted to appear slovenly.

As soon as all seven women were in the room, Wilma manipulated several figures on the clock. The upper half of the pilaster to the left of the dial rotated away, revealing a hollow space inside. A heavy two-foot-long leather strap with a wooden handle was hanging inside. The lower third of the strap was divided into two tails. If Veronica were more knowledgeable about the history of corporal punishment, she would have recognized it as a traditional heavy-weight Scottish tawse. Instead, she merely saw it as a leather strap that was going to hurt a lot. Seeing the reality of the thing brought her fear to the surface and her heart began to pound.

Her next thought was that this was not a thing like a cat o’ nine tails that would be used to flog her back. This looked like something that would be used only on her ass. The pain would be bad enough, but the humiliation was going to sting worse. What had Clay said? Pretend that it is an initiation into a secret society and play along. Why had she allowed herself to love Cary so much that she would be willing to allow herself to be degraded this way?

Rather than staring at the instrument of her imminent suffering, she turned to look at the other women.

“Remove your clothing,” Wilma said emotionlessly.

Humiliation was to be heaped on humiliation, but this was not entirely unexpected. Veronica refused to turn away in any show of useless modesty, but continued to face them as she slipped her shoes off, unbuttoned the dress with trembling fingers from the collar to the waist, then slipped it over her head and tossed it on the bed. She did not have to be reminded that 'clothing' included bra and panties. She slipped the sports bra off, baring her breasts to public view, then slipped her panties down and stepped out of them. She did not look at the other women because she did not want to see them staring back at her.

Wilma did something complicated to the clock and the lower right side folded out and up in two parts, forming a three-foot long wooden shelf – a whipping bench – at waist height that was supported by steel supports that extended from the end of the plank to the base of the clock. She had no doubt that the shelf would support her weight even if she were thrashing about on it. And she had no doubt that she would soon be thrashing about upon it because two steel rings had popped out of the clock base, just the right size and in just the right position to enclose her wrists if she lay along the bench. In that position, her hips would drape over the end, her head would like a bare inch clear of the clock, and her arms would be fully extended.

This clock was full of surprises.

She did not wait to be told, but stepped to the end of the bench, bent over until her breasts were mashed against it, and then extended her arms so that her wrists were positioned next to the rings. It was only slightly less humiliating to assume the position voluntarily rather than waiting for the inevitable instruction.

Anja, more flexible than Wilma, crouched down and, one at a time, opened the rings and snapped them closed about Veronica’s wrists. The rings did not have to be locked with a key because Veronica, with one hand on each side of the clock base, had no way to reach and release them once they were latched.

She had never been in such a physically vulnerable position in her life.

As Anja latched the second steel cuff, she looked at Veronica and whispered, “You may not feel like it right now, but you’re a hero.”

Anja was right. Veronica – naked, exposed, humiliated, terrified – felt like no hero.

She heard a noise and turned to see Wilma remove the strap from the hollow pilaster and hand it to Clay. Damn. She had hoped that Wilma, as the matriarch would swing the strap. Clay, at the age of forty-five would be a lot stronger than her seventy-year-old mother. Maybe, though, it would be better this way. After coming to her house yesterday and begging her to submit to the punishment, surely Clay would be grateful and merciful. Surely she would swing the strap lightly.

Veronica turned her head away from Clay, but could not hide her face. The other women in the room moved to take positions on either side of her head. This had a practical purpose: it put them out of the way of the strap, allowing Clay to swing freely without danger of striking anyone but Veronica. Undoubtedly, keeping the assembled audience in her line of sight no matter how she turned had a psychological purpose as well – it ensured that, throughout her punishment, Veronica was reminded that her failure to service her husband properly was not simply an issue between her and Cary. It was a family matter and the family had a right to witness the punishment that had been earned.

Wilma spoke again, “Veronica Hobard. You have failed to accommodate your husband’s needs. For this, we are obligated to administer chastisement according to our tradition. By remaining in this house, you have indicated your acceptance of this chastisement. For your correction, Clay Hobard will administer thirty strokes of the tawse to the best of her ability.”

Veronica soon learned that Clay’s gratitude did not translate into leniency. Apparently she felt a greater duty to give Veronica a strong incentive to satisfy her son’s carnal needs in the future than to reward the negligent wife for putting herself in this position.

Helpless to protect her ass from the stroke in any way, Veronica could only watch over her shoulder as Clay raised the strap high to the side and listen to it whistle as she brought it down with all her strength.

The crack of leather against flesh reverberated in the large room. Veronica gasped in shock and gritted her teeth against the agony that burned across her buttocks.

Wilma said, “One,” with forced dispassion.

Anja yelped in sympathy, and then looked at her mother, saying nothing but pleading with her eyes for a modicum of mercy.

None was forthcoming. The heavy strap rose and fell with equal force a second time.

Veronica whimpered through her clenched teeth.

“Two.”

Clay’s arm rose and fell again

The room echoed with the crack of the third blow.

Veronica rose on tiptoe, lifting her hips away from the bench, and then raised one foot off the floor as though she were trying to move away from the pain.

Each strike hurt more than the previous. If the blow fell over the same area as a prior blow then flesh that was already damaged sustained even more injury; if the blow fell on a previously untouched spot, then the damage was extended over an increasing area.

Veronica clenched her fists until her knuckles went white.

“Three.”

Whistle.

She clenched her buttocks tight in reflex against the coming blow.

Slap.

And Veronica cried out for the first time – not loudly but sincerely. She pulled desperately against the steel that enclosed her wrists, franticly trying to free herself and escape further pain, but they were as unyielding as the women standing witness to her punishment.

“Four.”

By the tenth blow, Veronica was shrieking from the agony she was feeling, but Anja was sobbing freely. The tears that rightfully belonged to Veronica were flowing down her sister-in-laws cheeks.

Veronica’s entire ass was bright red as blood rushed to the surface, but mottled more darkly where the tawse had struck hard enough to burst the capillaries under her skin. Her anguish was indescribable. She had been suffering for less than a minute, but she felt like she had spent a lifetime locked to the whipping plank.

Her buttocks hurt too much for her to clench them against the blows any longer.

And only a third of her punishment had been administered.

The march of the blows was relentless; Clay’s arm swung like a metronome with a five second long beat while Wilma counted time in a funereal tone. There were no pauses to give Veronica respite or Clay rest, which worked slightly in Veronica’s favor. By the fifteenth stroke, Clay’s arm was beginning to tire. Or maybe Clay was pretending to tire in a belated act of mercy, too late to save Veronica from any noticeable degree of anguish. The big muscles in her ass were bruised so deeply that even a mild kiss of the tawse would cause as much pain as the first mighty blow. Yet Clay’s strokes were anything but mild. To compensate for the fatigue in her arm, she began twisting her body to put real weight into her blows. The strap moved more slowly, but struck with greater force, the follow through bruising Veronica’s muscle all the way to the bone.

Veronica’s tortured flesh flattened and surged against gravity from the force of each blow. She screamed, not caring if the women standing witness thought she was weak or cowardly; not caring if the neighbors heard her and called the police; not caring if airliners flying overhead were diverted from their flight path. She screamed as loudly as she could in an attempt to distract herself from the torture that was being inflicted upon her ass.

It helped little. She still felt pain beyond any previous experience. The toothache that she had suffered in eighth grade, the cramps after eating potato salad left in the sun too long at church camp, the bruised shins from field hockey sticks when her pads slipped, all these were trivial nothings compared to this beating.

By the twentieth stroke, she was too sore and too tired to fight against the inevitable any longer. She collapsed against the wood plank, let her wrists hang loose in the steel loops, and lay sobbing uncontrollably as the slow march of blows continued to punish her tortured ass. Her nose filled with mucus and she had to breathe through her mouth as she wept in agony.

Clay’s arm had tired to the point that her last half dozen blows had noticeably less force than her first, but that made no difference to Veronica. Each blow was still hard enough to rock her body on the plank, crushing her naked nipples against the smooth, varnished wood, and stoking the fire in her ass to hellish levels.

“Thirty.”

Veronica barely heard the final count over her sobs, barely noticed that the blows had stopped, because the pain in her ass continued unabated.

Anja was crying too hard to do her part, so, unbidden, Lise stepped around to unfasten Veronica’s wrists. Then, Lise and Anja lifted Veronica’s limp body from the plank and brought her around to lay her facedown on the bed. Crystal thought to pull the quilt and upper sheet aside before the other two women let her sink onto the mattress.

Her beaten ass was so dark it looked more purple than red. Anja sobbed anew at the sight as she pulled the top sheet gently over her sister-in-law’s naked body.

Her own ass had looked exactly the same less than a year ago, but somehow it was harder for her to bear seeing the damage to Veronica’s ass than it had been to look in the mirror and see her own. Possibly because when she had been in this state, she had been in too much agony to care how she looked; possibly because she felt guilty about her part in convincing Veronica to submit to the beating. She knew that her motivation had been primarily selfish. She had been helped convince Veronica to suffer because the alternative would have been losing her friendship and Anja wanted to remain friends with Veronica.

Anja bent over and, stifling her own sobs, whispered, “We’ll laugh about this on Saturday.”

Through her own tears, Veronica replied, in a voice made hoarse and soft by her previous screaming, “I’ll laugh if you will.”

She was barely aware of Wilma returning the tawse to the hollow pilaster, twisting it back into place, and folding the whipping bench back into the trunk of the clock.

All the women filed out of the room, save Clay and Anja. Clay put her hand on Veronica’s head tenderly – the same hand that had so recently swung the strap so viciously – and said, “Please forgive me.”

Veronica looked at her and saw that there were tears in Clay’s eyes as well. “You did what you were supposed to do. There’s no fault to forgive.” She did not really believe that, but wanted to show Clay a degree of mercy that had not been allotted to her.

The tears that had been welling in Clay’s eyes overflowed and spilled down her cheeks. “Thank you,” she said and left the room.

When Anja was left alone with Veronica, she said, “I’ll stay here with you for as long as you want.”

“No. I’m all right. Really. Please leave and let me rest quietly.”

“Okay. But call if you need anything. Anything at all. Even just to yell at me for helping get you into this.”

“All I need is to meet you for lunch on Saturday.”

Anja smiled. “I look forward to that. I know a restaurant with real soft chairs.”

Veronica almost laughed.

After a half hour, the pain in her ass had subsided from an intolerable level of agony to a barely tolerable throb. She realized that she would have to eat supper standing up. Cary would think that strange. Unless he knew more than he was letting on.

She looked at the clock with renewed hatred. Now she knew that there was a heavy leather strap hidden in the left pilaster just waiting for her next lapse. If she let the clock wind down again, would she choose to suffer another beating rather than dissolving her marriage?

Before the beating, she had anticipated that the humiliation would be the worst part of the experience. She had been wrong. The physical pain was so much worse that she had forgotten to feel humiliated.

But she had suffered the pain for her love of Cary and, even now with the agony fresh and deep in her body, she knew that she would be willing to suffer the same pain and worse all over again if there was any risk that she would lose him otherwise.

The clock was running again and the hand had been wound back to the one o’clock position. She had to make love to her husband within the next forty-five hours. Her ass would still be bruised, still aching something terrible. No matter how soft the mattress, she would have to be on top. And maybe be on top a few times after that, too.

Cary liked to watch his wife undress at night, even on nights when they were not going to make love. Veronica understood. Men liked to see naked women and her husband did not frequent strip clubs. She was the only naked woman that he got to see so she was happy to let him look all he wanted. Though she felt somewhat self-conscious, she would slip her bra and panties off slowly while he was watching, arch her back and thrust her breasts toward him, part her legs and stick her ass out, strike whatever pose she thought he give him an moment’s pleasure.

It was part of the matrimonial bargain. He would forsake all others, even when he was just looking, and she would do what she could to satisfy his need to see female pulchritude. And he would return the favor. If she wanted to look at his cock, he would wag it in front of her for as long as she wished. The difference was that, whereas he could happily spend hours staring at her naked body, she could see all of him that she wanted in a minute or two. He did not mind the inequality.

Tonight was different, though. She had told him that she did not feel hungry and let him eat alone. He found that slightly odd, but chalked it up to a long day. Then, after dinner, he came up to the bedroom and found her lying in bed. Seven o’clock was early for anyone to be in bed; it was especially early for Veronica. He sat on the bed beside her and asked if she felt all right.

“Just fine,” she lied brazenly.

He stroked her hair for a minute, then casually drew his hand down her back and gave her butt a tender squeeze, as was his habit.

She yelped loudly.

He snatched his hand back. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s okay. My ass is just a little tender right now.”

“What’s wrong with it?” he drew the sheet down to her thighs and yelped himself. Both buttocks were deep purple and scored with swollen welts. He glanced at the clock and saw that the hand had been returned to the one o’clock position; that the clock had begun counting time down again. “It’s those damned women, isn’t it? What the hell did they do to you?”

Veronica laughed painfully, “I think they called it a correction.”

“Well I’m not having it. If having that clock in here means that you’re going to be beaten to a pulp, then I’m having it ripped out tomorrow morning.”

“No!” Veronica turned painfully to her side and snatched Cary’s hand. “No. It’s all right. I want the clock here. I didn’t have to let them do this to me. I did it because I want to be here with you and I can’t if the clock is removed. The terms of marriage in the Hobard family is that we maintain our conjugal clocks and they know how to enforce their terms.”

“To hell with that. I don’t care if they disown me. I won’t let them beat you.”

“I do care if you are estranged from them. And you didn’t let them do anything; I was the one who let them beat me. If you remove the clock, then I will have accepted their beating for nothing. You can’t do that to me. This is the way things are and you have to live with it. What did you tell me when we got back from our honeymoon? That the clock is a small price to pay for a perfect life. Well, you have to pay a price just as much as me. And this is a small price compared to the life we have. I’m asking you to do your part. Your family isn’t asking this; I am. You’ll leave the clock alone and maintain your family tradition for my sake. You’ll do it because you love me as much as I love you.”

He looked at the clock for a long time, and then said, “At the very least, I’m going to shut it off until you’re completely healed. You don’t have to make love to me when you’re in this condition. There’s a provision for turning it off when one of us is sick and this qualifies.”

He tried to stand, but she held his hand more tightly and pulled him back. “Don’t fight with me. I hurt too much to fight.” He looked down at her, and then sat back down beside her. “I’m not sick. I’m hurting a lot, but I’m not sick. I want to make love to you. I like making love to you, you know. I mean, I don’t want to make love to you right now, but I will want to do it before the clock winds down. I promise. It’s been too long already. It’s just, when we do make love, please don’t grab my ass like you usually do. It wouldn’t feel as good as it usually does.”

He lay down beside his wife, put his hand on her cheek and whispered, “I love you so much it hurts.”

“Me too.” And she meant it. Right now, there was nothing metaphorical about the pain of her love for him.

2. Training for Optimal Performance

“These seats aren’t as soft as you promised,” Veronica smiled at Anja.

“They’re soft as a cloud, compared to the other restaurants in town,” Anja grinned. “You may think me silly, but I actually went to a dozen different restaurants yesterday and tested their seats before I made a reservation here. I forgot how many restaurants seat you on wooden chairs.”

“Ouch,” Veronica winced at the thought.

“I figured that you’d still be a mite tender. As I recall, it was almost a month before I could sit down without feeling it in my ass.”

“This seems like a hell of a punishment for just having a little argument with Cary.”

“That’s what happened, huh? I figured it would be something like that. You’re such a careful person. Not like me. My clock wound down because I just plain forgot. Silly, huh? I was going to take Rob to bed, but I got busy with the publicity for a spinal injury research campaign and, before I knew it, hours had passed and the clock stopped and the next day the dragon ladies were at my door telling me that either I had to get beaten or beat it. Aunt Adalgisa whaled into my ass something fierce. I think she’s mad at the whole world. I think she hates her name. Anyway, she put everything she had into beating me, let me tell you. God, I howled loud enough to wake the dead. I thought she was going to break every bone in my butt. You better believe I changed my style after that. Now I don’t even look at the clock. I jump Rob every night right after dinner, regular as clockwork.” Veronica snickered and Anja grinned back. “We finish eating; the maid does the dishes; and I do Rob. That’s the safest way.”

“That doesn’t seem like as much fun as being spontaneous.”

Anja grinned. “It’s more fun than you might expect. But that brings up another issue. I don’t know if you remember because a severe whipping kind of drives everything else out of a person’s mind, but there’re two consequences to letting the clock stop. There’s the punishment, which is over, but there’s also the training part. That can wait for a couple of weeks until you’re less sore, but it can’t be put off longer than that.”

Veronica bristled. “I thought the whipping was the training. I’m not taking another punishment. I did what I had to do.”

“I know Wilma didn’t make it clear before, but the training is a completely different thing from the whipping. It’s not a punishment; it doesn’t hurt. It’s actually a good thing even though it sounds really weird when they explain it to you.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t really tell you in a way that you’d understand without the clock here. It's something that you have to do with the clock. In a couple of weeks, someone will get in touch with you and explain it. I’m just mentioning it now so that you won’t be surprised when it happens.”

“So I should look forward to a whole gang of Hobard women showing up on my doorstep again?”

Anja laughed nervously. “Not at all. Just Lise, I expect. The training is a real personal thing. I could be the one to do it for you if you want, but we thought that it might be a little less embarrassing if it was explained by someone you didn’t know so well. She just explains what you have to do and gets you started. That’s all. Just remember, it sounds weird, but it’s a really good thing. None of us have ever regretted our training.”

“That what everyone said about having the clock. When you gave it to me, you all said that I wouldn’t regret having it once I got used to it. Well, surprise, surprise, now, every time I look at it and know that there’s a leather strap and a whipping bench hidden inside, just waiting for me to fuck up again. I sure as hell do regret having the thing in my bedroom.”

“Yeah, there is a down side to the clock, all right,” Anja looked so rueful that Veronica almost laughed, “but, on the whole, Hobard women are happier than any other women I know. Right now, even with your ass throbbing on that seat, I’ll bet you’re happier than any other woman in this restaurant. I’ll bet you made love to your husband more recently than ninety percent of them and I’ll bet you enjoyed it a whole lot more than they do. When these women make love to their husbands, they’re so busy worrying about whether they are being used or not or they’re so busy calculating what advantage they might be gaining or losing in some power struggle that they don’t let themselves enjoy the experience.

“You and me, we know that we’re going to be making love to the man that we love regardless of all that. There’s no power struggles in our bedrooms. There’re no inequalities. We don’t think that we are being subjected to some horrible abuse when we’re not in the mood, but spend a few minutes making love to our husbands anyway. That’s why Hobard women invented the clock.”

“I thought the clocks were the men’s idea.”

“Hell, no. The first conjugal clock was invented by my great-great-great-great-grandmother Adalgisa.” Veronica raised an eyebrow and Anja smiled. “Yup, Aunt Adalgisa was named after her. Poor woman. Anyway, the first Adalgisa Hobard was the husband of a cuckoo clock maker in the Schwarzwald, the Black Forest region of Germany, in the early 1800s. Her husband started fooling around with a neighbor woman. Most women in that situation throw their husbands out of bed but Adalgisa was a real feisty bitch. She decided to keep her husband so busy that he wouldn’t have time for any other woman. She had him build the first conjugal clock so that he would always know that more sex was coming soon. He lost interest in the other woman immediately. The clock worked better than she guessed, so she passed the tradition on to her children and grandchildren. An unexpected side effect of their happy marriage was that her husband felt compelled to improve her lot in the world. The Hobard wealth is a direct consequence of seven generations of happy husbands.” Anja took a sip of wine. “The conjugal clock has grown rather more complex technically over the past two centuries, but the idea remains the same.”

“Yeah, right. The idea is that if I have a fight with my husband, the Hobard women are going to punish me for it by whipping me practically unconscious.”

“That’s not true. Nobody cares if you fight with Cary. You two can go at it like an alley cat and a junkyard dog as far as we’re concerned. Hiss and claw, bark and snap to your hearts content. Or get all pouty, move into your spare bedroom, and never speak a civilized word to Cary for the rest of your life. We don’t care. As long as you get together for a few minutes and make love every day and a half, we’ll leave you alone. That’s the whole story. As long as the clock doesn’t wind down, you can make any kind of mess you want of your personal lives. You’re his wife. If you’re unhappy with him, you can come up with a dozen ways to make his life a living hell apart from freezing him out of bed. That’s the whole secret of the conjugal clock. It keeps your bed neutral territory as you and your husband bounce down the rocky road of connubial life.”

“How can I make love to Cary if we’re having a fight?”

“You don’t like angry sex? You should try it some time,” Anja laughed out loud. “That can leave a few bruises of its own, but nothing like the tawse.”

“Tawse?”

“That’s what the strap in the clock is called. It’s a Scottish word for a Scottish invention.”

Veronica was struck with a sudden thought. “But what happens if a man is fighting with his wife and he refuses to wind the clock? What happens if she makes love with him and he decides that he’d like to see her get beaten and let’s the clock run down anyway.”

Anja was suddenly uncharacteristically serious. “If Cary fails to wind the clock right after making love to you, then you call Wilma or Clay or me immediately. And I mean immediately. If Cary even threatens to not wind the clock, call one of us. Hobard men are not allowed to use the clock against their wives. That would be an unforgivable breach of trust. If Cary wants to see you beaten, then he’ll have to do it himself and you can call the police and all the laws and rules of society will apply. Unless you’re into that kind of thing, in which case, you can come to some kind of agreement with him. We don’t care. Just leave the clock out of it.”

When Veronica left the restaurant, she called Cary. “I haven’t seen you for a while, dear.” She did not have to be in her bedroom looking at the clock to know that the hand was nearing midnight. It was the first thing that she saw every morning and the last thing before turning out the lights at night; its face was always in her mind.

“I’ll be home in half an hour.”

“Make it an hour. I’m downtown right now. I just had lunch with Anja.”

She sat on two pillows as she drove her Audi S5 home and she still felt every bump in the road in her aching ass. She was not as tender as on the first day, but had hoped that, after three days, she would have healed more. The beating had been brutal; the bruising was deep and it would be a while before she was back in tip-top shape.

It only took forty-five minutes to get home, but Cary was already waiting for her in the parlor just off the entryway. She had to smile at his impatience; his eagerness to make love to her was so sincere.

When she entered the room, he took her into his arms and kissed her gently, then pressed her tight against his chest. She laid her head against his shoulder and felt protected – a strange feeling considering that the only real threat that she felt was from the Hobard women and that was the one threat that he did not protect her from.

After holding her for a minute, he spoke softly into her ear. “You haven’t recovered yet. Holding you feels so good. This is all the love that I need right now.” He kissed her again. “Why don’t you lay down and rest and I’ll go up and wind the clock and get back to work.”

Veronica was startled. She pushed him back to arm’s length and stared at his face in shock. “You can’t do that. I haven’t made love to you. It doesn’t count unless you get off.”

“I don’t need to get off every time. I can wind the damned clock any time I want.”

Veronica was surprised to find that it felt like he was rejecting her; that he had judged her and found her inadequate to meet his needs. It hurt. “Like hell!” she snarled. “That’s not the deal. Don’t you dare try to cheat on me.” And that’s exactly what it felt like to her – that he was cheating on her. “You never wind that clock unless I’ve satisfied you. You understand me? Never! You ever do and I will leave you.” She did not know why she said that, but she knew that it was true. She had not realized before how integral the clock had become to her marriage. “I may be a little bruised, but I’m not a damned invalid. I didn’t suffer a beating just so you can blow me off! You get upstairs right now and get your damned clothes off so I can jump your damned bones!” She was genuinely angry and she was shouting. He was taken aback by her vehemence. He had not expected an angry reaction to his generous offer. He had expected her gratitude. He had misjudged her in some way that he did not understand. The only thing that he did understand was that he was not to wind the clock unless he had made love to her. Ever.

As she chased him up the stairs, Veronica glanced at the young maid who had been dusting the étagère in the hallway. Now she was standing, dust mop in hand, staring back wide-eyed. Veronica flushed and averted her gaze. She knew what the maid had overheard and had not yet acquired the knack of her peers of thinking of the household staff as part of the furniture. In the upper middle class world of Veronica’s youth, maids, cooks, and gardeners were still people.

For her part, the maid had become accustomed to the owners of the house occasionally retreating to their bedroom at odd hours of the day for a ‘nap,’ but had never expected to overhear the proper, elegant lady of the house screaming at her husband that she was going to ‘jump his damned bones.’

She thought Mr. Hobard handsome in a quiet, serious way and, as she continued her work, wished that, instead, she were upstairs jumping his damned bones while Mrs. Hobard cleaned her own damned house. She dreamed of marrying rich because life was so much easier for a rich woman.

Upstairs, Veronica was not having the easy time that the maid imagined.

Her ass hurt like hell every time Cary pushed into her. The first time that they had made love, she had stayed on top and, even crouched on top of him, she had suffered from the pressure of her ass against his thighs as he had arched his back to penetrate her deeply enough. This time, though, only the second time she had made love to him since her beating, she had chosen to throw off her clothes, tear off his, fling herself on her back, dragging him on top of her, and start fucking him immediately. It had seemed like a good idea at the time and he was hard enough to get right too it. She was not wet enough, though, and it felt like he was tearing her cunt with every thrust – a painful counterpart to the pounding that her bruised ass was taking against the firm mattress. She felt like the victim of a rape – ironic because it was her who was raping him – he would have stopped in an instant if she gave the word, but she was determined that he was going to fuck her whether he wanted to or not.

She vented her pain by shrieking sharply with every thrust, trying to make it sound like shrieks of lust to Cary. She had no idea if she sounded convincing or not. Possibly Cary was continuing because he though she was enjoying herself or possibly he knew that she was hurting and was determined to pay her back for rejecting his generous offer to wind the clock without getting the satisfaction that he was due. The latter was more likely because he could hardly forget that her purple and yellow mottled ass was still tender to the touch.

After a minute, her juices began to flow and he began slipping easily in and out of her cunt without causing pain. This left her free to enjoy the increasing agony in her ass as flesh that had just begun to heal was re-damaged, small blood vessels were torn open again, muscle fibers stretched to their limits, and pain receptors stimulated to new heights of activation.

She came, long and loud. She would never know if she came despite the pain or because of it. She did know that, for a few seconds, the pain disappeared, overwhelmed by a flood of pleasure. Her shrieks, her frenzied writhing, the convulsive involuntary contractions of muscles in her thighs, abdomen and vulva were stronger than ever before and stimulated Cary into coming simultaneously. Feeling him pulsing inside her, clutching her shoulders and pushing himself into her with all his strength stimulated her to a new level of ecstasy. She did not know if she was experiencing a second orgasm immediately after the first or if she had only pushed the last stage of her first to a new peak, but she did not care. She only knew that it felt damned good.

He lay upon her, exhausted for a few seconds, but, as the glow of her climax began to fade, the less joyful glow of her punished ass began to intrude. She pushed him off, looked at his blissful face and laughed in joy. “Damn, you’re good,” she said.

“You’re not hurting too badly,” he asked with a note of concern.

“I hurt like hell,” she laughed. “It’s a good thing you’re a great lover or I don’t know if I could stand it.” She pointed to the clock. “You owe me a rewind.”

As he wound the clock, she felt her ass gently with her hand. The slightest touch hurt. “If you don’t mind,” she said to his back, “I think I’d like to be on top again next time.”

Ten days later, Lise phoned. “Veronica? It’s Lise. Remember me? I was at your wedding.”

And at my beating, Veronica thought; she could not recall seeing Lise at the wedding but she could remember watching Lise’s cold, impassive face through her tears and shrieks as she was being whipped. It was as clear in her mind as if it were happening right now all over again. “Of course. What can I do for you?”

“I was wondering if tomorrow would be a good time to stop by for a few minutes and talk about the training procedure.”

“I don’t think I’m free tomorrow.”

“Then Thursday?”

“Thursday looks pretty busy, too.”

Lise laugh sounded strained. “Friday better not look busy. Let me be blunt, this is something that we have to take care of really soon. I don’t know if anyone told you, but there’s only a limited grace period. If your training doesn’t start within a couple of days, then your husband won’t be able to wind it your clock more. He’ll be distressed and you’ll end up in default again and you really don’t want the clock the wind down a second time. This isn’t something that I enjoy, either, but we have to do it. If we get it done and over with quick and we’ll both feel better.”

Veronica sighed. “Okay. How about tomorrow at ten?”

“I’ll see you then. Thanks.”

She wondered what horror she would have to endure now.

When Cary had convinced her to allow the clock to remain in their bedroom, he had promised that nobody else would ever see it. Nobody would see the obscene carvings that covered its sides. Carvings that were particularly humiliating for Veronica because it was her and Cary’s faces on the figures that were engaged in a display of sexual acts that had probably been copied out of an illustrated Kama Sutra. These included a variety of acts that she never expected to do with Cary in real life. She did not realize how little talent she had for foresight. And the carvings were not the most humiliating part of the clock. The dial was currently at the ten o’clock position showing that she had been screwed that morning. So now, despite all his promises, once again a woman who was nearly a stranger to her was standing in her bedroom, looking at her clock, knowing exactly what the position of the hand on the dial meant. When Lise saw the dial, she knew for certain that Veronica’s cunt was still slick from sex, filled with Cary’s fresh cum, and Veronica could not pretend otherwise.

But if the dial had been near the midnight position – if it indicated that she had not serviced her husband recently and that she would have to get herself fucked before the afternoon was over – would that have been any less humiliating? In Veronica’s family, sex was a taboo topic. She would not know if her parents had ever engaged in sexual intercourse, but for the evidence of her own conception; and did not know if they had ever made love again after her birth.

But here in her own bedroom, a near stranger knew at a glance exactly how long it had been since her last coupling and how long it would be until her next.

She thought that her humiliation was complete, but little did she guess that her humiliation was going to increase dramatically in the next few minutes. She had no gift of foresight.

Lise got right to the point – she was a nuts and bolts kind of person, which was why she had been asked to instruct Veronica. Anja, who was far closer to her, would have been too emotional.

“When a wife lets her clock run down, there is a presumption that something has gone wrong and remedial steps are taken automatically. You are not being singled out. It does not matter if the remedial steps are necessary or not in your particular case, they are useful in the vast majority of cases, so they are applied universally.

“At this point, the conclusion, right or wrong, is that a wife may have failed because she does not enjoy the physical act of love sufficiently.”

Victoria wanted to scream that she enjoyed sex just fine and the whole damn clan should get the hell out of her bedroom, but she held her tongue. Her two-week-distant beating had not yet healed completely because it was aggravated every day and a half by the physical act of loving Cary. A residual throb in her ass reminded her that there were consequences for ignoring the Hobard tradition. There was no gain from beating up on Lise verbally now and getting her own ass physical beaten later because the damned clock ran down for lack of “instruction.” She believed Lise when she said that she was not enjoying this and wanted to get it over with quickly. Victoria did not know what was going to happen but, whatever it was, it would obviously go more quickly if she just stood and waited for Lise to finish.

Lise continued her pedantic recital, obviously memorized and rehearsed. “There is no downside to learning to enjoy sex more and improvement is always possible. For the last two centuries, Hobard women have taken it upon themselves to examine the sexual act in minute detail. They have circled the world, from visiting the brothels of Paris in the Gilded Age and to studying the techniques of geishas in Imperial Japan. Their conclusions were surprising.

“First, they discovered that the vast majority of prostitutes are terrible lovers; callous and lazy, their only goal is to get the man off so they can get his money and send him away as quickly as possible. It is easy for a wife to outperform a prostitute. The few Hobard men who try visiting a prostitute return with stories of utter disappointment. Almost none ever return for a second time helping of lousy sex. The result is similar when our husbands engage in illicit affairs. Young women are almost universally mediocre lovers compared to us because we are given the advantage of seven generations of study. Women who would like to steal our husbands can’t catch up with our head start.

“It helps that our husbands have created their own mythology about Hobard women and one of the enduring tenants of that mythology is that no other bed is as satisfying as the Hobard marital bed. We work hard to ensure that that is true. Hobard men seldom stray.”

Despite herself, Victoria found that idea appealing. She wanted to be such a good lover that Cary would never be tempted by another woman. Realistically, he was a wealthy man and there would be no lack of women who would try to seduce him. She had learned nothing useful about sex from her own mother. Maybe it would be worth getting a few hints today.

“The second surprise was the discovery that the most important sexual act for men is straight, simple intercourse. There is nothing wrong with a little variety if you want, but the most basic act is the most important by far. Get that right and everything else recedes in importance.

“The third surprise was finding that improving the sexual act for the woman also improves it for the man. Unlike some sexual activities, basic intercourse is definitely not a zero sum game. You don’t have to sacrifice anything to make your husband happy. You don’t even have to try to make him happy. If you make sex better for yourself, you will automatically make it better for him. In fact, the training regime that you are embarking upon was never designed to make our husbands happy. It was designed only to increase our own enjoyment. That it happens to make our men happy as well is an accidental bonus.

“You are beginning a program of physical training. It’s just a simple physical exercise. There are two muscle groups that need to be strengthened to improve your enjoyment of basic intercourse. First there are the muscles that control the hips. It is no accident that many cultures have developed erotic dances which emphasize the ability of women to control their hips. Think about belly dancing, hula dancing, Siamese temple dances. Even strippers since the burlesque era have been bumping and grinding their hips with abandon. You need both strength and flexibility in your hips because the more you can control your pelvis, the better you will be able to position yourself during intercourse.

“The basic pelvic movement during intercourse is simple. You need to be able to tilt your pelvis forward to rotate your vulva toward your partner. When you do this, you are positioning your clitoris upward to receive more stimulation and you are also pressing your G spot, that spongy, ridged area that is located inside the front of your vagina, against the man’s penis. There’s also a psychological component. When you tilt toward him, you feel like you are being more receptive to your partner.

“A good pelvic tilt is simple and has no downside so it’s surprising how few women figure it out. You’d be surprised how many women just lie there with their vulva pointed in the wrong direction and let the man pound away at them. And then they wonder why they don’t enjoy sex much.”

Veronica tried to remember if she tilted her pelvis during sex or not. Surely she must tilt it somewhat because she enjoyed sex more than Lise was implying. At least she enjoyed it a lot of the time.

“The second muscle group that you need to develop is the muscles in your vaginal wall. You’d be amazed at the amount of control you can develop. There are erotic entertainers who can smoke by draw air through a cigarette with their vaginas, shoot ping pong balls across the room, play musical instruments, do all kinds of bizarre things that you’ll probably never have to worry about.” Veronica raised an eyebrow at the word, ‘probably.’ “There are also women who can take a man inside them, remain perfectly still and massage him to orgasm by doing nothing more than rhythmically contracting their vaginal muscles. Do that to your husband once in a while and you know that he’ll never be satisfied by any lesser woman. You don’t have to go that far,” Veronica heard the challenge in Lise’s words. “but you do want to be able to use your vaginal muscles during sex to increase your own pleasure. Gripping the penis when it is inside you stimulates your vagina and also presses your G spot against him that much harder to get that much more stimulation.”

Lise took a deep breath, and, for the first time, looked a little uncomfortable. She was getting to the embarrassing part of the prepared speech. “Your conjugal clock includes a mechanism to train both of these groups of muscles. From now on, you will have to use this mechanism in order to ‘prime’ the clock. You have to understand exactly what I’m saying. There’s no choice here. Every time, in the interval between lovemaking with your husband, you will have to perform the training exercise. If you do not, he will not be able to rewind your clock. In principle, you could do your exercise just before you make love to him while he is in the room watching, but I don’t think any of us could bring ourselves to do that. The worst thing you could do is forget, make love to your husband, then find that he cannot reset the clock, and have to perform a training session in front of him to enable it.”

Lise blushed at the thought and, for the first time, departed from her prepared script, “God, I’ve never heard of anyone having to do that. That’d be horrible.” She looked at Veronica, said, “Sorry.” and returned to her pedantic narrative.

“It is easiest to wait until your husband has left for work the morning after making love and then perform your training duty. A surprising number of us have incorporated the exercise into our daily schedule regardless of whether the clock needs resetting or not. Once you get over the oddness of the activity and begin to appreciate its benefits, you will realize that it is just physical training like jogging, yoga, or any other current exercise fad.” She paused, and then asked, “Do you have any questions at this point?”

Veronica shrugged. “Not really. What do I have to do?”

“I’ll guide you through it.” Lise blushed again. “The protocol says that I have to stay until you complete the first session. There’ve been instances of women who tried to fake it or just got it plain wrong and that’s a really bad way to let your clock wind down for the second time. So please, just go along with me and this won’t take long. The actual exercise takes only a minute. Literally.”

“Okay.”

“Um. Okay. Because it requires your vagina…” She stopped. “Can I just call it your pussy? I’m supposed to try to sound medical and scientific and all, but that just sounds phony to me. Do you mind?”

Veronica smiled, feeling a bit of sympathy for the woman. This had to be hard for her, too. “That’d be nicer than all the medical terms.”

Lise smiled back. “Great. Okay. As you must have guessed from my speech, you’re going to have to get your pussy involved, so if you can just take off your jeans and panties, we can get this done.”

Veronica raised an eyebrow as she unsnapped her waistband.

Lise raised her hands in a gesture of pacification and said, “It’s okay. I don’t have to touch you or anything weird like that. I don’t even have to look at you. I just have to be here for a couple more minutes to makes sure that you can do the exercise and then we’ll be done.”

Not much reassured, Veronica finished making herself naked from the waist down. Lise had seen much more during her beating, so what the hell? While she was undressing her lower half, Lise walked around to the back of the clock and fiddled with something.

“Okay,” Lise continued, “now you have to go to the right side of your clock. That’s right. You see this carving way down here at the bottom?” She pointed to a carving of Cary right at the bottom of the rear pilaster. The figure held its arms up in a gesture of supplication. “You grab that at the head and fold it down against the floor.”

Veronica folded the figure down and saw that the back side of it was flat and featureless.

“Now you do the same on the other side of the clock.”

Veronica found a similar figure on the other read pilaster, but this one was smiling and had its hands resting on its hips near its tumescent cock.

Once the second figure had also been folded onto the floor, Lise said, “Now, step around to the back of your clock. Here. See this figure of the woman up here?” She pointed to a carving of Veronica on the top of the right rear pilaster. Veronica actually had to step to the side to see it. It depicted her standing erect with her hands clasped behind her head, thrusting her hips forward. “You have to grab that with your left hand.” She waited until Veronica had done so, and continued, “And there’s another one on the other side. Grab it, too.” Veronica could not step around to see it as long as she was holding the first figure, but its location was obvious. She reached up and around to grab it. “Okay. Now you have to stand on the steps that you folded down a minute ago.”

“You mean on Cary’s backsides.”

Lise chuckled. “I think the symbolism is quite deliberate. We are so determined to please our husbands that we’ll step on them to do it if we have to.”

Veronica was assumed the position that was required to touch all four points – her arms were stretched above her head, he hands grabbing onto the top corners of the clock and her feet were straddling it, standing on the figures that she had folded against the floor on each side. She was out of balance and had to hold herself in position with her arms to keep from falling on her still-bruised backside.

As soon as she had placed her second foot on the second step, there was a click inside the clock. She looked down between her spread legs and saw a carved figure slip aside. It was an image of her and Cary in the throes of passion, front to front, but standing up rather than lying down. She was struck by the similarity between the female figure’s position and her own. A second later, a curved, slick, smooth, rounded thing that made Veronica think of an art deco dildo slide out of the clock and poked her in the mons.

“What the fuck?” she cried and jumped back. As soon as she released the clock, the dildo slid back inside and the copulating figures slipped back down to cover the hole. “What the hell was that?”

“That’s a pressure sensor,” Lise replied mildly. “The exercise is to slide yourself onto it and squeeze it with your pussy. You have to keep squeezing it until this figure,” she pointed to a figure of Cary that was at the height of her face, “gets a hard on.” The figure’s penis was drooping downward.

“You mean that, from now on, I’m supposed to hump this damned clock every time Cary humps me?”

Lise laughed lightly. “Actually, you aren’t humping the clock. You are just rotating you pelvis forward to meet the sensor – its position has been accurately calculated to require a certain degree of pelvic tilt for you to get it inside yourself – and you’re squeezing the shaft a few times. You don’t have to actually make any humping motions. That would be undignified.”

Veronica caught the irony in Lise’s voice and realized that the woman had a much dryer sense of humor than she had suspected. In other circumstances, she might enjoy her company.

“If you are dry, you can put a dab of K-Y on yourself. Now, if you wouldn’t mind giving that little man his erection, we’ll be done and I’ll get out of here so you can get on with your day.” Lise moved to the bed and sat down to wait.

Veronica noted that from the bed, Lise could see Veronica’s feet sticking out on either side, but nothing of an intimate nature. She appreciated that trivial concession to her modesty.

Like the whipping, her choice was to climb onto the dildo and squeeze it or divorce Cary. She did not need to be reminded that the Hobard clan allowed no middle ground where the clock was involved.

Given the alternative, sticking a dildo inside herself for a minute, even with Lise in the room, shouldn’t have been that difficult. But Veronica, child of a home where even the word ‘sex’ was taboo, found it a nearly impossible task.

She peeked around the clock to look at Lise and said, “Would you mind stepping outside for a minute. I will do this. I promise. But I can’t do it when you’re here.”

“Can’t. Sorry.” Her voice was emotionless, her demeanor as implacable as granite.

Veronica stared at the clock in frustration. How could she do this?

After another fifteen seconds, she heard Lisa’ voice say, “You’re doing it for Cary. Think how much he owes you for this.”

“He’s never going to know about it,” Veronica replied through gritted teeth. “Never even suspect.”

Lise laughed. “That’s the way, isn’t it? They never know about our biggest sacrifices.”

Sacrifice? Veronica asked herself what she was sacrificing. The answer was obvious. Her dignity was being completely trashed. Getting her ass spanked in front of witnesses had been humiliating, but this was utterly degrading. When they had promised her that the training was not a punishment, they had lied again. She was being punished by having every shred of privacy, modesty, and dignity torn from her. She was going to have to do this for Cary’s sake, and he was never going to know the cost of this gift that she was giving him.

Fortified by the thought of her love for Cary, she reassumed the disgusting position, watched the featureless dildo slide into place, and maneuvered herself onto it. It was physically more difficult than she had expected. To get close enough, she had to spread her knees wide and press them hard against the pilasters on either side, trying to push her mons as close to the clock as she could. The dildo was not long – it did not have to penetrate her deeply because the important muscles were in the lower part of the vagina – but she did have to rise up on her toes and rotate her pelvis as far upward as she could to position herself correctly. She could feel the throb in her still-bruised buttocks when she clenched them and felt a burn in her abdominal muscles from the effort.

Though Lise could not see much from the other side of the clock, she had been watching Veronica place her feet on the steps, spread her knees, rise to her toes and settle back down. She knew what had been accomplished. “Now, you just squeeze your muscles like you are trying keep from peeing. It’s the same muscle group.” Lise said helpfully.

Veronica tightened the muscles on her pelvic floor and strained her eyes to see the little figure that was hanging a couple of inches in front of her face. She saw its cock rotate a few degrees. She tried again, harder, and it rotated a little further.

“Is it working?” Lise asked.

“It’s working,” Veronica grunted and squeezed again. The little figure’s cock was now weirdly rotated to one side.

“It’s just keep going until the little man smiles at you,” Lise said enigmatically.

Veronica squeezed again and to cock rotated further.

“With practice, you’ll gain control over your pussy and you won’t have to squeeze everything else at the same time.”

Veronica grunted and squeezed again. She realized that she felt the dildo more clearly when she was squeezing than when she was relaxed. If she did the same with Cary inside her, she would feel him more clearly as well. One more squeeze and the cock had rotated into a vertical position. The figure’s head spun around. There was a second face that had been hidden on the back side. Unlike the face on the front which had a bland expression, the one that faced her now was grinning wickedly. The clock designers had a lusty sense of humor.

“You’ll know you’re done when Cary’s face is smiling at you.”

Veronica eased herself back off the dildo and stepped away from the clock. “He’s smiling, the little bastard.”

“Good. Don’t forget, you have to do that between every rewinding of the clock. It’s not an official secret. You can tell Cary about it if you want, but then he might want to see you do it. Men are fascinated by the workings of the clock. The fear that our husbands might want to watch keeps all of us from telling them about it. In fact, in two hundred years, I don’t think that any husband has been told about this feature of the clock.”

“I’m pretty sure that I won’t be breaking that tradition.”

“There are a couple of other things that are important. First, the statue on the back has to be erect and smiling for Cary to reset the clock. If you do your exercise and can’t get the clock to smile, then call one of us right away and we’ll help you figure out what you’re doing wrong.”

“I think I can manage by myself.”

“Not necessarily. The program changes and gets more challenging as you get stronger and more adept. A year from you, you’ll be surprised at how strong and flexible you are. It’s supposed to be obvious how to keep progressing through the stages, but the step between just generally squeezing the thing and beginning to use the muscles at the top and base of your pussy in sequence can be tricky.”

“Anything else?”

“Don’t forget to try out the pelvic tilt and pussy squeeze in bed.” Lise smiled, “You’ll like the result.”

Veronica did not look Lise in the eye as she showed her to the door. She and Lise would never be friends.

A month later, after Veronica had built up some muscles, she did use the tilt in bed and then she gave Cary a little squeeze. She definitely liked the result.

So did Cary.

3. Punishment Gone Bad

Cary and Veronica celebrated their first anniversary by returning to Hawaii for a week; first class airplane tickets satisfied the ‘paper’ requirement of the one year milestone.

A month later, Wilmer, Adalgisa’s second son, announced his engagement to Barbara MacDougal. Upon hearing the news, Veronica’s first thought was that a ‘MacDougal’ ought to know what a tawse was. Her second though was that if this engagement turned into a wedding, the day would come when poor Barb would become more familiar with the instrument than she ever expected. Unless she turned out to be an exceptionally attentive wife. Her brief introduction to Barb suggested otherwise. Her first impression had been that Barb was cold and judgmental.

Veronica doubted that Barb would benefit from the discipline of the clock, even though her own brief but intimate acquaintance with the tawse had turned out to be a not entirely bad thing.

Last year on their honeymoon, she and Cary had spent an entire week lazing on Hawaiian beaches surrounded by young women competing for attention by stuffing their perfect bodies into bikinis that barely covered their essentials. Cary had been somewhat distracted by the women on display. Veronica had not given it a second thought – it was only natural that a man would look at the parade of flesh in front of his eyes.

But this time, reprising their honeymoon to celebrate their first anniversary, Cary had given no other woman more than a cursory glance. His devoted attention to his wife’s charms, even when faced with a smorgasbord of delectable alternatives, was a testament to the effectiveness of the Hobard conjugal tradition. Who could object to three minutes of agony if it was rewarded with a lifetime of marital devotion? Of course, Veronica still faced the ongoing requirement that she fuck the damn clock every day. It had been more than three months and she still felt degraded by the exercise every time she performed it. For her, the best part of being in Hawaii was being three thousand miles away from that damned dildo. Well, maybe that was the second best part of the vacation. She continued to exercise her pelvis and pussy when in Hawaii by tilting her hips up and squeezing Cary’s cock into submission twice a day. Not only was that more satisfying than squeezing a dildo, it earned his undying gratitude. If this was a kind of judo for a pussy, hers was well on the way to earning a black belt.

The training was progressive. Just before the honeymoon had begun, she had reached a certain level of pussy proficiency and the clock had automatically begun presenting a different dildo for her exercises. This one was divided into two parts. Once inside her, the top and bottom parts swelled up slightly, in alternation, first the bottom, then the top. With a little trial and error, she had figured out that she had to squeeze the part that was swelling without squeezing the other part. She was proud that she had figured this out on her own and had not had to call Lise for further instruction. Her pride was still wounded from having to perform her first pussy-training exercise in front of Lise and she had not spoken to her since that humiliating day. She did not blame or resent Lise, she was merely embarrassed.

On the first night of their vacation, even though they were tired from the flights from Minnesota, she had wanted to show off her new proficiency. She had turned Cary face up on the hotel bed, mounted him, and, remaining perfectly still, had massaged his cock with her pussy until he groaned in ecstasy and came inside her. She could not make herself come by doing this, but she felt an incredible thrill when she saw her husband’s face contorting in response to her pussy power alone. Her pride might be wounded but her self-esteem was waxing strong.

And she had objective proof of her sexual prowess; for and entire week her husband had not shown the slightest interest in the parade of nubile bikini models strutting over the hot sand in front of him.

A few weeks after the Hawaiian vacation, Cary and Veronica had their own announcement for the family; she was expecting and the baby was due in mid-June, a month before Barb and Wil’s wedding. Veronica liked to think that the baby had been conceived on that first day of vacation when she had milked Cary dry by pussy power alone. And it might well have been.

A few days after their announcement, Clay made an appointment to visit Veronica; the Hobards never dropped in on each other without an explicit invitation. Veronica speculated that the family knew that their relatives were likely to be having sex at any hour of the day or night and had too much grace to risk arriving at an embarrassing moment. Nobody wanted to be turned away at the door by the maid; that would require that the maid implicitly acknowledge that she knew what was happening in the master bedroom.

After pleasantries, Clay asked Veronica, “Are you certain about your due date? You’ve consulted a doctor?”

“Yes. June the thirteenth. The baby will be a Saturday child.”

Clay smiled. “Very few babies are born on their due date. In reality, the baby is expected any time over a fortnight and the doctor just picks the middle day as the nominal due date. But, now I have to perform an adjustment to your clock. If you’ll excuse me for a minute, I’ll be right back to explain.”

Veronica was astounded to see Clay march upstairs and into the sanctity of her master bedroom without waiting for permission or allowing for her to escort her. She turned a cold eye on Clay when she returned a few minutes later.

Clay ignored the silent reproof. “I’ve set your clock on a pregnancy schedule. The parameters will begin to change now and will change more as your nominal due date approaches. You are expected to keep your husband satisfied throughout your pregnancy but the schedule will become less rigid as you progress. If you develop a high risk pregnancy and you doctor advises against sex, then that can be considered an illness and Cary can stop the clock. Late in your term, you’ll want to avoid being on the bottom for obvious reasons.”

Veronica had never become accustomed to Clay talking about her son’s sex life and cringed at the explicit reference to positions. Clay, as ever, was undeterred by Veronica’s discomfort.

“You can discuss alternatives with Cary. How you satisfy him during pregnancy is not our concern. What is our concern is that pregnancy can be a dangerous time for a marriage. You’d be surprised how many wives use pregnancy and motherhood as excuses to neglect their husbands. We know that your baby will need a lot of your attention but at regular intervals, you need to put a half an hour aside to devote your entire attention to your husband. Late in the pregnancy you will find the clock hand moving more slowly, but you must be careful never to let it wind down completely. Pregnancy will not exempt you from the consequences of a stopped clock.”

Clay paused and fixed Veronica with a direct stare. Veronica remembered Clay standing over her, swinging the tawse with all her strength and twitched reflexively in her chair. She had never been able to look at her mother-in-law with the same casualness after her beating as she had before.

After pausing for a couple of seconds to emphasize her point, Clay continued, “During the pregnancy schedule, your training regime is put on hold. Beginning today, you no longer need to use the clock to exercise yourself. I would advise you to exercise the muscles in your vulva on your own, though. The muscle strength and control that you have developed will give you a much easier pregnancy and labor than most women endure.

“After the birth, I’ll set your clock on a newborn schedule, which lasts for two months. I’ll advise you about caring for your husband during that period. Then it’s back to your normal schedule.” Unexpectedly, Clay reached out and held Veronica’s hand tenderly. “You’ve been so good for Cary, Juan and I are more grateful than I can tell you. I can’t imagine that my son could ever have found a better wife. I know that sometimes our traditions seem harsh, but I can only hope that you see the benefits and don’t resent them too much.”

Veronica was surprised to realize that she did not resent the Hobard tradition at all. So far, every weird, humiliating, and painful thing that she had endured had directly caused Cary’s love for her to increase beyond anything she could have imagined.

The pregnancy schedule turned out to be more relaxed than necessary, particularly toward the end. She could not have let the clock wind down and suffer a punishment even if she had wanted to; the clock hand moved so slowly during the last month that it would never have reached midnight. But Veronica got Cary off more than once a week anyway, right up to the beginning of labor, using a combination of manual stimulation and careful non-standard positions. She liked to see Cary happy. She found a rear-entry position with her on her hands and knees and her belly hanging freely to be most comfortable. When she was this position that gave her no clitoral stimulation and only allowed Cary shallow penetration, she found could use the well-developed muscles in her pussy to get a surprising amount of pleasure for herself. Humiliating as the pussy training was, it paid off.

She did not discover all this by herself. Anja, with disarming giggles and whispers and much rolling of her eyes, gave her invaluable advice and hints. When it came to sex, the Hobard women know what they were talking about. Veronica, her MBA courses still fresh in her mind, realized that the Hobard “tradition” fit the definition of a sophisticated modern knowledge management system. It had all the necessary elements – collaborative practices, cumulative memory, lifelong learning – and it had been invented two hundred years before corporate executives realized that they needed such a thing.

The baby was born at full term: a boy, seven pounds and nine ounces. They named him Barrett Cort Hobard; Barry for short. Cary had asked that they choose a German name in accord with Hobard tradition. Veronica was happy to accommodate him; she liked the name “Barrett” and could live with “Cort.”

On the newborn schedule, the clock did not insist on sexual activity at all during the first month and only rarely during the second, but Veronica felt magnanimous as she happily – and carefully – fucked Cary only eleven days after delivery. On the advice of Anja and Clay, she had refused an episiotomy and had had her child without drugs. The birth hurt like hell, but she had already survived thirty strokes with a tawse. What was a little more agony in her life? Especially for a good cause. Her peritoneal muscles were strong enough that she recovered exceptionally quickly. Her obstetrician, a thirty-eight year old graduate of Johns Hopkins Medical School with almost a decade of experience, said that she had never seen a mother recover so quickly. Obviously, this was the first time the doctor had had a Hobard woman for a patient. Veronica’s experience was not unusual in the family.

A few weeks later, Oma Wilma personally invited Veronica to the presentation of a conjugal clock to Barb. New baby or not, a personal invitation from Wilma was a command that had to be obeyed.

At the ceremony, Veronica realized for the first time that only the case was presented – it contained no mechanism and all the figures were held on with screws attached from the inside. The actual installation took a small army of technicians and artisans a full week. That was the reason that Hobard honeymoons always lasted more than a week and always took the happy newlyweds far away from Minnesota.

During the presentation, when she stood among the assembled Hobard woman and watched the expression on Barb’s face, she remembered her reaction to her own wedding present two years earlier. She knew that her view of her clock had changed, but she had not realized exactly how.

She could see that Barb thought that the thing was obscene. Veronica silently agreed; she would always think that her own clock was obscene. What else? It was covered in images of her and Cary, leering and grinning and grunting together in more ways, using more orifices and in more positions than they would ever try in real life.

Barb thought the thing was hideous. Veronica had changed her opinion but slightly in that respect. Whereas, at first she had thought that her clock looked intolerably hideous, now she saw it as merely ugly. She would never see it as beautiful: too baroque, too awkward, too busy visually. But now she understood the necessity of the design. The figures were not decorative; they were the controls for a surprising variety of functions. A clean, simple, modern design would have to be covered in buttons and labels, or at least have an embedded keyboard and display, and would be no more aesthetic than this collage of Kama Sutra/cuckoo clock carvings. At least this design looked like it was carrying the weight of two centuries of tradition.

Barb looked at the unmarked dial with the single hand and thought the thing was useless. She was flat out wrong. Though it was consistently annoying, often humiliating, sometimes downright degrading, Veronica believed that her conjugal clock was the most useful thing she had ever owned. She knew that, without the clock, she would have largely ignored Cary the same way that her own mother had largely ignored her father, especially after the arrival of the first baby. Veronica could not remember seeing her mother touch her father, even once, in the eighteen years that she had been raised in their home. Without the clock, Veronica would have been equally distant from Cary. Even before the distraction of the baby, the Hobard money opened so many doors, gave a Hobard wife so many opportunities to do so many exciting things, that Cary would have been lucky to get her attention more than a couple of times a month. Other women living with immense wealth slipped into quiet desperation, watching their husbands drift into the arms of mistresses and seventy hour work weeks, and did not know how to fix the problem. As much as she hated it, Veronica blessed the clock as a permanent reminder that she should be Cary’s wife and not merely a decorative fixture in his house; that she and Cary should be a source of pleasure for each other rather than trying to dig spurs into their mate’s ribs.

Veronica watched silently, letting the older women convince Barb to accept the clock by explaining it was a traditional Hobard wedding gift and telling her that she would find it more useful than it appeared. Several times they cautioned her against letting the clock wind down without explaining how she was to get Wil to wind it. Veronica had to suppress a smile. Barb was going to get a surprise the first time she made love to her husband in her new home. She looked at Anja and saw her friend grinning openly. Anja was right. Barb did not know it, but the presentation of the clock was an occasion for happiness.

During the months before the wedding, Veronica had chatted with Barb on a few occasions and had tried to get to know her better. She had learned that Barb was the only child of a university professor and a senior policy advisor in the previous federal administration. She had been raised by her mother, who was a respected historian of suffrage movements in North America. Barb did not know her father well – her parents had long been divorced and he had exercised his visitation rights only rarely. She claimed that she understood; he was a workaholic who traveled incessantly. Veronica could see the hurt caused by his absence in Barb’s face as she made apologies on her father’s behalf, nonetheless. After Barb left home to attend university – she was one of the rare and brilliant scholars who managed to win acceptance to Harvard – her mother had remarried. That union had lasted less than two years; her mother had attended Barb’s graduation alone. Barb was undeniably brilliant.  All the Hobard women were exceptionally intelligent and well educated, but Barb shone bright among them. On the other hand, she thought that the sun rose and set on her head. Veronica had a bad feeling about her.

Though younger than Veronica, Barb struck her as a reincarnation of a sixties second-wave radical feminist. Veronica, having flirted with feminism as an undergraduate student and having taken one course in woman’s studies, had come to see Hobard women as third wave feminists at least, if not the leading edge of the fourth wave. She reasoned that, as a result of their tradition, they had a clear role in marriage that gave them equal status with their husbands. They were never distracted by the gender-based power struggles that drain the joy out of most feminists’ relationships. Instead, Hobard women spent their energy on productive activities, in collaboration with their husbands when they wished and on their own when they did not.

Now, as she watched the new bride accept the clock with open distaste, Veronica predicted that she would let it wind down in less than a month. In Veronica’s opinion, Barb was a poor choice for a Hobard woman and she further predicted that Barb would abandon Wil as soon as she was told that she was required to submit to a whipping to stay married to him.

Veronica’s perfect record of incorrect predictions was upheld; she was proven wrong on both counts.

First, Veronica had left Wil out of her calculations. Wil was no fool; he knew exactly what he was getting in a wife and handled Barb deftly. He never waited for her to initiate sex and kept the clock wound for almost seven months by cajoling her into bed whenever the hand neared midnight. It only wound down when Barb finally put her foot down and flatly refused to accommodate him no matter how much he reasoned or pleaded with her. She said that she was tired and didn’t feel like it and he could just damn well wait another day until she was damned good and ready and to hell with his damned clock. He knew that the day would come when the wound down – the day always came – but was pleased that he had managed to delay it for longer than average. Most Hobard women let their clock wind down between three and six months after the honeymoon.

Second, Veronica had not counted on Barb’s competitive relationship with her mother. Barb had seen both her mother’s marriages fail after short durations, four years and two years respectively, and was determined that she would do better than that. She would suffer almost anything rather than abandoning her own marriage after less than a year because she knew that her mother would mention it every time they spoke, just to needle her. When Wilma had presented the option of either leaving Wil or submitting to a whipping, Barb had been less argumentative than Veronica. Where new Hobard wives typically said that they would take neither choice, Barb had not bothered. She had quietly listened to both options – leave or be whipped – had told the delegation that she would consider her position; then ushered them out. Barb had come to the conclusion, lightning quick, that there was no third option – that the family tradition could not have held for so long if outright refusal were possible – so she had not bothered arguing with the women. Barb was a smart woman.

The next day, Veronica was one of the seven Hobard women standing on Barb’s front step, waiting to see if she had left the house; and, by implication, her marriage to Wil.

A maid answered and ushered the women into the foyer. “Mrs. Hobard will receive you in the master bedroom. She has asked me not to escort you upstairs, but has given me the remainder of the day off, so, with your permission, I will take my leave.” Without waiting for the permission that she had just requested, the maid stepped out the front door and closed it behind her.

Veronica was impressed that Barb had reasoned correctly that her whipping would take place in the presence of the clock and had avoided the minor indignity of being escorted to her own bedroom.

As soon as they entered the room, they saw her standing in the center of the room wearing a fluffy green bathrobe. Barb took the initiative and, before Wilma could utter a word, said, “At this time, I would like to make my position absolutely clear. I am only allowing myself to be subjected to your abuse because you have left me with no other choice. Your actions constitute a violent and illegal assault on my person. You are violating every standard of modern civilization. I only regret that I am unable to avail myself of a legal remedy without irreparably damaging my marriage, which apparently I value more highly than do you. Every one of you should be ashamed of yourself for being involved in this assault.”

Wilma did not respond directly to Barb’s statement, but quietly opened the clock to reveal the tawse inside the hollow pilaster.

Veronica watched Barb closely and saw her flinch at the sight of the heavy leather strap. She considered Barb’s words. She was right. For all the vaunted centuries of Hobard tradition, this was nothing more than a brutal assault on a defenseless woman whose only crime had been to want to wait an extra day before making love to her husband. What right did she have to participate in this barbaric punishment? She scanned the faces of the other women present. She saw more anger than shame. Barb did not have a single other friend in this room.

“Remove your clothing.”

Barb slipped the bathrobe from her shoulders, letting it fall to the floor. She was wearing cotton panties underneath. Without comment, she slipped those down over her legs as well, and stepped out of them. She had understood the nature of the tawse as soon as she had seen it.

Wilma unfolded the hidden whipping bench from the side of Barb’s clock. Barb remained standing in the center of the room.

Wilma said, “Please lie with your torso along the length of the bench and place your wrists in the restraining rings.”

“No,” Barb replied, raising her chin in defiance. “If you want me there, then you’re going to have to put me there yourself. I am demonstrating my opposition to this procedure by engaging in passive non-compliance.”

Wilma looked nonplussed. The group of women looked at each other in silence for a few moments, uncertain what to do. No one was willing to grab Barb and force her onto the bench.

Clay took it upon herself to break the silence. “We will not force you to comply. If you do not place yourself into position voluntarily, then we will interpret that as exercising your option to leave your marriage rather than submitting to punishment. It is your choice alone to submit or leave. We will not make that choice for you.”

Clay and Barb stared at each other for a long time, neither willing to relent. The women in the room held their collective breath.

Finally, Barb said, “You say ‘choice’ but you give me none. You do evil here.”

She stepped to the bench, bent over and placed her wrists in the open steel rings. Anja bent over and snapped them closed. Veronica could see Barbs hands trembling in the rings. She did not know if she were trembling from fear or anger. Probably both.

As Wilma handed the tawse to Adalgisa, Barb’s mother-in-law, Veronica recalled Anja telling her that Adalgisa had “whaled into her ass something fierce.” She wondered if Barb was about to receive a beating even more brutal than the one that she had suffered at Clay’s hand. Was that physically possible? Surely there was a limit to what could be done with a tawse.

Wilma delivered her standard statement about the reason and nature of the punishment. When Wilma stated that Barbara “had failed to accommodate her husband’s needs,” Barb responded from the bench with a loud, “Bullshit!”

Veronica flinched at the interjection and looked at Adalgisa’s face. The woman did not try to hide her fury. Any hint of sympathy or tendency toward leniency had been banished by Barb’s defiant utterance. It was almost as though Barb were deliberately forcing the women to treat her as brutally as possible to make the barbarity of the proceedings absolutely unequivocal.

She was a brilliant woman and was willing to suffer as much physical mortification as was necessary to make her point. Veronica saw her as a martyr; driven by her intellect, she was inviting a full measure of pain and would be forced to feel it as deeply as any human being could.

She remembered Clay’s visit and Anja’s phone call before her own whipping. Their words of encouragement had not only helped to convince Veronica to submit to the whipping, they had let her view the process as a kind of initiation rite and had taken some of the sting out of the procedure. Looking at Adalgisa, it was obvious that she had given Barb no such support. In fact, she had probably hoped that Barb would abandon Wil and leave him free to marry someone else. Barb had no one to support her in this room; she was enduring this alone to preserve her marriage.

Veronica’s face remained impassive, but her heart wept for Barb’s courage.

Her rumination was interrupted by the explosive crack of leather against flesh. Adalgisa had put her full weight behind the first blow, turning her body to follow through with as much force as possible. The air was driven out of Barb’s lungs in an audible gasp. Barb was a slender woman and her ass was small, almost masculine in appearance. Now a broad stripe of pure white was painted across the narrow cheeks where the strap had driven the blood from the small surface vessels.

Veronica glanced at Barb’s face. It looked as white as the stripe across her ass. She was gritting her teeth against crying out, drawing her lips back to suck as much air as she could.

“One,” Wilma intoned in her patented funeral monotone.

Twenty-nine to go, Veronica cried to herself.

The second stroke was as vicious as the first. Veronica saw a flicker of joy in Adalgisa’s face as she laid the strap into her daughter-in-law’s flesh with all her strength in exactly the same spot as the first blow and realized that the woman was a sadist.

Barb’s face was contorted in agony, but she remained silent.

“Two,” Wilma intoned.

Veronica did not know if she could stand to watch twenty-eight more lashes of the tawse fall on Barb’s buttocks. She had only sustained two strokes and her skin was already blossoming with purplish patches.

Adalgisa put such effort into her third blow that she reflexively emitted a porcine grunt. Barb remained silent, but tears had begun to drip from her eyes, knocked from the corners by the force of the blows on her nether end.

Veronica felt her own eyes well with tears and glanced across Barb’s back at Anja. She was crying freely, though Veronica did not know if that were from sympathy for Barb or in memory of her own beating.

“Three.”

Another whistle of leather through air, another hoggish grunt from Adalgisa, and another thwack exploded against defenseless flesh.

Veronica became aware that all the women in the room were twitching in response to each blow. Every woman here had felt the agony of heavy leather beating against her own ass at some time in her life. None of them were enjoying this experience.

None except for the woman wielding the tawse. Adalgisa looked eager to lay into her daughter-in-law with all the force that she could muster.

“Four.”

The fifth blow was delivered exactly on top of all four previous ones. It was clear that Adalgisa intended to keep punishing the same small patch of flesh rather than spreading her blows over Barb’s entire ass. She was ensuring that she inflicted the maximum damage possible. After only five blows, Barb already had a stripe of uniform dark purple across her buttocks.

The sixth and seventh and eighth blows fell in slow cadence across the same narrow stripe of flesh. Adalgisa intended to do as much physical injury as possible. This punishment was supposed to hurt, but not cause a permanent scar. She looked at Wilma, but the elder woman refused to meet her eyes. She kept counting implacably.

By the tenth blow, the stripe across Barb’s ass was almost black in places and leaking blood from several spots along both edges.

Adalgisa changed her target on the eleventh blow. A fresh white stripe appeared above the existing purple-black band. The leather strap left dots of deep red – blood from the previous wound had been carried on the strap to stipple the fresh white skin. The lower edge of this new stripe fell exactly along the upper edge of the previous stripe; that thin margin of skin was going to be doubly punished.

Barb was lying limp on the bench, her body being rocked at five second intervals by the force of Adalgisa’s blows. Veronica could not tell if she had fallen unconscious from the pain or merely reached the point of helplessness where she no longer had the will to try to resist the inevitable.

By the time the twentieth blow had fallen, the line where the lower edge of the new stripe was coincident with the upper edge of the initial stripe formed a continuous long wound that was bleeding freely.

Adalgisa laid the twenty-first blow across the two stripes so that the split between the two tails of the tawse fell along the wound that she had opened up. Veronica had expected her to begin a third stripe below the initial stripe and was surprised to see Adalgisa continuing to punish the same flesh with the last ten blows. On refection, though, it was consistent with her unabashed sadism. She would be too tired to inflict the same degree of damage in a new spot; she could increase the damage more by concentrating the on the area that was already most deeply bruised than by beginning anew elsewhere.

By the thirtieth blow, enough blood was flowing from the wound across Barb’s ass that the last blow of the tawse threw a fine spray of red across the witnesses.

Veronica felt ill to see such cruelty. Watching was worse than being the victim. She never knew that three minutes could last for such a long time.

Adalgisa looked reluctant to stop swinging and hand the tawse back to Wilma. For an instant, Veronica wondered if the other women were going to have to physically restrain her from continuing past the proscribed count. She only managed to control herself when Wilma stepped directly between her and her victim.

As Wilma returned the tawse to the pilaster, Veronica looked at Adalgisa’s face. Her expression of satisfaction was disgusting.

Anja released Barb’s wrists. She and Veronica helped her to the bed while Wilma folded the bench back into the clock. Anja looked at Veronica with a question in her eyes. Veronica answered by gesturing that she should follow the other women out of the room.

When she was alone with Barb, she said, “You were incredibly brave.”

“Fuck off.” Barb’s voice was weak, but not hoarse – she had not once cried or screamed aloud during the entire barbaric beating.

She smoothed Barb’s hair with a gentle stroke.

“Get the fuck out of here and leave me alone.” Barb’s voice was strong and clear.

“I’d like to help.”

“My friends can help me. You’re not one of them, so get the fuck out of my bedroom right now.”

“Your friends don’t know what you’ve been through. And they won’t ever understand why.” She looked at Barb’s ass. It looked terrible. A thin trickle of blood was leaking toward the sheet. She wanted to wipe it away, but was afraid to touch the tortured flesh for fear of causing any further pain. She was certain that Barb would bear a permanent line of scar tissue across her ass. That was not supposed to happen.

“Fuck off.”

Barb would have good reason to hate her mother-in-law for the rest of her life. For a minute, Veronica marveled that she had not hated Clay for brutalizing her. It had been different between her and Clay, though. It had been tradition. For Adalgisa and Barb it was entirely personal.

“Leave me alone,” Barb whispered.

That was a sentiment that Veronica could understand. She had wanted to be left alone after her own beating, too. And it was clear that staying here was not doing Barb any good. “I’m going to go, then.” She paused. “Look, Barb, I’m pretty new to this whole Hobard marital tradition thing just like you and I can’t say that I understand it all that well. If you want to talk about it sometime, I’d like to hear what you think about it.”

“Fuck you,” Barb answered quietly.

On that sad note, Veronica left.

As she closed the door, she heard Barb finally begin to cry. Tortured sobs that broke her heart anew. She had never heard a woman sound so alone and wondered if Barb really did have other friends.

Clay met with Veronica for lunch the day after Barb’s beating. She got right to the point. “Barb is a problem. We must find a solution.”

Veronica bristled at Clay’s words. “Adalgisa is the problem.”

Clay shook her head. “Not any more. By unanimous decision, Adalgisa will never again be invited to another Hobard ceremony. She certainly will never be allowed to touch a tawse or cane again; nor will she ever witness another punishment. No one, not even me, wishes to socialize with her. She is still part of the Hobard family and still my sister, but she is no longer part of the Hobard tradition. She was exceptionally harsh when she whipped Anja and we should have paid attention and taken steps earlier. But no one ever dreamed that it was possible for her to do the damage to Barb that she did. Apparently, right after Barb and Wil’s wedding, she purchased her own tawse and has been practicing in secret for months to build up her muscles and perfect her aim with the sole goal of being able to inflict as much permanent injury as possible. Nothing like this has ever happened before. It will never happen again. I can promise you that.”

“She should go to prison.”

“Our solution is more permanent. Her expulsion from the Hobard tradition will last for the rest of her life and will hurt her more deeply than any legal sanction. I can promise you that.” Veronica returned to her original point. “The Adalgisa solution is easy. It is Barb who poses the more serious problem. We have to find a solution to her.”

“That poor woman is a victim, not a problem.”

“She is a victim and that is the problem. Hobard women are not supposed to be victims. They are supposed to benefit from our traditions. We do not know how to repair the damage that has been done to her. This wrong must be righted in some way.”

“How?”

Clay looked anguished. “We don’t know. We’ve been meeting all night and we don’t have a solution.”

“Take the clock out of her bedroom. Get out of her life and let her have a normal marriage to Wil. She deserves that much.”

“Do you really believe that her marriage to Wil would be better if we released her from our tradition? If we thought so, we’d do it in a heartbeat. But the question that I have for you is whether your marriage to Cary has been aided or damaged by the clock.”

Veronica was silent for a moment. She could not deny that her marriage was better, stronger, more loving because she made love to Cary regularly. Not just because of the regularity, but because she had become really good in bed. She experienced more than just orgasms; she frequently experienced true ecstasy. Not every time, but more often than not. Would they be depriving Barb of her best chance to experience joy by denying her access to the Hobard tradition? “The question is not whether you or I benefit from the tradition, the question is whether Barb can ever benefit from it after what she has suffered.”

“I believe that she can, but only if we can find a way to do it. That is the solution that we have not been able to find yet. That is why we are asking you and Anja and Lise for help. You are her peers. Maybe you have an insight that we lack.”

“I have no more insight into Barb than you had into Adalgisa,” Veronica stated flatly.

Clay flinched as Veronica’s statement cut deep, but continued her thought. “Barb has made no friends among the Hobard women. That happens. Not everyone clicks with us. Usually we don’t care about that as long as the tradition is upheld. Barb has become a special case, though. She needs to have friends within the family because she’s going to need more support than the rest of us.”

“After yesterday, she will never be friends with any of us.”

“I hope, for her sake, that you are wrong. At the least, we have to try. We want you to try.”

Veronica looked at Clay for a long minute, then said, “I have tried. I tried again yesterday. She told me to go fuck myself. I don’t blame her.”

“I don’t blame her either. But yesterday was yesterday and tomorrow will be tomorrow. Nothing is permanent. Not even ill will. We have to keep trying until we can form a positive relationship with her, if for no other reason than to start her on her training with the clock.”

Veronica looked at Clay in astonishment, then exploded, “What in hell are you women thinking? You think that Barb is ever going to hump that damned clock? Weren’t you there yesterday? Didn’t you see what we did to her?”

“I was there. I am suffering as much as you are. But the training is the compensation. It is the light after the darkness. It is the way that she can attain the joy that she deserves. You know the benefits. How can you deprive her of them?”

“Because your so-called training is degrading and Barb has been degraded enough already. You should be satisfied that she’s still willing to stay married to this family. Who in hell would be stupid enough to try to tell her that now she has to start fucking a fake dick that pops out of her clock every morning?”

“We were hoping that you would tell her.”

Veronica laughed bitterly. “You’re out of your minds. You’re completely disconnected from reality.”

“Not right away, of course, but eventually. After you’ve managed to create some kind of bond with her.”

“How long before this so-called training has to start? Two weeks? You think that I’m going to become such a close buddy to Barb in the next two weeks that she’ll be happy to hear me tell her about this marvelous plastic dick that’s hidden in her clock and that, if she doesn’t diddle herself on it every day, her clock is going to run down and then, so sad, too bad, we’ll be coming around to beat her ass again? She’ll not only tell the whole family to go fuck themselves, she’ll go straight to the police. Do the words, ‘felony assault,’ mean anything at all to you?”

“Don’t worry about that. We’ve taken steps to protect ourselves against legal action. Also, don’t worry about the timing. One of our little secrets is that the start of the training is not determined by the clock. The training timer is started manually during the first training session. If Barb doesn’t get her first training session for six months, her clock will still keep working until then. Wil will still be able to wind it.”

“Wil will be lucky if Barb makes love to him even once in the next six months. What happens when her clock runs down tomorrow? Are you going to visit her again and tell her that punishment time has arrived again?”

“That won’t happen, either. We instructed Wil to enter the illness code and suspend the clock’s function until we can get this straightened out. But, you know, it’s not quite as bad as you’re making it out to be. It’s true that Barb was punished more brutally than she should have been, but the punishment that we have all suffered was nearly as brutal as Barb’s. None of us gets an easy ride and we all get over it. Barb will, too. She’s tougher than you think. The real question is whether she loves Wil enough to forgive us. We’ll know that when her clock starts running again.”

“You think she and Wil will ever use the clock again?” Veronica was shocked. She was beginning to realize that Clay had been so immersed in the Hobard tradition that she had no concept of normalcy any longer.

“Of course. Eventually she’ll make love to Wil and he will automatically start the clock running again. Hobard men are so conditioned to wind the clock that he’ll not be able to stop himself. And you can’t forget, Barb has been making love to him every day or two for months. It’s become her habit, too.”

Veronica shook her head. “It won’t happen. Barb’s clock will never run again.”

Her record of incorrect predictions remained intact. Four days later, Anja informed her that Barb and Wil’s clock was running again. Somehow, Hobard women always knew when each other’s clocks were running. Some day, Veronica would have to find out how they did that.

Over the next two months, Veronica called Barb three times, asking her to go to lunch but Barb never accepted her invitation.

Then, to her amazement, Barb called her and asked her out. She was overjoyed to accept.

Barb was cold and distant during their lunch. Veronica was disappointed, but not surprised. How could she have expected any different? Even so, they managed to maintain a conversation about neutral subjects: movies, vacations, children. On the last point, Veronica said that she was happy to be a mother; Barb that she wanted children eventually, but not before she was ready.

Then, not particularly delicately, she began probing Veronica for any information about Hobard wives getting involved in the Hobard businesses. Veronica knew little about the subject, but could tell her that she knew of a few cases where Hobard wives had become company executives. There was certainly no stigma attached to it – she had met a couple of husbands who were pleased to brag about their wives’ success in the family business ad nauseum.

Barb commented, with forced casualness that one of the Hobard companies, White Arctic Refrigeration, was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. It was one of the last small independent American manufacturers of refrigerators. Most others had been acquired by major white goods manufacturers years ago. Hobard had been unwilling to sell White Arctic when it was viable and now their competitors were convinced that it was about to collapse and saw no need to buy it out even at a deep discount. The Hobard conglomerate would take a substantial financial hit when it finally collapsed.

She said that she had a few ideas and thought that she might be able to turn the company around if she were put in charge and given a free hand. She had put the idea to the company board of directors, but they were reluctant to give a young woman with no track record control over a company, even if she was a Harvard graduate, a member of the family, and the company already had one foot in bankruptcy court.

Veronica promised to do what she could to help. That afternoon, she began lobbying the other Hobard women who promised to argue Barb’s case to their husbands. Normally Hobards, men and women, were required to work their way up to senior management positions – the family name was not an automatic entrée to a top floor office – but everyone knew that Barb deserved a little extra consideration. And White Arctic was almost dead anyway; there was no time for anyone new to work their way up the hierarchy.

She heard, a few weeks later, that Barb had assumed the leadership of White Arctic. Within a few months, Barb managed to restructure the debt, move most of the manufacturing offshore, and stabilize sales. A lot of White Arctic workers were handed pink slips, but Barb did not seem to mind having a reputation for ruthlessness. Then she fired the development staff en masse, and hired a new group of young engineers. She shrank the line down to only three models and ordered a complete redesign that emphasized reliability over superfluous features. She had correctly discerned that American consumers were tired of seeing their fancy appliances break down constantly and wanted a simple refrigerator that would last for twenty years without needing repair. The new White Arctic refrigerators were backed with an all-inclusive twelve-year warranty. The daring warranty earned high praise in the press and buyers flocked to appliance stores, willing to pay a premium price for a basic appliance that was guaranteed to keep working. Appliance retailers could not keep White Arctic refrigerators in stock, and Barb’s company became a major profit earner for the Hobard conglomerate within a year.

Victoria was bemused to see that Barb’s unique way of saying “Up yours!” to the entire Hobard family was to prove that she could do better than anyone else. Still scarred by the most brutal beating that Victoria would ever witness, Barb was getting her revenge by making the Hobard family even richer than before.

Years later, she learned that Barb had paid a secret price to become the CEO of White Arctic; the Hobard matriarchs had insisted that cunt training had to be included in the deal. Lise had been asked to oversee her initial training session.

Belatedly, Veronica wondered if any of the factory workers that Barb had so callously fired, when seeing their family car being repossessed and facing eviction from their homes, would have found any consolation knowing that the cold bitch who had signed their pink slips was paying for it every single day by being forced to strip naked, press her bare pussy against an obscenely carved clock, spike her cunt on a plastic cock and squeeze with all her might. Probably not.

Veronica did note that, despite all the hours Barb had to devote to turning White Arctic around, she never again let her conjugal clock wind down.

During the next year, Veronica and Cary saw Barb and Wil socially on a number of occasions. Both Barb and Wil appeared happy with each other. At times, Barb even seemed to show some small affection toward him.

She was not an innately happy person; this was as much happiness as she could achieve.

4. The Clock Winds Down a Second Time

Though Hobard women invariably let their conjugal clock wind down during the first year of their marriage, a significant minority manage to keep theirs from ever winding down a second time. This is possible because the clock slowly, almost imperceptibly relaxes its schedule over time. After a few decades, the hand will take more than two weeks to return to the midnight position. And, of course, if the man or wife becomes physically unable to perform sexual acts, the clock would be permanently disabled. Curiously, most Hobard women dislike its appearance, but, even when the clock has been taken out of service, almost none allow it to be removed from their bedrooms.

Veronica, though, was one of the majority who failed to keep her clock wound as the years passed after her first beating. Through no fault of her own, it wound down for the second time in the eighth year of her marriage to Cary, three years after the birth of their third child.

One night, Cary did not show his usual eagerness to follow Veronica to bed. When she finally took his hand and led him into the master bedroom, the clock had passed the eleven o’clock position and was lingering perilously close to midnight. She undressed him, took his limp cock in her hand, and whispered, “I want to fuck you bad,” in her breathiest, sexiest voice. She put him on the bed and massaged his cock, first gently, and then with increasing vigor.

He did not respond.

After a time, he said, “I think I’m ill.”

“No, you’re not. You worked all day. You don’t have a temperature. You’re healthy.” If she let him stop the clock when he was not ill, she would be punished. The Hobard women would insist on confirming his condition, coming around as soon as the clock was stopped under the pretense of wanting to help her nurse her husband back to health. That had happened before. More than once in the past few years, she had been one of those women in attendance, visiting the wife of a sick Hobard husband and then participating in the post-visit discussion, deciding by consensus whether the clock had been stopped for a legitimate reason or not. Once she had been witness to the punishment of a wife who had allowed her husband to stop their clock under false pretenses. The Hobard tradition always placed the blame on the wife.

“I’m just too tired.”

“How can you say that? I wake you up in the middle of the night all the time and you make love to me even when you’re half asleep. You’ve been sitting around playing with your computer for the last two hours. You can’t be that tired. Just knock off a quickie with me. I really want to get fucked.” She looked at him but he did not meet her gaze. “I know. Let’s have a nice bath together and relax and then you can do me.”

They bathed. She brought him back to bed and tried to arouse him with her mouth – something that she seldom did – but even that was insufficient.

He tried as hard as he could, but his cock swelled only slightly; it never grew sufficiently hard to penetrate her. She was frustrated to the point of distraction. She knew that, if he could only get it inside her for an instant, she would be able to squeeze him into a full erection with her talented cunt.

She was still trying to coax wood into him when the bedroom fell silent. The quiet, reassuring ticking stopped for only the second time in their marriage. She looked up from her ministrations and saw the hand pointing directly toward the heavens. By grim coincidence, the conjugal clock had reached the midnight position at exactly midnight.

Fear clutched at her heart and she collapsed beside her supine husband. He looked at the clock in horror, and then held his wife close. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I should have stopped the clock. Oh, god, I’m sorry. I should have rewound it even if I couldn’t make love to you. This is all my fault. I’ll tell them that. I’ll make it all right.”

She was torn. Maybe she should have asked him to rewind the clock even if they had not made love. It would violate the tradition of the clock, but she did not deserve to be punished. She had worked as hard as she could to try to make love to her husband. Every man had to be allowed to fail once in a while; the male organ was not a clockwork device. But, despite all her rationalizations, she felt like she was the one who had failed, not him. In her gut, she felt that she deserved to be punished.

She did not want to suffer pain and humiliation, but there was nothing that she could do to stop it at this time of the night.

Her only hope was that, when the women came tomorrow, they would let her explain what had happened. They had to understand and forgive her because it was not her that had failed; it was him.

She barely slept; in the dim light from the street, the white face of the silent clock loomed large and pale like a cold moon on a midwinter night, the single black hand pointing to the judgment that was hanging over her head.

At ten o’clock in the morning, Sarah, the wife of Clay’s oldest brother, called. Wilma was eighty-five years old and frail. Immediately after the debacle of Wilma’s inadequate supervision of Barb’s beating by Adalgisa, Sarah had begun assuming some of the duties of the matriarch. By now, Sarah was doing everything of substance and Wilma’s role was purely symbolic.

Veronica had been surprised to see that the Hobard women were not discriminated against according to their parentage. The oldest wife was the oldest wife, regardless of whether Hobard blood ran in her veins or not.

On the phone, Sarah told Veronica, “An inquiry will be convened in your home at two o’clock. Your presence is required.”

“An inquiry?”

“The first time a clock stops, the consequence is fixed and automatic. All subsequent stoppages are followed by an inquiry to establish the circumstances. We will be at your house at two o’clock today. Be prepared to host three judges. Your dining room will have sufficient space.”

Veronica would have an opportunity to plead her case; she almost cried with relief after she hung up the phone.

So, at two oh five, Veronica found herself facing Sarah and two other women across her dining room table. She had seen these other women from a distance at family functions, but had never been introduced to them. She was relieved to see that neither Clay nor any of her friends were included as judges because she would be revealing intimate details of Cary’s failure to perform in bed. How could any wife tell her husband’s mother that he couldn’t get it up?

Sarah did not bother to introduce the other judges but began by laying out the procedure. “You will tell us what happened. Be assured that it is in your best interest to be complete and accurate, even if you have to tell us things that you think will reflect badly on you. Your husband is also facing an inquiry and it is important that your account can be reconciled with his. We can only determine the most effective course of action to maintain your marriage if we know exactly what happened. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell us what happened last night.”

Veronica spared no detail in her account. When she finished, she said, “So, you can see that I did everything humanly possible. I did not fail to accommodate my husband’s needs and I did nothing that warrants a punishment.”

Sarah frowned. “When a clock winds down, punishment and correction of the wife are mandatory, regardless of the circumstance. The purpose of this inquiry is not to decide whether punishment will take place, but rather to determine the exact nature of the punishment and, more importantly, to select the form of the remedial training that will follow. We will consult with your husband’s judges and return tomorrow at noon to present you with your options.”

“What options?”

“Why, your option to submit to punishment and corrective training or to leave your husband, of course. You have no other option.”

The three women left.

That night, Veronica fell asleep staring at the pilaster that hid the tawse.

The following day, the three judges, accompanied by Clay and Anja, presented themselves Veronica’s door.

Veronica could not stop herself from trembling as she led them into the sitting room. She knew that this was another step closer to the inevitable consequence that she was facing.

“You have a choice between submitting to a caning or leaving your marriage,” Sarah said. “You have been married for only eight years. In accordance with your prenuptial contract, there is no annuity or financial compensation provided by the contract until after the tenth year, so you will be permitted to leave this house with nothing but the clothes that you are wearing. You will be given unrestricted access to your children immediately and, once you have established your own home, joint custody. The children will be supported by the Hobard trust. For the most part, they will be provided with goods and services rather than money. Any money that is given to you to support the children will be reviewed by an independent auditor to confirm that all expenditures are necessary to maintain their well-being, comfort, and education. You will maintain complete financial records for their examination.”

Veronica did not bother listening to the details. She loved her husband and children dearly; she would to submit any punishment, even an assault as brutal as Barb had suffered, before she would leave her marriage. In fact, she had stopped listening as soon as Sarah had uttered the word, ‘caning.’ She had never seen an actual cane. She associated it with third world countries like Singapore and Saudi Arabia. If the tawse had been bad, the cane had to be worse. Her stomach churned with fear.

“We will return on Thursday at noon to administer your punishment. If you choose not to submit to twenty strokes of the cane, then you should leave these premises before that time.”

The seven unsmiling women left.

What did ‘twenty strokes of the cane’ mean in practical terms? Veronica spent the afternoon in front of the computer reading about caning. She learned that canes varied from thin whippy things that stung the skin to heavy wooden sticks that could be used to beat a person to death. She also learned that canes could be applied to the back, buttocks, thighs and calves. Depending on the type of cane and the force with which it was applied, it could leave permanent scars. A sufficient number of severe strokes could leave a person permanently disfigured. She stumbled across a video of a man being caned on the buttocks in Singapore. By coincidence, he had also been sentenced to twenty strokes. His buttocks had been laid open deep through skin and fat to the muscle; by the end of his caning, all the skin had been beaten off. She did not doubt that he would be deeply scarred for life.

Her conclusion was that the word ‘caning’ was insufficient to tell her anything about the severity of the punishment that she was facing.

If Adalgisa had been permitted to take a cane to Barb’s back instead of a tawse to her buttocks, Barb would never have been able to wear a backless dress again.

Veronica recalled that, when offered a whipping, she had been assured that the punishment would not leave permanent scars. She had never wondered why the issue of scarring had been mentioned. This time, she was aware that she had been given no such assurance. The omission gave her the clear impression that she would be left with scars. But, if the cost of keeping her husband was to bear scars on her flesh, then she would bear scars.

On Wednesday, predictably, Clay phoned and asked to see her. She was about to refuse; she already knew that she was going to submit to the caning and did not want to hear her mother-in-law begging her to go through with it. Clay, hearing the pause, added, “Please see me. We have to talk about what you should expect.”

That was something that Veronica did want to hear.

When Clay saw Veronica on Wednesday, she took her into her arms and hugged her tightly. “I know what happened,” she said quietly into Veronica’s ear, “and I know that you think that it is unfair for use to punish you for Cary’s shortcomings. You are right. It is unfair. But, in another, more subtle way, it is not and you will understand with time. Often, the situations that let a clock wind down a second time are more complicated than they first appear. I didn’t come here to beg you to accept the punishment, because I already know that you will. The depth of your love for Cary is obvious to all of us. But, if you want me to beg then I’d be happy to beg. I’ll get down on my knees and plead with you if that would make it any easier. I’m guessing that you’d rather not have to see and hear that performance.”

Veronica laughed despite herself and hugged Clay back. “I don’t need to see you beg. I’m willing to suffer anything that I have to for Cary. But I don’t think that I deserve it.”

“I know.”

The two women released each other and took a step apart. Clay spoke first. “I came here to tell you something important. When you first see Cary after your punishment, make him tell you why he could not make love to you. He won’t want to do it. It’s going to be humiliating for him and you’ll have to force him to come clean, but it’s really important. Don’t let him off the hook until he explains himself to you. Fully. Make sure that you don’t let him tell you only part of the story. Keep on him until you get every detail. You deserve an explanation, and you need to hear it. You’ll be hurting, but that’s exactly why you’ll have the upper hand. It may be the only time that you can force him to tell you the whole truth and it’s really important that you make him do it.”

Veronica’s heart fell. “He’s going to tell me that there’s another woman, isn’t he?”

Clay shook her head. “No. Don’t worry about that. As nearly as I know, he has never cheated on you and. If he ever does stray, I would never try to make him confess it to you. The Hobards handle infidelity quite differently. Some day I’ll tell you some stories that will make you laugh. But that’s not what’s happening here.”

“What, then?”

“You have to hear it from him, not me. I just came here to make you realize that Cary has something important to tell you, but that you will have to force it out of him. That’s all.”

“What about the caning? What kind of cane? Twenty strokes is a lot. How hard?”

“I can’t tell you that. All I can say is that I won’t be administering them. The mother-in-law is usually asked to administer the punishment but always has the right to refuse. I exercised that right. I felt obligated to administer the tawse for several reasons. Not the least was that I saw how my sister abused Anja and knew that she would be Wilma’s second choice, if I refused. I had to beat you then, but now, Adalgisa’s out of the picture permanently. Besides, this is a very different situation. I don’t think that I’m supposed to tell you this, but we’ve flown a woman here from Germany who is a true expert with a cane and will be able to administer the precise strokes required. She has caned dozens of women. We’ve used her before.”

“She’s not a Hobard?”

“She is, but a more distant branch of the family. We would never let an outsider touch one of us.”

“How bad will it be?”

“I won’t lie to you. You will suffer.”

“Will it scar me permanently?”

Clay shocked Veronica by turning her back to her, pulling her pantyhose and panties down to her thighs and raising her dress to her waist. She looked over her shoulder. “This is typical. It’s been fifteen years. It looked a lot worse at first, but by the second year, they faded to about where they are now. They’re still fading a little, but I expect them to look about like this for the rest of my life.”

So Clay had let her clock run down a second time, too. Veronica bent close and looked at her mother-in-law’s ass. She saw a series of faint white lines; touching them gently, she felt that they were slightly raised, especially where the lines crossed. They were visible, but she had to look closely; from a few feet away, they were almost unnoticeable.

“I can live with that,” Veronica said. “It’s not so bad.”

“I know,” Clay replied, “but it will look a lot worse for about a year. You won’t feel like wearing a high-cut bathing suit next season.”

Veronica laughed, “Maybe I’ll wear a thong and show everyone what happens to Hobard women when they don’t please their husbands.”

Clay did not return her attempt at levity, but said, in complete seriousness, “You do please Clay. Don’t ever doubt that. Sometimes, though, a man needs a little more than just being pleased. Sometimes he needs a bit of excitement.” She blushed. “But now I am talking out of school. Do you want to go shopping? We could call Anja and make an afternoon of it.”

Veronica knew that Clay was trying to take her mind off her impending caning and was grateful to her for it.

Anja had plans, but she cancelled them. Today, providing Veronica with distractions took priority over everything else.

She and Anja and Clay spent a pile of money in the next three hours, mostly on clothes that they would never wear.

Veronica bought a pink thong bikini just to make Clay laugh. Even with an unscarred ass, she would never wear a thong in public.

Veronica’s bedroom was large; it easily accommodated the six women who watched her slip her fluffy white bathrobe from her shoulders, leaving her nude, and toss it across her vanity chair.

There were fewer women present today than when she had been whipped with the tawse and Veronica wondered at that. Then she realized why – only women who had been caned for letting their own clock wind down a second time could participate in caning another. That was why, in eight years, she had witnessed a number of whippings, but never been invited to witness a caning. Clay had shown her that she had been caned; now she realized that Anja’s presence meant that she had been caned as well.

After she had been laid along the whipping bench and had her wrists locked in the steel cuffs, while Sarah was pronouncing sentence, she watched the strange woman who had brought a small satchel and a long leather case into the room. She must be the professional from Baiersbronn.

The pro – Veronica had not been introduced and could think of her only as ‘the pro’ – was a short, stumpy woman about forty years old. She was wearing a snug sleeveless top, loose skirt and athletic shoes. No sleeves to bind her arms and sensible shoes to give her good traction; Veronica was terrified by her obvious dedication to the administration of pain.

The woman said something in German, and then opened the satchel and withdrew a handful of wide leather belts. The steel rings about Veronica’s wrists were insufficient to maintain her position to the satisfaction of the pro. She would be punishing Veronica with a much higher level of precision. She wrapped a wide leather belt about Veronica’s waist and buckled it tight underneath the whipping bench, fastening her torso solidly to the plank. Then she knelt and pulled Veronica’s knees forward to strap them to the steel supports that ran from the end of the bench to the base of the clock. She was strong and braced herself against the floor as she pulled the straps tight, stretching the muscles in Veronica’s buttocks and thighs as taut as possible.

When she was finished, Veronica could not move her ass more than an inch in any direction. The muscles in her butt and hams were already beginning to ache with the strain.

The pro prodded Victoria’s butt firmly in several spots with the tips of her fingers, judging the thickness of the layer of fat that she would be striking and the tone of the muscles underneath. She was speaking audibly to herself in German while she conducted her inspection. Victoria felt like a hog being assessed by a butcher. Tears were already overflowing her eyes; her lips trembling.

The other women in the room looked on the careful preparations with respect. Most of them had never seen this level of expertise brought to a caning. Clay had spared no effort or expense in arranging for Victoria to suffer at the hands of the best.

Finally satisfied, the pro opened her leather case and withdrew the cane.

The sight of the cane held Victoria in thrall as the snake holds the rabbit. She was terrified, but fascinated, unable to turn her eyes away.

The cane was a full meter long, made of some synthetic material. It was not round in cross section, but triangular with rounded corners. A round cane will leave two welts, one on each side of the cane. This was designed to leave a single, wide, well-defined welt, down the center of the stroke. It was moderately heavy and had a good flex under pressure. It would never break. Only a virtuoso would be able to leave a perfect welt without cutting; a mis-stroke would part the flesh badly enough to require stitches.

Anja bent over and whispered in Veronica’s ear, “Scream as loudly as you can. It will help you endure the pain.”

Veronica did not need Anja’s permission, she was almost screaming already and she had not yet received the first stroke.

The pro spoke to Sarah in German. Some distant part of Veronica’s mind processed this. Sarah was not of German extraction, she came from British stock, but was apparently so devoted to the Hobard tradition that she had learned German on her own.

“Eins.” Apparently the pro had asked Sarah to count before the stroke was delivered, probably to ensure that she knew exactly where she was before every one.

Veronica would never mistake the feeling of the cane for the tawse. Her agony was indescribable. People talk about fire and burning, but the pain was more concentrated, more intense, more immediate than any burn she had ever felt.

She was not even conscious of her scream – it burst through her throat from her diaphragm and echoed off the walls.

“Zwei.”

Pain on top of pain. The woman with the cane was not putting any body weight into her stroke whatsoever, and was using far less than the full strength of her arm. She let her wrist do the serious work, giving each stroke a precise flick that brought the cane into contact with the skin at the exact speed required to raise a horrible welt without breaking it.

“Drei.”

And on and on. Because the woman was not expending significant effort while mortifying Veronica’s flesh, she did not tire in the least. The strokes did not diminish in strength or severity as more were administered.

Every stroke fell on fresh skin. She marched the cane down Veronica’s ass with inhuman precision. The welts accumulated in precise parallel lines that did not touch or cross. Fitting twenty individual welts within the area between the top of the crack in Veronica’s ass and the fold that separated it from the tops of her thighs required true artistry. The space between the welts was narrower than the welts themselves.

The woman took her time; the strokes fell at ten second intervals.

The final stroke fell exactly three minutes and ten seconds after the first, an eternity to the woman on the bench. “Zwanzig.”

One might think that, after so many strokes, Victoria’s flesh would be so tormented that the last stroke would be indistinguishable from all the ones that preceded it. One would be wrong. The final stroke, like each of the first nineteen, blazed its own unique path of agony across her taut ass.

The pro did not pause to admire her handiwork. She pulled a soft cloth from her satchel and wiped down her cane before returning it to its case. There was no blood. Miraculously, the woman had not broken the skin.

Only after she had attended to her cane did she recover her straps, freeing Veronica’s knees and waist from the bench. As soon as the pro closed her satchel, Sarah led her from the room. The pro had not spoken even once to Veronica – she was nothing more than a piece of meat that needed tenderizing.

All of the other women followed the first two, even Clay and Anja, leaving Veronica alone, still lying on the whipping bench, her wrists still locked into the steel rings at the base of the clock.

Veronica’s shrieks had subsided to sobs only after the last stroke had been delivered. She was in too much pain to wonder why she had not been freed; her hands were jerking uncontrollably against their restraints, but she was making no effort to pull them lose.

Then, someone else screamed, deep and guttural, behind her. A man. She turned to look over her shoulder and saw Cary, his face contorted by fear and anger and guilt.

They had left her, bound and tortured, to be released by him. He had never been told that a whipping bench was built into the clock and the sight of her, physically bound to the clock appalled him.

“What in hell did they do to you this time?” He did not wait for an answer; she could not have spoken through her sobs if he had. “Oh, God. How could they do this to you?” He stood and stared at his love, still bound to the whipping bench, her beautiful round ass marked with stripes so darkened by subcutaneous bleeding that they were almost black, and began to cry himself. “I did it, didn’t I? Please don’t hate me. Please. I tried to tell them it was my fault but they didn’t care.” He stepped to her and reached out to touch her mortified flesh. She screamed at the contact and he snatched his hand back as though he had been burned. “Oh, God! I’m so sorry.”

She did not know if he was apologizing for touching her or for having failed to make love to her three nights earlier. She did not care; she was in too much pain. She tried to speak through her sobs.

“What?”

She spoke again, this time managing to pronounce the words “Free me” clearly enough for him to understand through her wet wheeze. She rattled her wrists against the steel that enclosed them to indicate that she was talking about her restraints and not about her marriage to him.

“Oh, God. Of course. Of course.” He knelt and fumbled with the latches. They were simple clips, but his hands were shaking, too, and it took time for him to release them.

As soon as her wrists were freed, her arms dropped to let her hand drag on the floor. She felt too weak to push herself off the bench.

“Let me help,” Cary said through his own tears, and slid his hands under her shoulders and tried to raise her from the plank.

She screamed again, any movement increasing the pain in her ass.

He dropped her back down. “Oh, God. Oh, God. What can I do?”

She swallowed her sobs, gritted her teeth and said, “Help me to the bed.”

“The bed! Okay. Here, grab me.” He bent over and she put her left arm around his shoulder. She clenched her teeth against the pain as he straightened up and she shifted the bulk of her weight to her legs and hips.

She began sobbing again, loudly, as the two staggered over to the bed and she laid upon it, on top of the comforter.

He looked at her lying there for a minute, then said, “I’m going to call an ambulance. We’ve got to get you to an emergency ward.”

“No!” she screamed through her sobs. “No one else. Just you.”

“They can give you a painkiller.”

“No. You stay. Right here. With me.” She had to struggle to get the words out between her sobs.

“Anything. Anything you want.”

“Sit down.”

He sat beside her.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why didn’t…why not…make love…to me?”

He was silent. She turned and looked up at his face. He flushed bright red under her gaze. He was guilty as sin about something.

She pressed him. “Tell me.”

“I told them. I explained that it wasn’t your fault. I told them that I messed up. I told them everything. They had no right to do this to you. If they had to beat someone, they should have beaten me.”

“Always wife.”

“But you were innocent. I told them that.”

“Tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“Told them. Tell me. I hurt bad. I deserve to know.”

“I can’t.” He hung his head and refused to meet her eyes.

“You will. You owe me. Look at my ass. You owe me.”

He looked at her injuries. His heart broke. “It would only hurt you. I can’t hurt you any more.”

“Tell me.” Her voice, hoarse, forced through gritted teeth, sounded like the snarl of a wild animal.

He was silent. Tears were flowing down his cheeks.

“Lie down. Beside me.” She tried to sound less feral.

He walked around the bed and lay down on the other side, leaving six inches of space between them, afraid to get closer for fear of accidentally jostling her and causing her any additional pain.

“Don’t look at me.”

He turned and faced away from her.

“Start talking. Now.”

He looked at the wall and began speaking in a flat monotone, trying not to think about the words that he was speaking, trying to pretend that he was somewhere else, trying to pretend that she was not listening. “There’s pornography on the Internet. Everyone knows that. I never looked at it much. I had great sex with my wife. Why would I need to look at pictures of strange women that I would never meet? Never touch. But I saw an ad. The same damned ads that pop up all the time. But this time, I looked at it and I thought, why not? Just out of curiosity. Just look at something different. Time slipped away. I looked at one picture after another, read a couple of stories. Time slipped away. And I got so horny. I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t stop myself. I just had to touch myself a little and I kept going until it was too late. I forgot about you. God. I’m so sorry. It was just once, just that one time. I forgot about the clock and I got myself off instead of coming to you. They had no right to beat you for it. No right. It was all me. I’ll never do it again. Never. I promise. God. I never meant for you to get hurt like this. They had no right.”

She listened to him cry for a minute, then said, “Go away.”

He turned to look at her. “I’m sorry. Can’t you forgive me?”

“I have to rest. Go away.”

“I’ll do anything for you. Anything. Just tell me what to do.”

“Go away.”

He went, closing the door softly behind him, leaving her alone with her pain and anger.

She hated him. She had suffered a terrible punishment because he had jerked off in front of the computer, looking at pictures of sluts instead of coming to her and making love. She had never denied him anything. She had given him all the sex he wanted. It didn’t have to be every day and a half. He could have her twice a day if he wanted. Three times. Whatever. He knew how the clock worked. He knew that he had to make love to her. It was his family tradition, for fuck’s sake, not hers. He’d done this deliberately. He wanted to see her get beaten.

She lay on the bed, her naked tortured ass throbbing with every angry beat of her heart, and raged against her husband; railed against him between her sobs.

He left her alone. Over the hours, her anger abated but forgiveness was too much to ask. Her anger was replaced by bitter disappointment in her husband.

It was mid-December and the sun sets early in Minnesota. Her husband came to her in the darkness, knelt by her bed and said, softly, “It’s dinner time. Can I bring you something? Soup, maybe? A sandwich? Ice cream? Anything.”

She ached terribly, but felt hunger gnawing at her gut even so. But she would accept nothing from his hand. She would starve to a skeleton first. “No.”

He left.

She was growing cold and struggled to get under the covers. Even the weight of a sheet and single wool blanket made her welts burn with the intensity of hellfire.

After half an hour, the door opened again. “I brought you a bowl of parsnip and ginger soup. Just in case you get hungry. And a cucumber and brie sandwich. I’ll leave them here just in case.” She did not answer and he left them on the bedside stand. She wanted to object when he turned the lamp on, but she was in no mood to say anything to him.

By the light of the lamp, she could see that his eyes were red. He was suffering, too.

Good.

He left again.

She ate the soup and sandwich propped up on her left elbow, keeping her ass away from the mattress. After the tawse, it had been days before she could sit without pain; after the caning, it would be days before she could sit at all, the damage was that much worse.

The food tasted good. He knew that they were her favorites.

It was too early to sleep, so she spent the next few hours reading. She had just started The Shipping News by Annie Proulx – a story about another weak man. Only, as she read, she had to admit that the man in the story, Quoyle, was stronger than he appeared at first glance.

Tonight, she had difficulty with the idea that Cary might also be stronger than he appeared. If he was, she was not seeing it through her veil of tears.

He came to bed after she fell asleep and left before she awoke in the morning. She slept poorly ­– her ass hurt every time she moved – and was aware that he was in bed with her, but she never woke fully. She needed rest after the stress of the past days.

Late in the morning, when she opened her eyes, she saw that the whipping bench had been folded back into the clock some time during the night.

The hand pointed to two, once again counting down to the next time she had to make love to her husband or suffer punishment for failing. The clock was relentless. No matter how sore her ass, no matter how much she blamed him, no matter how deep her disappointment in him, even if she could not bear to look at him, she would still have to fuck him.

She would never be able to explain to anyone, least of all to herself, why she felt comforted by that thought. It had something to do with habits learned over eight years of marriage.

It took a week of healing before her thoughts turned in another direction. She was standing with her back to her full-length mirror one morning, looking at the precise geometric array of angry welts that disfigured her backside, carefully probing to see if they hurt any less than the day before, when she remembered the story of Adalgisa, the many-times-great-grandmother who had invented the conjugal clock. That woman had begun by examining herself when her husband had cheated on her. Veronica might be looking at her ass in the mirror, but she was still looking at her husband as the cause of her current problem. It made sense. There was no way that it was her fault that he’d succumbed to Internet porn. Was it? She asked herself if there was anything that she could have done to stop him from looking.

She thought about all she had done for Cary; about all the times she had made love to him; about how hard she had trained herself to be the lover that he deserved. Hell, a far better lover than he deserved. Certainly she was a much better lover than any slut prancing about in front of a camera, having her pictures posted on the Web. There was no way any one of them would have spent the kind of time and effort developing their hip and cunt muscles like she did. She grew angry all over again. Angrier even than when he had confessed about jerking off instead of making love to her.

In a rage, she dialed his cell phone and, when he answered, snarled, “Get home right now.”

He arrived home in record time.

“Show me,” she yelled as soon as he walked through the door.

“What?”

“Show me the damned porn on the Internet that got you so turned on that you forgot about me.”

“You don’t want to see that,” he protested.

“Show me, damn you. I went through hell because of those pictures. You show me those pictures right now.”

“It wasn’t just the pictures; there were some stories, too.” He sounded like he was trying to excuse or justify himself in some bizarre way.

Her rage grew. “The hell if I care. Show it all to me. You get your ass in front of that computer and show me exactly what got you off.” She was practically screaming. So what if the maid was getting an earful? She could go fuck the gardener for all Veronica cared.

Dutifully, reluctantly, Cary shuffled into the study and turned on the computer. “I don’t know if I can find it all again.”

“You’re going to sit there until you show me every last picture and I don’t care if you have to surf the whole damned Web to do it.”

She fell silent and waited for the computer to finish its boot sequence. Cary had never seen a computer run so slowly in his entire life.

Finally, he got a browser running and began typing key words into Google. He fumbled around for a long five minutes before finally saying, “There,” in a small voice.

She bent to look close. The screen was filled with small images of a youngish woman in a black corset and high heels. Towards the top of the screen, she was just standing in different poses, but at the bottom, she was kneeling on the ground. In the last image on the page, an anonymous man had his hands on her head and his prick in her mouth. “Is that as big as they get?”

Cary glanced up at her, then at the screen. “Oh. You mean the pictures. No. If you click on one, then you see them bigger.”

“Click on that one.” Veronica pointed to the last picture.

Unhappily, Cary clicked on the picture and it filled the screen. The woman had her hands behind her back – Veronica could see the glint of handcuffs – and her mouth wide open. The man had her hair wrapped in his hands and was forcing his cock past her lips.

“That got you off?”

Cary nodded without looking at her.

“What else?”

He typed and clicked silently for a minute. When the page filled with text, he said, “There’s a story that I read. That’s all.”

She did not believe for a minute that he had spent two hours looking at one page of pictures and reading one story a few pages long, but she would accept that as good enough. “These were the things that excited you the most?”

He nodded silently again.

“Get out of here. Go back to work.”

He reached for the ‘off’ button, but she knocked his hand aside. “Leave it. Just get out of here.”

He raced out of the room, his face burning with humiliation.

She had suffered enough humiliation on his behalf. It was time he suffered a little of his own. He sure as hell deserved it.

After she heard the front door slam, she began reading, her dismay increasing as she scrolled through the text. This was what really turned her husband on?

That night, when Cary came home, the maid met him at the door. Her shift began just before noon and usually did not end until the dinner dishes were done, but she was already wearing her coat and boots. “Mrs. Hobard asked me to tell you to meet her in the living room.” There was a strange glint in the maid’s eye.

The house was unusually quiet. “Where are the children?”

“They are spending the night at their Aunt Anja and Uncle Rob’s house. I have to go now. The lady’s orders.” The maid slipped out the door. Cary thought that he heard a nasty little giggle before the door closed.

He sloughed off his coat and pulled off his boots, then walked through the house to the living room.

The drapes were closed and the lights turned low – too low to read comfortably, but ample to see his wife standing at the far end of the room, dressed in nothing but a black underbust corset, fishnet stockings and high, high heeled black open-toed pumps. She was dressed exactly like the woman in the porn pictures that he had shown her seven hours earlier. She had even had her long hair dyed black and permed into tight curls like the model.

A handcuff dangled from one wrist.

She put a hand on her hip, thrust her pelvis far to the side, arched her back to thrust her naked tits toward him and said, “If you want something, love, you let me know and you’ll get it from me.” Her voice was soft and sensual. It was entirely different from her hissing and snarling this afternoon.

He was not yet certain that this was better.

She catwalked toward him, crossing her feet at the ankles with every step, her hips swaying from side to side, her tits bouncing slowly back and forth.

He felt himself growing hard, his cock pressing against his briefs, fighting for release.

When she reached him, she stroked his face, and then slowly moved her hand down his body; the open handcuff that was hanging from her wrist brushed against his neck, shirt, belt, and hips. When she reached his cock, she said, “We better let your prick get some air before it strangles in there.” She slowly sank to her knees, unbuckled his belt, unhooked his waistband, and slid his zipper down, inch by inch. As soon as she worked his underwear over his hips, his cock sprang free and pointed directly into her face.

She began licking the head and he moaned. Then she lowered her arms, reached behind, and flicked the second cuff about her other wrist, trapping her hands at the small of her back. Only her mouth was available for her to use on his cock.

She pumped her mouth up and down over his head a few times, then looked up at him with wide eyes and said, “Grab my hair and get to it. Fuck my mouth like there’s no tomorrow.”

He entangled his hands in her hair at the sides of her head and thrust himself deep into her.

She gagged and choked, but he pounded into her relentlessly until he came hard and deep in her throat. It did not take long.

She knew what was expected, swallowed every drop, licking him clean. She had only tasted his cum once before and, last time, had rushed to spit it into a tissue. This time was different. If she could survive a caning, she could sure as hell swallow an ounce of jism without throwing up. Besides, she could not get her hands anywhere near her mouth when they were cuffed behind her back.

She stayed on her knees, licking and kissing him until he grew soft. Finally, he sighed, reached down and helped her back to her feet. In the high heels, with her hands locked behind, she needed assistance.

He hugged her tightly. “You didn’t have to do this.”

She wanted to hug him back, but was physically restrained from doing so. “Is it what you wanted?”

“It was perfect.”

“Then I did have to do it.”

He kissed her tenderly, a sharp contrast with the callous way that he had treated her mouth only minutes before. “Where’s the key?”

“You don’t have to release me until you are ready.”

“I’m ready.”

“On the top of the bookcase.”

As soon as she had cuffed her hands behind her back, she had restricted herself from reaching the key by herself. He wondered if she had realized that when the cuffs had clicked shut. Undoubtedly. She was no fool. When she told him that he did not have to release her until he was ready, she really meant it.

Instead of unlocking her immediately, he slipped the key into his shirt pocket and spent a couple of minutes massaging her naked breasts and then her pussy through the crotch of the corset. She had no choice but to let him play with her to his heart’s content.

She wouldn’t have had it any other way.

When he did unlock the cuffs, she hugged him tight and told him, “You’ve got a clock to wind.”

The hand was only in the six o’clock position. She could have waited until tomorrow to do this.

In the bedroom, after the clock was wound, he helped her out of the corset. It was difficult for her to reach the laces that crisscrossed up her back.

Someone must have helped her lace it up. He remembered the glint in the maid’s eye and her nasty little giggle as she left the building.

During the next three weeks, Veronica kept their clock wound with normal missionary style sex. Cary was content with that, especially when he had the memories of the handcuffed blow job to amuse him in his spare moments.

He had forgotten that he had also shown her the story on the Internet about the wife and her foolish promises – he thought that the porn incident was behind them – until he came home one Tuesday evening. As soon as he walked through the door, the maid handed him an envelope, told him that Mrs. Hobard had instructed her to hand deliver it as soon as he got home, and then leave the house. Once again, the maid was chuckling as she walked out the front door.

The note read: “I, too, keep my promises. If you’re not at the Union Bar on Marshall at 9:00, I’ll let every man in the place fuck me in the ass. I’m not a whore, so I won’t be asking them to pay a cent.”

Shit! The story on the Internet was a fantasy. He never imagined that she would want to act it out in a real bar. He stood stunned in his foyer for minutes, remembering as much as he could about the story that he had shown to her. In the story, the woman had gone to a bar in a ridiculously short skirt and tube top, attracting the attention of every man in the place. She’d intended to offer to give a blow job to one of them, but had ended up facing a whole bar full of men who expected her to give them blow jobs all night long. Her husband had rescued her from that fate, only to give her a worse one – to let every man in the bar fuck her in the ass. Only at the last minute had the husband relented and settled for fucking her ass himself. In the story, the men in the bar were good natured and allowed the wife to walk out unscathed. God! If she tried to do that in real life it wasn’t going to end so happily. Most likely, she’d get dragged into the back alley and raped and murdered. And, if he were there, he’d get beaten to death trying to save her. His obituary would say that he was collateral damage of his own stupid fantasy.

He arrived at the bar at 6:45, got a beer and took a seat right beside the door, looking through the glass constantly for Veronica.

The bar was similar to the one described in the story. It was dingy, the lighting was inadequate and the predominant shade was brown; it was musty, decorated with old bar signs; and it was noisy, the patrons ignored the television sets that were tuned to CNN and assorted sports channels and argued with each other about work, politics, and football.

He nursed his beer as slowly as he could, but he was finishing his fourth by the time 9:00 was approaching. He had eaten nothing since lunch and was feeling every ounce of alcohol that was flowing through his veins.

The bar was half full. Unlike the story, there were a lot of women present. By his estimate, maybe a third of the crowd was female, and they were dressed decently, unlike the outfit that his wife would be wearing if she were acting the part that she had promised.

Seeing his wife in here, dressed like a cheap hooker, would be as humiliating for him as for her. And then there was that group of five guys at the back with their long greasy hair and motorcycle boots. They weren’t laughing and arguing; they were emptying their pitchers of beer with mechanical precision and glowering at everyone in the room, looking for a fight. They were the ones who’d be demanding service from Veronica if she came in here acting like a hooker; and they wouldn’t be taking ‘No’ for an answer. What ever had made her think that he wanted to actually live out this fantasy? This wasn’t erotic, this was terrifying.

He strained his eyes through the foggy glass, desperate to catch a glimpse of Veronica as soon as she appeared on the street.

It was 9:10 when he finally saw her trudging through the snow, dressed exactly as the story described: too-tight pink tube top, black miniskirt with a hem that barely covered her crotch, visible garters snapped to the top of black stockings. Her pink high-heeled, open toed sandals were already ruined by the inch of salty slush on the sidewalk. As he dashed out the door to intercept her, his first thought was the she must be freezing, Nobody walked even a block in winter in Minneapolis without a coat, and the clothes that she was wearing left more skin bare than covered. Thank goodness it wasn’t one of the coldest days – at forty below, bare skin freezes in less than thirty seconds.

As he abandoned his beer and dashed through the door to intercept her before she came inside, his second thought was to wonder why she was carrying a brown paper bag.

When she saw him, she said, “I’m freezing. Let’s get inside so I can warm up.” Her teeth were chattering when she spoke.

“Forget that. You aren’t going anywhere but right back home and into a nice warm bed.”

“No way. I didn’t go through all this just so you can wimp out.” She held up the bag. “I brought my own butter in case the bar didn’t have any. I thought that we should forget about all that blowjob stuff and skip right to the bottom line. You know, where you’re fucking my fresh buttered bottom.”

“It’s not safe in there.”

“Well, if you want to get right to business, then you can take me back to the motel. I’ve got a room in a place just off 394. My car is just around the corner. That’s why I’m late, I kept driving around until I found a spot close enough to walk without a coat. I thought that you’d want to see me walk into the bar dressed like this, not bundled up in a parka. I wanted to get it perfect and severe frostbite would have wrecked my entrance.”

He didn’t know what to say. She was trying so hard, he couldn’t bring himself to tell her that she had it all wrong. The reality of her walking into a bar dressed like this was nothing like the fantasy. And the more she tried to copy the story, the less he felt like he was living it.

She was no fool. She knew exactly what she was doing to him. After three weeks, her ass still looked like it had been run over by a tractor and felt like a washboard when she ran her fingers over it. She was determined to make him think a lot more carefully about his fantasies in the future. So she kept playing her part. She was grateful that he had intercepted her before she had had to walk into the bar, but she was still keenly aware of the looks she was getting from passers-by as her husband escorted her back to her car. Every single one of them thought that she must be a fugitive from a lunatic asylum.

At least she was making her point – if he wanted excitement, he could get it from her; he didn’t have to look at porn on the Internet. But her point wouldn’t be complete until he had his cock embedded firmly in her asshole.

Come hell or high water, he was going to take her up the ass before the evening was over. She hoped that it wouldn’t hurt too much.

She let him drive her to the motel in her car. Neither could think of anything further to say to the other. She just sat, warming herself in the flow of hot air from the vents and clutching her bag of butter to her gut. No margarine. She would be packing her ass with nothing but the finest cultured, unsalted butter. It was great to be a Hobard woman.

When they got out of the car, Cary slipped his parka over her shoulders. She knew that he had not done that to keep her warm, but so that it wouldn’t look like he was taking a hooker up to his room. What a knight in shining armor. She did not bother to point out that her own parka was lying in the back seat; that there was no need for him to walk across the parking lot wearing only his suit jacket. It was better that he thought that she was making herself entirely vulnerable strictly for his pleasure.

As soon as they were in the motel room, she threw the parka aside and stood before him, eyes downcast, letting him look at her in her cheap slut costume for as long as he wanted. From here forward, the fantasy had to start getting good for him. Whereas she had set up the bar scenario to convince him to be realistic, the motel room was all about showing him that she could deliver what he most wanted.

She felt unexpectedly shy. Her tits were half hanging out where the tube top had slipped; she felt the hem of the tiny miniskirt tickling the tops of her thighs, letting cool air flow against her butt that was left naked by the thong she was wearing. She felt available. She reached up with her left hand, the one that was not holding the bag with the butter, and pulled the tube top down to expose her tits completely, showing him how completely available she was.

She stepped forward and brushed her hand lightly against his crotch. He was hard; this was getting good for him.

“Come on,” she said, took his hand, and led him to the bathroom. The essence of the story had been humiliation and this was going to take her humiliation a giant step deeper.

He stood in the doorway and watched her raise her miniskirt to her waist to reveal a scarlet thong that barely covered her crotch in front. She turned to show that it covered nothing behind – the thin red strap between the waist and the crotch was completely hidden in her crack. He cringed to see the red stripes that marked her flesh from the top of her ass to the bottom, once again reminding him that she had suffered so much for his failing.

She slipped the thong over her hips. It was trapped inside the garter belt straps that were attached to the tops of her stockings, so, rather than unsnapping the clips, she let the thong hang there.

She opened the paper bag, withdrew a pound of butter wrapped in gold-colored foil and set it on the counter. As soon as she had folded the foil open, she bent over, half squatting, held on to the edge of the sink to steady herself, scooped a tablespoon of butter in her fingers, reached between her legs, and pressed it against her asshole, forcing as much as she could inside herself.

This had to be the ultimate in self-humiliation. Veronica’s face was burning.

She took another scoop of butter and forced it further into her ass.

Cary watched from the doorway as her fingers kept eating away at the brick of butter, pushing more and more, deeper and deeper into her asshole. Within a couple of minutes, half the brick was gone and the index and middle fingers of her right hand were disappearing into her asshole past the second knuckles. Her sphincter gaped open slightly, no longer closing completely between scoops.

Veronica had not eaten since the previous night and had taken laxatives twice during the day, once in the morning and once in mid afternoon, to ensure that her lower bowel was as empty as possible. She had ample room for a half pound of butter.

Finally, she wiped as much butter as she could off her hand onto the hand towel – she did not want to interrupt the rhythm of her act by taking time to wash with soap – and walked back into the room. She left her thong hanging at the tops of her stockings where they were soaking up the drops of melted butter that were flowing down her thighs from her gaping asshole. They slightly hobbled her, and the high heels slightly unbalanced her, so she walked slowly. She pulled a wooden armchair away from the desk to the end of the bed, spread her legs as far as the thong allowed, bent over the back, hiked her skirt up to her waist to expose her freshly-buttered asshole and waited. She did not have to say a word. Cary had no doubt what was expected of him.

He looked at her for a minute, appreciating the view of her long legs, raised high by the pink sandals with the five inch heels, the ass cheeks framed by black and red spread wide to reveal the puckered, slightly gaping asshole glistening with butter. He was keenly aware that she was submitting to utter humiliation just to give him a few moments of excitement.

He dropped his pants and stepped close to her. Though already hard, he massaged himself for a few seconds just to make certain, then slowly slid the head of his cock down her crack to the waiting hole and pressed forward.

As his cock stretched her open further than had her two fingers, she gasped. He withdrew slightly, then pressed forward again, the head of his cock getting better lubricated from contact with her flesh.

She gasped again.

Though only penetrating a half inch, he began pressing and withdrawing in slow rhythm, driving fractionally deeper with every thrust. When his head forced her inner ring open, she cried out from the pain – not unexpected, not unbearable, but sufficient for her to feel nonetheless.

As soon as he was past the inner ring, he slipped all the way in until the front of his hips was pressed against the welted skin of her ass. She felt so tight around his shaft, so hot in the core of her that she gasped in pleasure. He grabbed her waist to get a good purchase on her and began working his hips slowly back and forth, sliding his cock almost all the way out of her ass, then plunging back in slow motion, again and again.

She could squeeze him almost as hard with her cunt as he was being squeezed now, but this was continuous and effortless. Then, unexpectedly, she gripped him hard with her sphincter muscles, again and again in synchrony with the moments of his deepest penetration. He wanted the sensation to never end, but could not hold himself back. He came longer and harder than ever before in his life. He felt like he was filling her entire gut with buckets of cum.

He stayed there with his hands on her back, keeping her bent over the chair, until he grew so soft that he slipped out of her despite his desire to stay inside forever.

He fell back on the bed, spent.

Released, she stood slowly. Tears trickled down her cheeks, a counterpoint to the butter and jism and shit that was tricking down her thighs. She did not know why she was crying – she did not feel much real pain, more of a dull ache in her ass. Maybe it was the humiliation; Cary would never know how degraded she felt. Or maybe it was just relief after the stress of the day, the shopping, the preparations, the fear about what might have happened in the bar.

She walked gingerly into the bathroom – the thong still hobbling her upper thighs, her asshole still gaping open, aching and leaking, unsteady on the pink stilettos – and turned on the shower. She left the slut clothes in a pile on the bathroom floor and stood under the shower for a long time, letting the water, turned as hot as she could stand, flow over her, trying to wash the evening away along with the grime of the slush on her feet, the coagulating butter on her thighs, the sweat of her husband on her back, the tears on her cheeks.

When she returned to the bedroom, she found her husband on his back on top of the bedspread, his pants still hanging around his ankles, fast asleep. He looked sated, satisfied. He looked like he had not a care in the world. The bastard.

She crawled into the other bed and fell asleep alone.

She did not wake up alone. Sometime in the night, Cary had undressed, cleaned himself up, and crawled into bed with her.

In the morning, when she began to stir, he looked at her and grinned; then held her tight and whispered into her ear, “I don’t think any man alive ever deserved a wife as wonderful as you.”

She silently agreed. But she hugged him anyway.

A month to the day after her caning, Lise called. “I would like to meet with you and talk about your next level of training.”

Veronica did not bother arguing against the inevitable, but agreed to meet after lunch.

That afternoon, she was hardly surprised when Lise asked to see her clock, but she was surprised by what Lise revealed to her. “There is a reason why the haut reliefs depict so many different sexual acts. When our husbands rewind the clocks, they don’t always do it the same way. During the rewinding, they manipulate the image that depicts the sexual act that occurred. If he went down on you, he pushes that figure – Lise pointed to a carving of Cary with his face buried between Veronica’s thighs – and if you went down on him, that one – she pointed to another carving of Veronica on her knees performing fellatio on a carving of Cary – and so forth.”

Veronica had thought that she was beyond becoming angry at the clock’s invasion of her sex life, but she was wrong. She hissed, “You mean that damned clock knows every single kind of sex that Cary and I ever have. It’s been keeping track of our every activity during our entire marriage.”

“Exactly,” Lise replied blandly, trying to pretend that she did not notice Veronica’s red flush of rage. “And that’s important at this stage in your marriage.”

“Fuck you!”

Lise looked offended. “You know it’s not me. I have nothing to do with this. I’m just the messenger. If you want to hear the message from someone else, that can be arranged, but they’ll have to tell you the same thing that I’m telling you.”

She was right. Veronica worked for a minute to get her anger under control, then said, “I’m sorry. You know that I don’t blame you, personally. But I’m getting tired of this whole damned Hobard tradition.”

Lise nodded sympathetically. “We all get tired of it sometimes. It’s hard. Sometimes I hate it so much, you wouldn’t believe it. But it works. I look at my other friends outside the family. Angela got divorced for the third time last year. Maryanne hasn’t had a real date since Bob ran off with a real estate saleswoman. Nancy told me that Arnold hasn’t made love to her in more than two years. She thinks he’s banging his secretary three times a week and I happen to know that she’s right. When I think about it, I realize that I don’t have a single friend outside the Hobard family who can tell me honestly that they have a happy marriage. And I don’t know a single Hobard woman who says that her marriage is unhappy. I mean, sure, you hate the things you have to do sometimes. And sometimes you are probably angry or disappointed with Cary. But can you say that you have an unhappy marriage? Do you ever wish you could leave Cary?”

Veronica shook her head. “Of course I’m happy with the way things are. The thing is, I don’t need any more beatings or training or reminders from that damned clock to keep things chugging along.”

Lise shrugged. “I don’t know about that. I do know that things won’t stay the way they are now. Everything changes with time. Everything. The Hobard tradition ensures that the changes will be for the better whether you want them to or not. When the clock winds down, it raises a red flag. There’s going to be an intervention whether you need it or not. It’s scheduled like sunrise and there’s not a thing either of us can do about it.”

“So what new kind of humiliation do I get to enjoy this time? Am I supposed to learn to wriggle my clit? Tongue stretches? Sphincter relaxation exercises? Or do I just start humping the clock again.” Veronica had not had to exercise on the clock’s dildo in a couple of years. It had taken her four years to reach the highest level of pussy training and then it had stopped. The assumption was that she would be getting enough exercise now from making love to Cary to maintain her strength and skill. The assumption was correct. She took pleasure in using her muscles in ways that most women never imagined.

“At this point in a marriage, your biggest threat is boredom. Even Heaven would get boring after a few years if nothing new ever happened. We don’t want Cary running off with some second-rate bimbo just because he needs a change of pace. You’re going to have to provide him with new experiences. Think of it as keeping him excited in you. You have to keep him off balance by doing something unexpected every so often. It doesn’t take much, but it’s really important.”

Veronica was not going to confess that she had already surprised Cary rather dramatically twice in the last month, but she had to admit to herself that it had helped. Cary was more attentive than ever. “So what do I do?”

“Most of the time, you just keep doing what you have been doing so well for the past eight years. Ninety percent of the time, your husband just wants good basic sex.”

“And the other ten percent of the time?”

“He wants something different. Every so often you have to add a little hot spice to the basic recipe.”

“And…” Veronica knew that the hammer was about to drop.

“Your clock is the recipe book.” Lise gestured toward the dial. “From now on, you’re going to have to reset it before Cary can rewind it, just like when you had your training before. Most of us reset our clock every morning, just to be sure. This time, though, you don’t have to worry about dildos popping out of it, you just push that carving of yourself on the left side of the dial, then that carving of Cary on the right side of the dial – she pointed to the two carvings that had their arms arched around the dial as though they were holding it in an embrace – and then you go around to the side and slide the carving of you and Cary in a missionary position upward. Go ahead and try it.”

Veronica obediently pressed the carvings on each side of the dial, then went to the side, found the third carving at eye level and slid it upward to reveal a few lines of text carved on a wooden plaque. The text read, “Make love in a kitchen.”

Lise explained. “That’s more than just a suggestion, but it’s not quite an absolute requirement. You don’t have to do it right away, but you should do it soon. If you make love to Cary too often without doing what the clock says, then it will stop letting Cary rewind it and it will run down. I think you have a couple of weeks to do it, but I’m not really certain. I’ve never let my time run out and I recommend that you don’t either.”

Veronica looked at Lise with narrowed eyes. “In the kitchen?”

“It’s winter, otherwise it probably would have suggested outdoors. Be glad that the clock knows what season it is.”

“But in the kitchen?”

“That’s not the strangest thing that it’s going to suggest. The kitchen is pretty easy. But if you really can’t do what it asks, you can overrule it a little bit. You can push on the plaque and it will sink back into the clock and a different one will come up tomorrow. I don’t recommend that, though. You can only it once per suggestion and both times that I’ve tried it, the alternative suggestion was a lot worse than the original.”

“I’m not going to like this, am I?”

Lise shrugged and grinned. “Let’s just say that most of the suggestions are more fun for the husband than the wife. There’s a trick to it. It doesn’t give you a suggestion every time. Most often, the plaque is blank. It only gives a suggestion if you’ve been doing the same thing over and over for too long. Avoid long runs of sex in the missionary position. Once in a while, give your husband a blow job or make love doggie style and the clock with think you have a suitably varied love life and won’t make many new suggestions. I once heard about a wife who never got a new suggestion in ten years. She was kind of a wild spirit and I suspect she kept making love to her husband in so many different ways that the clock couldn’t think of anything new. Most Hobard wives in this stage only get a half a dozen suggestions a year. It’s not hard to keep enough variety in your sex life to keep the clock satisfied for two or three months at a time.

“So that’s it. Just add a bit of spice to your sex life and you’ll keep your clock wound, no problem.”

The next time the maid had a day off, Veronica dragged Cary onto the kitchen table.

Over the next few years, she found that Lise was right: it cost her little to keep the clock satisfied by giving Cary a little variety. Sometimes, she went further than the clock asked. She never liked taking him in her ass, but it made him so happy that it was worth doing it a couple of times a year just to see the expression on his face.

Veronica never found out what would have happened if she had let her clock wind down a third time. It seemed that only one Hobard wife in a dozen did. She suspected that Lise had; there was a month when she dropped out of sight and she had looked chastened when Victoria next had lunch with her. There were rumors among the other wives that she had been sent to southern Germany but she was never willing to talk about it.

Lise’s likely punishment was none of Veronica’s concern. The only thing that mattered was that she and Cary grew old together, growing happier every year. And that her own clock never wound down.

The day before their weddings, when she presented conjugal clocks to her own daughter and to her sons’ wives, were happy days for her, indeed.