I was relieved when the visit was over. We were all going back to Helen’s house for dinner, so we left the zoo and walked to the bus stop. Fortuitously, given how events were about to unfold, we were the only people waiting for a bus. I thought I’d have another attempt at making conversation. “My favourite animals were the chimps. I love watching chimps, so what’s your favourite animal, Alice?” I asked.

That move backfired! “I don’t have a favourite animal,” she retorted, vehemently. “I grew out of having favourites years ago, but I see you haven’t, Julie. Anyway, you should use their full name, which is chimpanzees. Or, better still, their scientific name!” With that she was searching on her phone, announcing “They are called Pan troglodytes. I bet you don’t know how to spell that, do you? Go on!”

She was right, I didn’t. I made a couple of mangled attempts which drew sneers from her. By now my patience had been exhausted and I lost my temper with her. I took a step towards her, shouting, “You stupid girl, you can only spell it because it’s on your bloody phone! You’ve been a perfect bitch all day.”

Alice put her hands up to her face, as if to protect herself from being struck, and stepped back in shock. She looked as if she was going to burst into tears. “Get her off me, Mum, get her off me!” she screamed.

Helen moved quickly to place herself between me and Alice. Not for the last time, I experienced her explosive temper where, in the space of seconds, she went from calm to ballistic. “Don’t you threaten my daughter!” she screeched, before placing an arm around Alice’s shoulder. I realised straight away that I’d overstepped the mark.

“I didn’t... I wasn’t going to hit her!” I protested. Turning to Alice, I attempted to apologise. “Sorry, Alice, I didn’t mean to scare you. I shouldn’t have said what I said.” 

My apology was unacceptable to Helen, who yelled, “Absolutely right you shouldn’t have said that! You will never, ever, speak to my daughter like that again, or threaten her. Apologise properly—now!”

“I’m really sorry, Alice, I don’t know what came over me, but I shouldn’t have frightened you, or spoken to you like that. Please forgive me.” Alice didn’t say anything, but her expression suggested she had achieved her aim of provoking me beyond breaking point.

Helen didn’t, or maybe wouldn’t, see that Alice had played a part in this. She had reached her own conclusions. “A childish outburst like that deserves a childish punishment. When we get back to the house, you will write out two hundred times ‘Chimpanzees are Pan troglodytes.’ And as Alice is the injured party, you will show her your lines for approval. Understood?”

This set me off again. “No, I don’t understand!” I exclaimed. “I’m not writing lines! It’s humiliating.” Of course, I’d spent many hours writing lines for Helen, but I’d never been ordered to do so in public, and being told in front of Alice made it many times worse.

“Well, Alice used to write lines when she was a child, so why shouldn’t you?”

“I’m not a child. I’m more than twice Alice’s age. Anyway, I presume Alice stopped writing lines years ago.”

“Yes, she did, because her behaviour improved. It’s a shame yours hasn’t. Would you rather I spank your bottom, Julie? A spanking in front of Alice with your knickers pulled down. Would you prefer that?”

I was scarlet with embarrassment and relieved there was no one else within hearing distance of this discourse. Alice, though, had continued to make a miraculous recovery from her ordeal and was no longer disguising her amusement at all the commotion.

“I’ve asked you a question, Julie. Will it be lines or a spanking?”

I knew I was defeated, and feeling as if I was the lowest form of life, I replied, “I’ll take the lines”.

“Uhm, I didn’t quite catch that?”

“I’ll take the lines, thank you, Ma’am.”

“That’s a shame,” chirped Alice, “I wanted to see her blue knickers!” I'd often fantasised about a domineering woman treating me like this, but fantasy is very different from reality. Today, I had been subject to real-life abuse, in public. I was no longer sure what the future held.

The bus journey back to Helen’s was uncomfortable for me. Helen and Alice sat together, whispering to one another, and, to show I was in disgrace, I was sent to sit on my own, several seats away. I spent the journey brooding on what my fate would be when we arrived at Helen’s house.

Half-an-hour later we were back and Helen gave out the instructions—“I will cook dinner, Alice can go and watch television, and Julie can write out her lines.” She passed me an A4 pad and a pen, and showed me on her phone how to spell Pan troglodytes.

I was seething inside with the way I’d been treated. I suppose I could have walked out, but, instead, I compounded my debasement by writing out the lines, which took me around eighty minutes because I wanted to be careful not to make mistakes. “Shall I show them to Alice, Ma’am?” I enquired.

“Yes, that’s what I told you to do, and don’t forget to call her Miss,” she replied.

With some trepidation, I went into the next room where Alice was absorbed in watching a stupid talent show on television. “Excuse me, Alice... sorry, Miss, but here are my lines.”

She glanced at me with some contempt and then took the pages of A4 from my grasp, barely looking at them. “Pathetic and childish shit,” she murmured. Then she took another peak at the lines before commenting “You need to write your name at the top of each page—it’s Julie Moriarty, remember—and then stick the pages to the fridge door with magnets.”

“Thank you, Miss,” I replied, self-consciously. I felt my face blush and my penis twitch inside its cage at the humiliation I was suffering at the hands of someone so beautiful, yet half my age. I complied with the instructions and attached the lines to the fridge, where any visitor to the house might see them.

Over dinner, Helen and Alice kept up an animated conversation, but I barely spoke, such was my pent-up anger at the demeaning way I’d been treated all day. 

“So do we give Julie the job?” Helen asked Alice, excluding me from this conversation.

“Do we have to, Mum, after the way she behaved towards me today? No one has ever threatened me like that before. I was terribly scared.”

“I know, sweetheart, I know..., but I was there to protect you and I’m going to make sure it never happens again. I’ll be talking to Julie after dinner and you have my word that she will never, ever, threaten you again.” With that Helen glared in my direction with a look that could kill. “But she’s a relative, and it’s our turn to give her a chance, at least until she wants to go and impose herself on another unfortunate distant cousin.”

“But I’m not happy that she’s been lying to us about transitioning. I still think she might be a pervert.”

“Don’t worry, darling, I will make sure that she can’t possibly hurt you, or interfere with you. You have my promise on that.”

Alice thought about it and then slowly nodded her acceptance. “OK then, I’m willing to give it a go, Mum, as long as she behaves herself.” I felt like I didn’t exist because at no point was I asked whether I still wanted the job. But I felt it could have been worse, and I could have been told that the job offer had been rescinded, which would have caused me countless problems getting my old life back. Nevertheless, I still had this inner anger over the way the pair had behaved towards me all day.

After dinner, I told to wash the dishes, while Alice went around to a friend’s house to watch Netflix for the evening. Dishes done, Helen then sat down at the kitchen table to talk to me.

“Well, you messed up big time today, didn’t you? What have you got to say for yourself?” she demanded.

Being told it was all my fault was more than I could take and my frustration boiled over. I started ranting, releasing the tension that had built up over the day, and which had been only partially released at the bus stop. “Me?! Me?! It wasn’t all my damn fault! I’m absolutely bloody fuming, Helen. I feel like throwing the towel in and never seeing you again. You’ve made me look a complete clown and I’ve never been so humiliated as I was today! I told you that your hair-brained backstory would unravel, but you just said I was being negative. Alice could see that it was all a tissue of lies. And why didn’t you stop her questioning me in that aggressive way, it was like an interrogation. Then punishing me with lines in front of her was the final straw. I’ve been utterly humiliated by the pair of you.”

Deceptively, as I was soon to discover, Helen took my outburst very calmly. “Oh! I thought you were a submissive. Isn’t being humiliated a turn-on for submissives?”

Failing to read warning signs that Helen’s temper was rising, I argued back. “No! Not in public. And certainly not in the presence, or with the connivance, of a mistress’s daughter! What were you thinking?”

“And what were you thinking, when you flashed your underwear?”

“That was an accident, and you know it. What you were doing was deliberate.”

“And I suppose it was another accident that you called me Ma’am. You seem to have a lot of accidents, and then you wonder why I told you not to drink too much fluid.”

“You were out of order, Helen! This is not a laughing matter.”

“And I suppose a thirty-seven-year-old man shouting abuse at an eighteen-year-old girl is fine in your book, despite nearly bringing her to tears?”

“It was an act she was putting on. She has you wrapped around her little finger and she was provoking me to react!”

“If that was so, then it worked, didn’t it? You completely lost your cool!”

“I was at the end of my tether by that point. She had set out to cause trouble, aided by you!”

“So you don’t have the maturity to rise above being teased by a child? You can be so feeble sometimes!”

“She’s been spoilt and you should have intervened and put her in her place! She shouldn’t talk to people like she did.”

By now I had pushed Helen too far and she shrieked back, “Don’t you dare tell me how to raise my child! I’m fucking fed up with your behaviour today and your general negativity, so I’m giving you a choice. You either leave here right now, never to return, or you can lie over my lap and receive a bare-bottom spanking that you will never forget. Which will it be? You have ten seconds to make a decision.”

I was taken aback by this ultimatum, and it put me in a dilemma. My brain was going into overload and, in the background, I heard Helen counting off the seconds. “I’ll take the spanking,” I shouted. I surprised myself in my reply and the decision had come from my heart, whereas my brain was still computing.

“Pull your trousers down and get over my knees.” Again, my brain was lagging behind my actions, and I soon found myself across Helen’s knees. She expertly used her left hand to hold down my arms, while she pulled my knickers off with her right hand. The spanking then started. First with her hand and, after a while, with the hard sole of her shoe, which she had reached down to take off. I’ve no idea how long the punishment continued, but I was soon crying for mercy, yet with no benefit.

Without saying a word, she delivered blow after blow, alternating between the left and right buttocks. I’d never imagined a spanking could be delivered with such ferocity. She was also amazingly strong for her build, and my attempts to wriggle to escape blows were futile. Tears were streaming down my face when, after an age, she pushed me off her knees onto the cold, stone slabs of the kitchen floor, which were almost welcomingly soothing under the circumstances. She ordered me to sit facing her, cross-legged, with my pink chastity device on full display.

“Let me make this clear to you, Julie, once and for all. You will never again try to top me from the bottom. I will not have a submissive tell me how they should be spoken to. That is my decision, and my decision alone. You will never again speak to me like you did a while ago, when you told me that you were ‘absolutely bloody fuming’. And never again will you shout abuse at Alice, like you did today. Do I make myself clear, because, if not, then we’re finished?”

My brain was still in a whirl and my backside was on fire, but I was coming to my senses. I began to recognise how close I had come to losing everything. It was time to make amends, if that was possible. “Yes, Ma’am, I’m very sorry. I was completely out of order.”

“OK, Julie, for your sake, I hope that you are truly sorry because there’s no future for you in this household if you’re not. Do you realise how close you have come to destroying your hopes?”

“Yes, Ma’am, I do now. Can we... can we try to put this behind us and start afresh?”

"You’re lucky that I don’t bear grudges, so your outbursts won’t be held against you... unless you try the same trick again. Assuming you’ve learnt a lesson, then we move on and we need never mention this again.”

“Thank you, Ma’am, I deserved that spanking and I regret speaking to you and Alice how I did.”

“That’s fine, Julie. Like I say, let’s move on. I will try to patch things up with Alice, but you have a lot of bridges to build with her if you want to be accepted. I’ve never seen her so upset as she was today.”

I nodded, still convinced that Alice had faked her reaction to my outburst, but recognising I was on thin ice. Yet I still found the courage to try to clarify something with Helen. “One thing, though. If I do have concerns or worries about the way things are going, am I allowed to raise them with you? There might be occasions when I feel you’re pushing me beyond my limits, such as with the female uniform thing.”

“Yes, of course, you can raise anything you want, Julie, just as long as you don’t start the conversation by saying you’re ‘absolutely bloody fuming’. Stay calm and remember your manners, that’s all I ask. And obviously, I expect you to treat Alice with the greatest respect as well, as she is higher in the pecking order.”

I acquiesced, appreciating that I would be at the bottom of the hierarchy.

“Now, Alice may be back soon, so you need to go home, but there’s one last instruction I have for you. When you get back tonight, I want you to handwrite a letter to Alice. A long letter, perhaps five hundred words, thanking her for going to the zoo with you, telling her what a good time you had, and apologising again for your behaviour and the upset you caused her. And, at the bottom, use felt tip pens to draw a picture of a chimp—she may see the funny side of that. Post the letter First Class so she gets it before we next meet. Understood?”

I agreed, while wondering how much more humiliation could be piled on to me. There was to be no sex today, not least because Alice would be home any time. But I also knew that if we’d had sex, the chances of me cumming would have been negligible. I didn't even feel like masturbating when I got back to my flat.