There was no doubt about it, they were an odd couple and had been right from the beginning of their courtship. Bertie had a degree, worked as a restaurant manager, and spoke with the tone and elocution of a university lecturer. Rachel worked part-time as a DJ, had never gone to college, and seldom got out of bed before noon. Those who speculated about their relationship supposed that Bertie’s attraction to his petite, youthful girlfriend was completely physical, or some kind of belated act of rebellion against his structured upbringing. Bertie and Rachel had heard these theories before and laughed them off, largely because these stories all made the same assumptions about an educated, worldly young man and his hot young “thing” – in fact, Rachel at thirty was nearly four years older than Bertie.

They’d first met at Bertie’s restaurant, Rachel as a waitress between gigs and Bertie a maitre’d paying his way through school. He’d been attending an art college that Rachel had briefly considered after her graduation, and they’d bonded that way. Eventually, Rachel had her fill of waiting tables and moved on, but Bertie had impressed his bosses, and he continued to move through the ranks. It was a joke between them that Bertie had put so much effort into being taken seriously as a grown-up that he’d somehow aged a decade.

But the past week had changed matters. Despite his objections, the restaurant owner had decided that Bertie needed to take a vacation, and had crossed him off the schedule for the week. Bertie had shrugged at first, resigned himself to cleaning the apartment and repairing the couple’s leaning bookcase, and decided to make the most of the time to himself. In two days, he’d ambitiously torn through his entire to-do list. Rachel was usually a laid-back woman, content to relax, watch TV and scribble in her time off, and Bertie’s constant pacing was wearing on her last nerve.

Finally, Rachel had the insight that, rather than find little things to keep one person busy, she and Bertie could find things they could do together. While both of them enjoyed cooking, their separate working hours had usually kept them apart at meals – so Rachel suggested they pool their favourite recipes while they had the time and stock up the freezer. Bertie had liked the idea, and this was to be the first night of what he called their “pilot project”. And he’d assumed it was going well until he’d heard Rachel say:

“Honey, this is canned corn.”

He nodded and lifted the note he’d transcribed from her earlier that day, “That’s what you said. One can of corn.”

“I need cream corn, Bert. It’s a cream soup, I told you that.”

“I thought that was what the milk was for?”

“That’s just to keep it from getting too thick. Jesus, you work in a restaurant!”

It was the wrong thing to say. She could see him visibly bristle.

“I didn’t mean to infer…”

He all but snarled, “It’s no problem. I’ll just take it back to the store and exchange it. Unless you’d care to?”

“It’s a twenty-minute walk,” she reminded him, raising her hands, “But you can drive there in five. Just tell them you made a mistake.”

“A mistake,” he repeated. The word burned like acid in his mouth. As far as he was concerned, mistakes were made only by incompetents. Bertie didn’t make a lot of mistakes.

“Please, Bertie. I have to work tonight, and I don’t want to miss this dinner.”

She was right, of course, they couldn’t afford the time it would take for her to make the trip. It was up to Bertie – as usual, he thought to himself. As he grabbed his coat, he couldn’t resist making a parting shot:

“Imply. The word is imply.”

***

He wasn’t the kind of man to make a lot of mistakes, but even Bertie could admit to himself that once he did, he tended to follow them up one after the other. Immediately regretting his pompous words to Rachel, he missed his turnoff and passed the grocery store. Finally reaching the store, he tried so hard to avoid admitting his mix-up that he confused the poor girl at the register, who ended up calling her manager just to figure out what she was being told. Growing impatient with the delays, he took the main road back just in time to get caught in rush hour traffic two blocks from home.

By the time he walked in the door, the apartment was empty. Bertie only had to look at the clock to know what had happened – not knowing where he had gone or if he’d be able to drive her to work, Rachel had taken matters into her own hands and left early. The dishes left by her hasty dinner of Coke and potato chips were evidence of that, as well as the dirty pots and vegetable trimmings that she’d left behind.

He put his coat away and considered his options. As much as he hated to admit it, Rachel deserved an apology – she’d spent all of her time and effort making this evening special, and he’d wrecked it by fuming over minor bullshit. His first thought was to make the soup in her absence, then surprise her when she got home, but there were two problems with this. One, Rachel had no doubt kept the recipe on her phone, which had gone with her. Two, she likely wouldn’t be back until three or four in the morning, hours that Bertie wasn’t sure he could keep.

He spent the next half hour wondering what he should tell her, if he should call or wait until the morning. After a while, he still hadn’t come up with an answer he liked, so he jerked off to internet porn and went to bed.

***

“Bertie? We need to talk.”

He rolled over in bed, his eyes squinting in the light streaming in from the next room. Rachel stood in silhouette, pausing cautiously in the doorway.

He didn’t feel like he’d been asleep for very long. Was she home early? He rubbed his eyes.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” he croaked. He wasn’t ready for this yet. “Can we wait until the morning?”

“No, it can’t,” she said, only a little bit of hesitation showing. She held something in her hand. It looked like a scrap of paper – maybe the size of a photograph. She rubbed the paper nervously between her hands.

“Just give me some time, alright?” Bertie was starting to realize, something was just off. He felt… different. Rachel stood barely over five feet, but seemed taller somehow – or had he shrunk somehow? His voice couldn’t muster his carefully practiced baritone, but that could be because he’d just woken up…

"You left your computer open, Bertie.”

Shit. Red heat flooded up to his ears. The porn. He couldn’t remember if he’d shut down the laptop, and it was now pretty clear he’d forgotten. If he hadn’t been in enough trouble already!

“I saw my pictures. What are you doing with those?”

His thoughts suddenly came to a grinding halt. Her pictures? He tried to stammer out a response, but she held up a hand.

“You know what I’m talking about, Bertie. The ones from my trip to Port Hope. The ones where I’m in my bikini.” Sensing she wasn’t jogging any memories, she continued, “My ex-boyfriend took those pictures. Did you ask him to give them to you?”

It sounded vaguely familiar. One of Rachel’s exes had taken her to Port Hope, but it was well before they’d met. But none of that was important right now – even if she had a right to be mad at him, she should be able to speak to him like an adult.

“Come out with it, Rachel.” He swallowed his spit. Why did his voice sound like it was cracking? He saw her stiffen, and she drew up to her full height over the bed.

“All right. I wasn’t going to bring it up, I just packed up your computer and put it away. And that’s where I found this.” She showed him the picture.

It was hard to make it out in the dim light. It had clearly been taken by a cheap digital camera, then printed to plain white paper and cut to size. In the photo, there was a girl – no, a young woman – lying topless on her bed. It must have a been a hot day, Bertie decided, because the only way the curtains could have parted just so was if the window had been open and a breeze flowing.

“What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I don’t know,” he said, almost sullen. He still couldn’t figure out what this was about. The woman in the picture had long hair, as much as he could tell, and a bright new tattoo of a rosebush on her shoulder.

Rachel had a tattoo of a rosebush on her shoulder. She’d had it there for over ten years.

“I understand that you like me, Bertie. I like you too. But I don’t like you that way, and I don’t like you taking pictures of me. It’s disgusting, and it’s disgusting for my ex to be sending those pictures to you. I don’t ever want to know that you’ve done this again. Do you hear me?”   

He couldn’t have been angrier if she’d been yelling at him. At least then she wouldn’t be talking to him as if he were a child. But saying she wasn’t his girlfriend? Calling him a voyeur? There had been a time in his life he’d been that kind of creep, but he'd left that behind, he was no longer a withdrawn sixteen-year-old...

In the back of his mind, something clicked into place.

Reflexively, he moved his hand to his face. Smooth, without a trace of the stubble that seemed cursed to pop up the moment he’d shaved. His boxers were gone, replaced by the bright colours of a pair of faded Attack of the Clones pajamas. He gulped.

Rachel noticed his sudden panic. “I’m not going to tell your parents, Bertie. But I think we both know you deserve to be punished.” She took a seat on the opposite side of the bed.

He nodded, lost and mesmerized.

“Come here, Bertie.” She patted her lap. He could see now that she was wearing a tight black miniskirt over her bare legs, matching the band T-shirt and spiked collar on her neck. He’d known that Rachel had adopted a Goth appearance for much of her late teens, but he’d never expected to see it outside of old photos…

“Come here!”

Her voice jarred him back to reality. He rolled out of bed and walked around to where she waited. Her first instinct had been right, she was taller than he remembered. But if they’d both regressed – he didn’t have a better word for what had happened to them – then the now-twenty-year-old Rachel was the same height as she would be at thirty. Which put her just slightly shorter than a young Bertie. He’d been a late bloomer, he realized. He stood at her side, uncertain what to do next.

Rachel frowned. Then, with a grunt, he grabbed him by the arm and pulled him unresisting across her lap. The realization of what was about to happen dawned on Bertie, and he cursed himself for missing it earlier. He wiggled to escape, but he was a skinny teenager now, and Rachel had always been stronger than her tiny frame would suggest.

The first smack landed squarely on the seat of his cotton pants. It came as a surprise, but not as painful as he’d expected. As an adult, he’d turned his older girlfriend over his own knee at times, and she’d often said that he spanked too hard. If this was anything like what she felt, he didn’t know what she was complaining about.

“Let me up!” he heard himself shout.

She answered him with another spank that echoed through the room. Dangling off the edge of the bed, he tried to pull himself up from her lap. Rachel held on tight and kept up her strikes. Bertie could feel the heat seeping into his pajamas.

He tried again, “I’m too old for this!”

This caused her to stop. Thankful for the reprieve, he reached out for the bedframe and escape – only to find her slim hand on his wrist in an iron grip.

“You’re right, Bertie, you are too old for this. You should know better than to spy on a girl like a creep. Did you know it’s a crime? People get arrested for that, they get put on a registry. So I think getting spanked like a little boy is better than what could have happened, don’t you think?”

Shame and anger fought for control in Bertie’s mind, and found common ground in humiliation. He kicked his legs, but Rachel would not be swayed. She continued her barrage on his sixteen-year-old behind until hot tears flowed.

“Are you sorry?” she asked.

Words weren’t coming to mind. He nodded.

“Now go back to bed.”

He rubbed his warm buns and shuffled over to the side of the bed. She rose and stood at the entrance of the room, waiting by the light switch for him to settle back under the covers. Once she could see he was in place, she turned off the light.

“I’m glad we got this over with. Sleep tight.”

Bertie snorted, more embarrassed in this moment than he’d ever been in his life. She was acting as if she’d done him a favour, assigning him a childish punishment rather than talking it out like rational adults. He remembered what he’d been like at fifteen – taking out his youthful indiscretions, he was a voracious reader and a senior member of the school debate team. Who did she think she was to treat him like this?

And yet – she was right. What he’d done, or what she said he’d done, was wrong and illegal. She’d have been well within her rights to call the police, and he didn’t think that an extensive vocabulary was going to be enough against the evidence he’d been stupid enough to print out and hide in plain sight.

His frustration boiled out in one word that he spat out into his sheets: “Cunt.”

“What did you say?”

Bertie froze. He hadn’t realized how loud he’d said it. He wracked his mind to explain away whatever words she thought she may have heard, but his excuses ran dry as the light flickered back on. Rachel stood in front of him, her face red.

“Get up.”

“You just told me to go back to bed-“

“Up!”

Bertie wasn’t sure if it was his adult mind or teenage body that responded, but his legs propelled him from the bed with a will of their own.  Pushing aside the sheets, Rachel sat down in the space he’d just vacated, fixing him with a glare that could melt steel.

“Take off your pants.”

“No!” His response was automatic. So was hers. She reached around his waistband and shucked off his pajama bottoms in one swift motion. Before he found the time to react, she’d pulled him again over her knee.

“I’m not going to tell anyone what you did, because I know you made a mistake and I know you’re not going to do it again. But if you think you can call me that the moment my back is turned – after what I did for you – you just made another big mistake.” And with that, she brought her palm down on Bertie’s naked bottom.

The first slap reminded him that he’d dismissed the first spanking over his pants as painless. The second began to teach him the error of his ways, and it was not a lesson that Rachel intended to end soon. Bertie gritted his teeth. He may have cried the first time out of humiliation, but he wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of tears again. She slapped away at his wobbling buns, bringing a heat and colour into his hindquarters that Bertie had never felt in his life.

After what felt like an eternity, Rachel stopped, rubbing her hand. Bertie let out a sigh of relief – he’d toughed it out. His hand reached out to rub his burning cheeks.

“We’re not done here,” said Rachel in a harsh tone, “Get me the hairbrush from the bathroom.” She raised her arms to let him rise.

Bertie scrambled to his feet, desperate to cover his naked member, but Rachel swatted his hand aside.

“I’m a grown woman, Bertie, that’s nothing I haven’t seen before. Bring me the hairbrush, now. Before I get really angry.” Bertie gulped at her commanding tone and leapt to attention – in more ways than one. He saw her eyebrow lift and made himself as scarce as he could, his pants still bunched around his ankles.

As he returned, hairbrush in hand, it occurred to him that he was running to his own execution. His feet dragged to a stop outside of the bedroom door. Rachel noticed his hesitation. He steeled himself, expecting her to shout or get off the bed to drag him back. Instead, she smiled sweetly.

“Bertie, it’s hot and I’ve worked up a sweat. I’m going to take my top off before I finish your spanking. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Slack-jawed, he nodded.

“Then you’d better get back over my knee, shouldn’t you?”

Bertie’s head swam, no match for the hormonal overload of his sixteen-year-old body. He laid himself willingly back on her lap, his penis pressed against her bare thigh. Above him, Rachel pulled off her greasy band T-shirt. It flopped to the floor in front of him. Then, taking up the brush, she went to work.

The crack of the wood against his flesh was deafening, but what demanded Bertie’s attention was the pain. His backside blazed as the brush struck again and again, each spot deliberately picked to send him squirming, the thought of escaping or even sitting comfortably the next day gone in the wind. Over the noise and his own sobs, he heard Rachel:

“This could have been over, but you kept making it worse for yourself! You bad, bad boy!” She punctuated each word with another smack on his reddened buns. Her reprimand delivered, she relaxed her blows, keeping up the unbearable sting without tiring herself in the process. He knew he’d had this coming. He could have stopped his punishment at any time, and that was almost as bad as the pain.

“I’m sorry!” he shouted, and meant it. Her tempo slowed, and she set the brush down onto the floor. Her thighs clenched as she moved, pressing Bertie in a very sensitive place. He could feel the pressure building, and as she rubbed his bottom with reassuring fingers, he let out a ragged gasp. He spasmed once more, dribbling down Rachel’s bare leg.

He glanced upward, expecting to find Rachel’s hand raised for another punishment. Instead, she wiped his eyes with a tissue before attending to the mess above her knee. Dismissed, Bertie started to pull up his pants, wincing as they touched his burning seat.

“I think you’ll want to sleep without those tonight,” she said, picking his pants off the floor. He nearly gasped – Rachel hadn’t been wearing a bra underneath her T-shirt, and her round, full breasts swung free before him. She caught him looking and sighed, more exhausted than irritated.

“Turn and face the corner until I’m gone.” Bertie knew better than to argue, and assumed the position. He was in his place.

***

“Hi, honey.”

Bertie awoke with a start. Rachel never beat him out of bed, especially on a work night. The clock by the bed read 5:00.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t stick around for dinner,” she continued, “I got a call from my boss and he asked me to show this new girl how to set up and tear down the sound system. My little protégé got drunk at the end of the night, so I had to walk her home.”

Bertie sat up, once more at his full height, and ran his fingers through her short, vibrant hair.  She opened the covers and snuggled in beside him in bed.

“I’m sorry, too. I made a mistake and should have owned up to it.”

“I also lose my temper sometimes, it’s hard to know when to draw the line. Of course,” she added, drawing her tongue over her teeth, “the spankings help.”

Bertie’s voice caught in his throat. Could she be thinking the same as he was? Had she been fantasizing about this kind of turnaround? For how long? And the most pressing question of all…

“That must have been some dream you were having, honey. You’re hard as a rock!”

… Did she still have a hairbrush?