Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
As soon as Grace felt my weight on the bench seat, she turned to look at me with wide eyes. At the same time, she reached for the seatbelt and started to pull it across her shoulder.
“Good girl,” I told her. She had turned to find the buckle of the seatbelt, but now she turned back, her eyes going even rounder. I didn’t have the slightest doubt, from the expression on her pretty face, that the words had the same kind of effect they’d always had on Shelly: the sense of solid, benevolent, old-fashioned masculine dominance and the rightness of a strong woman submitting to a stronger, caring man.
Grace
I looked away from Mr. Carpenter quickly, my cheeks burning. I didn’t like how my body had reacted to him saying good girl like that, and I didn’t know what it meant.
I wasn’t a good girl. Hadn’t I pretty much proven that? I had shoplifted. I had gotten arrested. I wasn’t completely sure what had happened in the hearing room with the judge, if I had to be honest, but it definitely meant the government thought of me as a criminal, didn’t it?
I tried to tell myself that I had in fact chosen to become a bad girl. I knew deep down that I hadn’t actually chosen it at all—really I had just kind of wanted to see what it felt like. But that didn’t mean that I had any interest in playing the part of a well-behaved young lady for this asshole who some ‘authority’ had designated as my foster father.
My body, though, seemed to have a different idea. My chest, in particular, where a treasonous warmth seemed to have arisen, something like pride, however much I tried to deny it—but also, horrifyingly, down below my belt, where the notion of being a good girl seemed to become so complicated that I simply refused to think about it.
Thankfully I had a good excuse for looking away, because I had to obey his instruction to fasten the seatbelt, didn’t I? I managed to spend long enough on it that Mr. Carpenter had started the car and pulled out into Main Street before I had to turn back toward the windshield.
I looked out at the tiny town of Grasskiln. I saw we were actually about to leave the built-up part of it completely and drive out into the gently rolling farmland that seemed to surround the town on all sides. I felt for a moment like I had somehow, despite everything, managed to find my way out. I had grown up in a grimy suburb and moved to a grimier city, with no prospect of finding anything softer, or greener, or just better. Here I was in the heartland, apparently with a roof over my head—or at least in the cab of an old, but clearly well-loved, pickup truck.
When I remembered what Mr. Carpenter had promised would happen once I got under his roof, though, the warmth of those few seconds of something like contentment drained out of my body in an instant. I had my hands on my knees, half-consciously trying to cover up the fashionable rips in my jeans. At the recollection of what the big, bearded man had said when I had stupidly talked back to him, and he had grabbed my arm—that’s nothing compared to how much your butt is going to hurt by the time you go to bed tonight—I clutched so hard at my legs that I forced a little cry of pain from my throat.
“Grace, honey?” Mr. Carpenter asked, startling me as much by his attentiveness as by the surprisingly gentle tone he used. He turned to look at me briefly, then returned his attention to the twilit road, then looked at me again. “You okay?”
My jaw dropped. I had absolutely no idea how to answer. Of course I wasn’t okay. How could I possibly be okay, when he had told me he meant to do to me what the guard on the bus had done to Frannie? And maybe even worse—I had the distinct feeling, though without any exact knowledge, that a whipping would differ from a whuppin’ in some important and painful way. Mr. Garrison spanking Frannie with his hand had apparently represented a whuppin’. Mr. Carpenter had threatened to whip me right there in the street. What my ‘foster father’ planned to do to me seemed like it could well involve something worse than his farm-callused hand.
As these desperate, terrifying, pseudo-logical thoughts ran through my head, another voice, somewhere off in the distance of my mind, started to scream. Crazy. Fucking insane. Lunacy. What the ever-loving fuck are you even thinking about? Stop trying to figure out exactly what this fucked-up nonsense means and start trying to get the fuck out of here.
He had called me honey. That part hadn’t really sunk in at first—probably because I had not the slightest idea what to make of it. Apparently a man like Mr. Carpenter could call a girl honey despite having every intention of baring her ass and whipping her until she couldn’t sit down.