Page 368 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 1

“All right!” she shouted, and then held up her hands placatingly. “You’re right. That was a mean trick I just pulled, and I’m sorry. I-I’ll try to be more cooperative, but I don’t want you spanking me anymore. It doesn’t feel good.”

“It’s not intended to.” He lunged at her, grabbing hold of her arms and pulling her face down over the desktop. He swung his arm, his hand cracking hard across the summit of her rounded bottom three times in rapid succession. Just as quickly, he let go of her and she scrambled backwards onto the floor. She clutched her bottom in both hands and glared at him in wide-eyed anger, panic and even a little relief that it hadn’t been worse.

He pointed at her. “Now, you can either acknowledge that we’re even and settle down. Or, we can keep fighting and picking at one another, making this whole experience just that much worse, until I get fed up again and really let you have it.”

She rubbed her bottom, her chest heaving as she considered her options. There still weren’t any.

“I could have spanked you a whole lot harder and a heck of a lot longer than that,” he added. “I’d also like to point out one more time that spanking errant, troublesome young women these days, isn’t considered wrong back now.”

Her mouth pursed, her bottom lip protruding slightly. “Truce?” she asked.

He nodded. “Truce.”

The vacuum sucked at them again, and Audrey closed her eyes an instant before the bright light flashed them back to the beginning of the scene. This time, she got it right.

It looked exactly like any other science room that she could remember having studied in throughout her high school days. There was a fake skeleton hanging from a metal pole behind the instructor’s desk, a chart of the periodic tables hung on the wall, and the blackboard had a ten-page reading assignment chalked next to a list of chemical liquids.

The professor himself looked like Albert Einstein without the mustache and wearing coke-bottle-thick, black-rimmed eyeglasses. He was old, his curly white hair frizzed out all around his head, and he walked between the students’ individual science labs with a back that was slightly hunched.

“Hello, study buddy,” Morgan said, startling Audrey as he dropped into the seat next to her.

“Now what?” she asked, her eyes darting furtively between the other students sitting around them.

“No ‘Hello, Morgan, thanks for getting me through that last scene’?”

“No,” she said shortly.

“What’s the matter?”

“It just occurred to me: the more I cooperate with you, the further into this movie we’re going to go and the closer we’ll get to the part where the spiders start eating people. I don’t want to see that. And I really don’t want to be in it!”

He caught her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “I’ll warn you before that starts to happen. Besides, you’re the heroine, remember? You survive this, too.”

“That’s if everything goes as the script dictates.”

“Right.”

“But I don’t know the script. And you may or may not have noticed, but my skills in following directions aren’t really as fine-tuned as they could be.”

“If worse comes to worst and we do get eaten,” he squeezed her hand again, “it’s a short-lived discomfort and then the movie starts over again. No big deal.”

She arched her eyebrows. “A short-lived discomfort?”

He nodded. “Really. I’ve had paper cuts that hurt more than being speared by those giant spider fangs, injected with a poison and enzymes that slowly turned my body into a liquified goo, right before I was used as a spider Slurpee.”

Audrey stood up, but Morgan caught her arm and sat her back down again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. That wasn’t funny. I’m sorry.”

“I hate spiders,” she said. “If I survive this, I’m going to dedicate the rest of my life to squishing every single one of the little eight-legged freaks I find.”

“Say, ‘Is it possible for a spider to grow as big as a man?’”

Audrey blinked at him. “What?”

“You two aren’t doing your work.”

Audrey jumped when the elderly teacher suddenly appeared at her elbow. “Oh, Mister, er…”

“Russell,” Morgan supplied.

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