A Necessary Beating

by Ashley Zacharias

“Not going to the gym today?” Derrick asked brusquely.

“No,” Jillian replied, surprised. For the first three months after her horrible 'Fall from Grace', he had restricted all conversation to single-word replies and she only got that much if she asked a direct question that, in his opinion, absolutely required his input. In the past month, he had begun to answer in full sentences on occasion, which had been a huge improvement. But this was the first time that he had initiated any conversation on his own. She was encouraged by the progress. She decided that was the day to try to get him to take a more concrete step towards forgiveness. “I want to talk about us.”

“No,” he said, in a low, monotone, instantly slipping back into his post-incident verbal mode.

“I know you don't want to talk to me. I betrayed you and I know that it's going to take a long time for you to learn to trust me again. I don't mean that we should have some long conversation about our deep feelings. That's bullshit. I want to give you some physical satisfaction. I hurt you and you have the right to hurt me back.”

“What? You're going to give me permission to cheat on you? You think that will make me happy again? Fuck that.” His tone was bitter, but this was the longest monologue that he had said in her presence months. That was something.

“No. I'd never be that stupid. Cheating didn't give me any satisfaction and I know that it wouldn't give you any, either. I have something completely different in mind. Come with me.” She took his limp and and tried to pull him toward the door to the hallway.

He just stood still and said, “What do you think? That if you take me back up to the bedroom and fuck me, then all will be forgiven? Don't be an idiot.”

He had not made love to her in four months. She thought that he must be hurting but she was not so egotistical as to think that a roll in the sack with her would fix anything. No woman was that good in bed. And any woman who thought that she was was deluding herself. “No. We're not going to the bedroom, we're going to the basement. Trust me.”

“Why in hell should I ever trust you again?”

“Because I'm not asking you to trust me as your wife. I'm asking you to me as a pitiful woman who deserves to be punished. You can't argue with that. I know that you have a right to be angry and I want to see if I can give you a little relief from it, even just temporarily.”

What did he have to lose? He relented and let her lead him down to the basement.

He found that all the furniture had been moved out of the rec room. Even the walls were bare of decoration. Jillian had been busy down here, recently. This was no spur of the moment impulse.

“So what do you want from me?”

She handed him a pair of short pants, his gym shoes, and white socks. “Put these on.”

“No.”

“Please. You don't have to, but you'll be more comfortable if you're not wearing your suit and tie. I'll be back in a few minutes.”

He looked down at the clothes that she was holding. Her hand was trembling. In fear, maybe? So what? She had every reason to be afraid of losing him. He'd not yet made up his mind to divorce her, but he had thought about it every day for the last four months. He'd even looked for the names of a few lawyers. “I have to get to work.”

“You don't punch a time clock. Nobody will care if you're an hour late. In fact, nobody will care if you miss the whole morning. Your monthly reviews are terrific. You've earned a little freedom. Come on, now, do this for yourself. You'll be glad you did.” Jillian disappeared back up the stairs before he could throw any more arguments at her.

Derrick looked at the shorts and wondered what she was up to. She'd said that she wasn't going to try to jump his bones, so what did that leave? Doing Pilates together?  Even she couldn't think that was a good idea. He had to admit that she had made him a little curious. She might be an unfaithful slut but she had a wicked imagination. What the hell? He would play along until his curiosity was satisfied. After that, there was no way that she could stop him from getting dressed and going back to work.

Five minutes later, Jillian returned to find her husband standing in the middle of the room, dressed only in gym shorts and running shoes. She was wearing a white terrycloth robe and carrying a small gym bag in her right hand. He noticed that her feet were bare and she had tied her shoulder-length blond hair back in a pony tail. She was wearing no jewelry and no makeup. “Thank-you. Hold out your hands.”

“What do you want from me?”

She unzipped the gym bag and pulled out a pair of red and white leather boxing gloves. The white was on the front where the fist would contact the opponent. “I want you to beat me. Not just beat me, I want you to wale into me and beat the shit out of me. Now, put your hand in here.” She held out the right glove.

“No,” he replied, but he let her raise his hand and slip it into the glove.

“Push now, get your hand right down in there.”

He pushed his hand down.

“That's right. Let me lace you up good and tight.” She tied a double bow in the laces. “Now the other hand.”

“You think I want to beat you?”

“Yes, you do. You should want to beat me. It's biological. We've got all this civilization weighing us down, but sometimes we have to be true to our real nature. Your need to beat me up is part of your basic human nature, even if it's been buried under too many layers of civilization. Besides, this is just boxing. It's a socially acceptable sport.” She tied the second glove tight. “I know that a sound beating won't be enough to make everything all right. But it will be a start. It'll help balance our accounts so that we can start to build our marriage up again. I've told you that I'm sorry and promised to be faithful and I'll keep telling you again and again with all my heart, but that's just words. Today I'm going to give you more than just words. I am going to give you a full measure of pain and blood.”

“I can't hit a woman.”

“I'm not a woman this morning, I'm just a punching bag. Call me your sparring partner if that makes you feel any better.” She gestured to the empty room. “You can think of this as our boxing ring.” She laughed bitterly. “I'm going to think of it as my new wedding ring.”

She slipped her robe from her shoulders and let it drop to the floor, leaving herself stark naked. Then she pulled a mouth guard out of the bag and slipped it over her upper teeth. She worked her mouth a couple of times to make sure that it was properly settled. Finally, she drew another pair of boxing gloves out of the bag and put them on her own hands. These were smaller than his, pink, and they closed with a velcro strap. She used her mouth to fasten the straps. “I won't be using these all that much so they don't need to be tied on.” Her words were slurred as she tried to speak around the mouthguard, but he could understand what she was saying.

“I'll hurt you.”

“Of course. You're supposed to hurt me. That's the whole point. I expect you to hurt me bad.” She kicked the robe and empty gym bag against a wall.

“You want to be hurt? You think that will give you some kind of relief from your guilt? You're looking forward to this, aren't you?”

“No. I'm scared half to death of what's coming. I don't like pain. I don't want to suffer. That's what's going to make this punishment. This is no game. This isn't a sport. I can only imagine how bad this is going to be for me. I imagine that it's going to be real bad. I'm relying on you to make sure that it's as bad as I imagine and you're going to have to man up and do it. I broke our marriage and I'll do anything to fix it again. I desperately want you to inflict as much pain on me as you can just on the chance that it will take us a small step in the right direction. You have to know with absolute certainty that you are punishing me. Really punishing me.”

“I'll injure you.”

“Not with the gloves on. I'm twenty-three years old and I'm in good health. More important, I've spent the last three months at the gym working hard to strengthen my neck and abdominal muscles. I've never been in such good shape in my life.” He wondered if she were deliberately implying that he was physically unfit compared to her. She continued to speak, “Unless you sucker punch me in the back of the neck, I doubt that you could hit me hard enough to cause permanent injuries or internal bleeding. You spend all day sitting at a desk.” She put a sneer into the last sentence, to make it clear that she was implying that her infidelity was partly his fault because he wasn't physically fit.

The taunt stung like the lash of a whip.

She paused to suck the saliva from around her mouthguard, then continued, “By the way, this is a beating, not a fight. Marquis of Queensbury Rules do not apply here. There's no rounds, just keep working on me until you're too tired to continue. Take all morning if you want. And you can forget about that 'above the belt' crap. You can hit me anywhere on my body. If you want to really wale away for a long time and are worried about internal injuries, my thighs can take all the pounding that you can dish out.” She tapped her glove against her thighs and slurped, “Why don't you see if you can bruise these suckers all the way to the bone? I expect to spend most of the week in bed healing, so it doesn't matter if I can't walk on them for a while. Also, when I'm on the ground, I'm still fair game. Just get on down and keep hammering away on my torso and arms and legs. What else? Oh, no kicking. Except for my ass. You can kick me in the ass all you want. And the legs, I guess. Just be careful that you don't kick me in the spine or in my head when I'm on the ground. You don't want to have to nurse an invalid.”

She stepped directly in front of him with her hands dangling at her sides and said, “That's it. Okay? Go ahead. Make me sorry for what I did to you. I'm ready. Make me sorry that I was ever born.”

Derrick didn't think that he'd be able to hit his wife. Then she smiled. It was the exact expression that she used when she thought that he'd done something stupid. It was like she was enjoying seeing him standing there with his hands dangling impotently. He had no choice. He had to wipe that smug expression right off her face. He lashed out with a quick snap that caught her full on the cheek. Her head bounced sideways an inch. When she looked back at him, there was no smile on her face; her smug expression had been replaced by shock, as though she hadn't believed that he would really hit her. Then she forced herself to smile again. “Is that all you got?” she slurred through her mouthpiece. “Man up, you cocksucker. You'll never break my nose or crack my ribs with pussy little jabs like that.”

He cocked his arm back and smacked her straight in the face. He didn't put his body weight behind the blow, but he didn't pull the punch, either. He hit her hard and the slap of leather against skin sounded loud in the small room. When the glove bounced back, he saw her head rock on her neck. She wasn't smiling now. She put her gloves up to protect her face from a third blow. He drove his left hard into her gut.

She grunted loudly as the wind was driven from her lungs but kept her hands in front of her face. He followed immediately with a combination to the body, a right to her upper abdomen and a left into the ribs on her right side. This time he put a little weight behind his punches. She groaned in pain and lowered her gloves from her face. His next right caught her across her left cheek and eye. It was the hardest punch to her face so far and she yelped in pain around her mouthguard.

“Keep your mouth shut, bitch, or you'll break your teeth despite the mouthguard,” he snarled and planted a hard left against her right cheek. She snapped her mouth shut and he slammed her full in the face again, rocking her head back. Her lip split and blood burst out. She whimpered but kept her mouth shut. Finally, she thought to raise her gloves to protect her face again.

Then he settled down to work, rhythmically and methodically slamming into her upper arms, ribs, and abdomen; punishing body blows that bounced her back and forth from side to side and slowly drove her backwards, one step at a time. She grunted and whimpered continuously under the rain of blows.

As the damage accumulated, bruising made her skin turn bright red and tender. Every punch was a new agony. She began trying to anticipate the blows. Rather than trying to hold her ground and let him push her back, she peered over her raised gloves and jumped back when she saw his fist coming. But he could move his fists a lot faster than she could move her body. He kept advancing and hammering at her until he had her backed into a corner.

She could move no more. All she had left was to raise her arms to cover her face and let him plaster her body with brutal blow after brutal blow. They both heard her two lower left ribs crack when he hit her with all his might. He stepped back and lowered his gloves.

She gasped, “What's the matter, slugger? Run out of steam? Don't wimp out on me now. I can take whatever you can lay on me.” She lowered her arms and he saw blood dripping from her nose.

He walked back to the middle of the room, turned and said, “Come on out here, then, and we'll see how tough you really are.”

She walked toward him slowly. For all her bravado, she was suffering terribly from his prolonged pummelling on her upper body and face. The cracked ribs made every breath painful.

“Spread your legs.”

She knew what was coming – she was the one who said that low blows were allowed – but she spread her legs wide anyway and waited for him.

The upper cut to her cunt was vicious. Derrick put all his strength into it.

She gasped in pain, then managed to sneer and say, “That's pretty crude symbolism, don't you think?”

“You flinched and put your knees together on me. Spread 'em again.”

“I didn't,” she said, but she gathered her courage and spread her knees as wide as she could for him.

“Now, shut your eyes and I'll give you a surprise.”

Fearfully, she closed her eyes.

“No peeking, now. Good and tight.”

A long moment passed and then the slap of leather against flesh echoed through the room as her clit and lips were hammered against her pubic bone. His first blow had been nothing compared to this. Her crotch exploded in agony. She shrieked and collapsed to the floor, her gloved hands pressing between her legs, trying in vain to staunch the white hot pain flowing through the tenderest parts of her female anatomy.

After watching her writhe on the floor for a minute, Derrick said, “Stand back up.”

She struggled to regain her feet.

“Assume the position again.”

“No, please. No, not again.”

Her nose crunched when his right hand powered into her face. There was no doubt that it was broken now. Much too late, she threw her gloves up to protect her face from further pounding.

“Put your hands down.”

“Please. I'll do it. I'll spread my legs for you. Don't hit my face any more.” She spread her legs wide one more time.

He didn't bother to tell her to close her eyes; with her gloves in front of her face, she couldn't see the next punch coming. This time she screamed so loudly that her mouthguard flew across the floor, spraying a fan of blood that had filled her mouth from her split lip. Again she collapsed to the floor in agony. She feared that she might be rendered sexually dysfunctional if he kept doing this. He feared that the neighbors might hear her screaming and call the cops.

“Shut up!” he yelled and delivered a vicious kick to her left buttock. She cried out, but not as loudly as she had been screaming. He kicked her again in the back of her thighs. She said that she had wanted to see if he could bruise her big muscles all the way to the bone? Okay. Let's find out, he thought.

She curled into a foetal position and let him kick her again and again while she screamed and cried. After delivering innumerable kicks to the biggest muscles in her body, he became aware that she was begging for mercy. “Please stop. Please. I'm begging you. Please forgive me. Please don't hurt me any more. I'm so sorry.”

He stopped kicking her.

She struggled to her knees, leaning her weight against his legs and throwing her gloved hands around his thighs. “Thank-you,” she sobbed. “Thank-you. Thank-you.”

He didn't know if she was thanking him for beating her or thanking him for stopping.

She kept struggling upward and, when her head reached the level of his crotch, she used the thumbs on her boxing gloves to pull his shorts down over his hips to his knees. Then she put her lips to his sweaty, half-erect cock. When had that happened? he asked himself absently. Did beating his wife half to a pulp actually turn him on? Was he some kind of sick fuck? When she began working him with her bloody tongue and lips and he stopped thinking about anything but fucking her. God it had been a long time since he had fucked his wife. He was going to do it now and he was going to do it strictly for his own pleasure. To hell with what she wanted. All that mattered was what he wanted and he wanted his cock buried in her cunt right to the hilt right now.

He pushed her hungry mouth away, then put his still-gloved hands on her shoulders and shoved her all the way to the floor. Her crotch was beet-red and tender as hell from the pounding it had taken but that was her problem, not his. She whimpered when he parted her lips and entered her, then screamed in pain when he drove down all the way to the root and crushed her swollen clit against the underlying bone with the full weight of his body.

He ignored her suffering and pounded into her as hard as he could. When he came, he screamed every obscenity in his vocabulary almost as loudly as she was screaming in pain. He screamed that she was a dirty cunt, a god-damned whore, and a fucking slut. And more. And he meant every word.

He stayed inside, his sweat pouring over her face and body, and waited until he was completely limp before rolling off of her.

As soon as she was free of his weight, she rolled back up into a foetal ball, hugged her knees to her chest and sobbed piteously.

After he regained his breath, he looked across at her, seeing her face clearly for the first time since he had begun beating her. Then he had seen that smug expression that he wanted to wipe off her face. Well, it was gone now. Her nose was smashed crooked and she was blowing bubbles of blood from it with every breath. Her lower lip was split open and was dribbling more blood from the raw wound. Her entire face was splotched with dark red patches that covered her from chin to hairline and ear to ear. Both eye sockets were already turning an ugly black. The only part of her upper body that was unbruised were her breasts. He had not hit her breasts even once. He still loved her tits and some deep, reptilian part of him did not want to see them lumpy and discolored. But leaving her breasts untouched was not much of a mercy considering that her body was one massive bruise from just below them all the way to her pubes. He didn't want to know what her crotch looked like. Her upper legs looked the worst of all. His kicks had been vicious and the soft rubber toes of his running shoes had hit her like rubber mallets over and over again. The deep bruises there were already dark purple in places.

He looked down at the hands that had done this and saw that the white leather on the front of both gloves was smeared with his wife's blood.

Remorse flooded through him. How had he been able to do this to another human being? Especially someone that he had once loved? Tears began rolling down his cheeks, mixing with the sweat that was pouring across his face.

When Jillian heard him sob, she looked across into his eyes.

“I'm sorry,” he said, raggedly.

She reached out a hand and put a finger across his lips. “No, darling. I'm sorry. You only did what I asked you to do. And I asked you to do it only because you needed it. You did the right thing. You've always done the right thing.” She was whispering, her voice dampened by the pain that was coursing through her body, but her words rang clearly in his ears. “And you know something? I'm going to heal just fine. I'm going to set my nose straight and tape my lip together and bind my ribs up and in a couple of weeks or a month, I'll be as good as new again. And then you know what's going to happen? I'm going back to the gym and start working out again. I have to keep myself in shape because, in two or three months, you're going to start thinking about how I betrayed you and it's going to eat at you and you'll start wondering if I'm thinking about betraying you again, and you'll get angry again. And when that happens, I'l know and then I'm going to bring you back down here and put those gloves back on you and you're going to beat me to a pulp again. And that's going to keep happening as often as necessary until you are absolutely convinced that I'll suffer anything to do to earn your trust back, no matter how much pain I have to endure. And then, maybe, you'll be able to forgive me. Really forgive me and then you can start learning how to trust me again. Actual, real trust, not like now when you're just feeling sorry for a beaten woman. When that finally happens, when you know in your heart that you can trust me again, then you won't need to beat me any more and then we can start planning for our future together.” She dreamed of going back to work again, resuming her career, and eventually having children with Derrick, but it was too early to share those happy thoughts with him. Much too early. Maybe another year for the job; maybe three or four before children. She'd have to take a lot of beatings before she could ask him for that much. But the beat of their marital life would go on. She would do everything in her power to make sure of that.

He shook his head. “I don't care what you say. I'm never going to beat you like this again.”

She smiled sadly. “Yes, you will. You have to do it for both our sakes. I think, next time, that I'm not going to wear gloves. Instead, I'm going to wear handcuffs. If my hands are cuffed behind my back, you'll be able to do a much more precise job on me. You'll be able to make my punishment that much more severe. Now, let me untie those gloves for you and then you go upstairs and have a nice warm shower and then go to work. I'm going to lay down here for a while longer. But don't you worry, I'll be able to make it up those stairs after I've had a little rest.” She could not stop herself from whimpering at the thought of having to move but she covered it by saying, “But I think we'll have to order pizza in tonight. I don't think I won't be able to cook dinner for you until tomorrow.”

As she listened to her husband mount the stairs, she felt like she had been racked. Her beating had been worse than she had imagined. Thanks to her broken ribs, every breath hurt; thanks to her bruising, every movement was pain. But her agony was ameliorated by hope. She had just had the longest conversation that she had had with her husband in four months. And he had even made love to her, more or less.

There would be more conversations like this in the months to come. She would make certain of that. She began to cry.