Although this blog remains on “indefinite hiatus,” I wanted to pop back in to reprint, in its entirety, “Beneath Her Hem,” a short story by a fellow writer, Eosuchus, which I excerpted in a posting last December, “A Day in the Life, Part 1.” “Beneath Her Hem” is a bit racier than my usual postings, but full of dutiful devotion to what the author and protagonist are convinced is the superior sex. It belongs to what I would call the “Day in the Life” genre, chronicling the quotidian routines and rewards of a wife-worshipping househusband, blissfully serving his wife and daughters in a matriarchal marriage. Similar nonfictional journalistic passages have appeared in various FLR blogs and message boards, and I find them all the more stimulating for the routine nature of the descriptions of a wife-led marriage as it is lived.
The author’s copyright appears at the end: Copyright--Permian Systems 1997. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission. – Mark Remond
***
Characters: Elinor Yates and Steve Yates-Simpson. Their daughter Katherin , 14; second daughter, Jennifer, 12.
Elinor is an attorney specializing in small company law. Works for many femsupreme and feminist causes, earns around $90,000 a year. Steve is a hard-working househubby, also a freelance illustrator and artist, earns $35,000 or so. Good with his hands. They are doing pretty well financially for their part of America in the late 1990s. But they are saving hard for early retirements and college for their girls. They live comfortably, but there aren’t a whole lot of extras. Elinor runs a tight household. Her daughters know their dad’s sex role. In her teen -rebel phase, Katherin treats him badly. Jenni tries to protect him.
***
The morning began early for Steve Yates-Simpson, 43. At six-thirty he was up and out running his daily three miles. At seven he was fixing coffee and doing push-ups in the kitchen. At seven-fifteen he was taking breakfast on a tray upstairs to his wife, Elinor Yates, 44. He woke her with a kiss on the toes and while she drank her coffee he massaged her feet and calves. She didn’t feel like oral sex that morning, although often she did, so he was downstairs a little early that day. While he started the girls’ breakfasts, he ate his own and skimmed the newspaper on the Internet service.During the morning CNN news he thought about his dinner menus and added some things to the shopping list. Then thinking about lists, he checked his daily schedule. Katherin, his fourteen-year-old rebel and bully, had booked the dad driving service to be taken downtown at three-thirty in the afternoon for a two-hour stint at the record shop and then the mall. Jenni, his friend, had soccer practice at four-fifteen. Shopping would have to be squeezed in there. Steve would be driving about twenty-nine miles in that period, here, there, back here, back there and finally home. The morning was available for the laundry and vacuuming. Plus a quick once-over for the house. It was Thursday already and Friday was always a special night, particularly if Elinor saw lint or crumbs anywhere. Elinor’s rule of her household was strict and her demands were many. Steve was always a busy man, as a result.
His daughters appeared for their breakfasts. Katherin had toast that morning, with tomatoes, avocado and skim milk yogurt. She also ate bran flakes and skim milk and she ate fruit. And that was all she ate. Ever.
This did have the advantage for Steve of being easy to remember. He never ran out of the things that Katherin ate.
Jennifer ate a more broadly based diet. She shared with him a bowl of oatmeal stirred with a little maple syrup.
The girls left for schoolbuses promptly at 8.30 and 9.00.
“See you this afternoon, girls,” he said.
“Don’t be late, Dad!” said Katherin in her dominatrix voice. Since Katherin turned thirteen and had discovered what Steven’s relationship with Elinor was really about, she had decided she was going to emulate her mother. That meant she was now of higher rank than Steve. Steve had not accepted this and Elinor had not allowed Katherin to start ordering him around. Still Katherin refused to respect her father in any way.
“See you, Daddy,” said Jennifer with a hug and a kiss.
He watched them go affectionately. Katherin’s anger wasn’t unexpected. She was in a stage of life when conformity was really important. She didn’t conform to society’s norms, of course, but to her own peer group, fans of Hole and novo hardcore groups. Bright girls and boys, with their heads shaved sometimes. With lots of piercings sometimes. Who hung at the mall, but away from the crims and dopers. And who definitely didn’t hang at school things.At nine-thirty Elinor would take her first calls. Until then Steve would perform his secretarial role. Promptly at nine the calls began. First the USU agency about the copy, then Martha Lander, then Jean Ruger, then Jane Boyle. Then the snippy woman at Grace & Favor PR company. Steve took calls while he cleaned up everyone’s breakfast things and tidied up the kitchen and finished the shopping list.
When Elinor entered the office, Steve went upstairs and broke down the big bed in which they slept as man and wife, except for those nights when Steve slept somewhere else, like in the cage kept in the big closet or wrapped around the bidet. Elinor was expert with ropes and cuffs. He pulled out the sheets and dropped them in the plastic laundry hamper he now carried from room to room. He gathered underwear, socks, t-shirts, sweats, towels, shirts, pantyhose and bore it away to the basement. He sorted it and began a complex wash cycle.
Upstairs he checked on the dishwasher, emptied it and went over the kitchen with an eagle eye. Crumbs were lurking behind the counter stool. He whistled as he dusted them up and put them carefully into the garbage bin. One more careful check. Elinor might come into the kitchen at any time from about this moment on. Elinor had better not find anything at all to be critical of in the kitchen.
He went up to the bedrooms again and remade the big double bed. The girls got clean sheets twice a week and they weren’t due for a change yet. He went over the bedroom carefully, with duster and damp cloth. It was time to vacuum, which he did everywhere but in Katherin’s room. Katherin was in the process of trying to forbid any access to her room. She put her dirty clothes out in the morning for him and did her own vacuuming at Elinor’s insistence.
Vacuuming until everything was meticulous took a half-hour and by then the laundry was ready for the drier. He spent the next thirty minutes with the drier. While he moved the complex batch of clothes, all with different drying and washing times, through the drier, he did his weight-lifting exercises in the little gym area set aside for him next to the washer and drier. That day was the third in his regular cycle. He did ten sets of twelve repetitions of overhead press with a fifty pound weight. Nothing too heavy, but enough to work up a sweat and to really keep his shoulder muscles limber and strong. One thing Elinor really liked about Steve was his body, which he kept at “slave boy” perfection, even at the age of forty-three. Elinor liked to boast occasionally to friends that her husband’s body looked and felt like that of a twenty-five-year old’s.
While he worked out he checked in on the news. The weather looked good for the weekend. The cookery woman was going to be back with a recipe for a cake that tasted heavy but was actually light in cals and fats. He punched his VCR to tape this section.
When the presses were done he picked up ten-pound handweights and moved them through a series of tone and shape exercises.
At last the drying was finished and he carefully folded the garments of the women of his household and took them upstairs in a plastic hamper. Behind him the washer chugged in the cycle as it washed the sheets.
He put everyone’s clothes away, except Katherin’s which were left outside her door in a neat pile on a chair. Then he tackled the bathroom. There wasn’t much to do. The bidet, toilet and bathtub fixtures gleamed. A quick wipe and spray with germ-killer, a wipe of the mirror and a little polishing here and there of metal surfaces were all that was needed. He almost missed a thumbprint on the door, but got it on his way out.
He was ahead of the game this morning. Good. It was time to get to work. He headed downstairs and went past the kitchen to the garage and the studio above it where he worked.
He had a few phone calls to make and then he got down to work on some graphics he was making for a Domme’s website. The job was worth a thousand bucks and the Lady Gennifer was something of a friend of Elinor’s. One of the new class of Internet friends that were now springing up all over the world.
Elinor certainly had a lot of these new friends, all of whom shared her supremacist views regarding women and marriage. Steve’s skill as a painter and illustrator had been put to good use in service of the cause. There were now several customers who paid good money for his original drawings of female dominants and male slaves. Elinor advertised them heavily on her website and also on the combined website she shared with several other women of her persuasion in the North East.
That day Steve was working on a stunningly effective graphic of a sensuous looking woman spanking a man while two young girls stood to one side and watched with bright, fascinated eyes. The females were clothed, the man almost naked with his pants pulled down around his ankles. His buns were bright red. His head and shoulders hung down over the woman’s legs, his arms were tightly bound behind him, wrists to elbows. His body was lean and well muscled. The woman was generous of form and proportions, wearing a tight sweater and short skirt, nylon pantyhose and medium high heels. Her expression was almost perfect, exuding a happy sense of power and sexy authority. Her hair was cut to the shoulder in a soft coifed look quite at odds with the power in her shoulders and breasts as she kept the man pinioned across her knees and spanked him with her open hand.Steve was working in gouache and a soft wash and tweaking the fine detail on the woman’s and the girls’ expressions. The girls were particularly difficult. They had to convey an element of surprise, awe and pleasure. It was complex and not easy to get perfect.
Steve was a perfectionist, though, and he loved his work. An hour slid by happily and the picture reached that level where he was prepared to let it go. He glanced at the clock. It was time to get back to the house. Lunch was coming up.
He darted out of the studio and back to the kitchen. Elinor was still in her office, still on the phone, probably with the assholes at Grace and Favor. He chided himself, they were women, not assholes. Women were always right, that was the rule. It was just that these particular women were behaving like assholes over this booklet Elinor had prepped for them. Steve believed in femsupremacy, it was an article of faith for him, but he recognized that women were still people and they had their faults.
He moved quickly around the kitchen in an intricate ballet as he opened the refrigerator and removed sundry foods, then took out the implements and boards to prep them on. In ten minutes a handsome-looking sandwich on homemade bread was ready and a salad just needed dressing to go.
Elinor had seen the clock. She was prompt as usual.
“That looks wonderful, darling.” She was going to sit in the kitchen and eat while she watched him work. It was one of their long-term “scene” activities.
“Steve, take off your shirt and pants,” she said. Steve felt himself getting excited. Elinor wanted to scene. The scening between them was always very strong.
He did as he was told, of course and put his clothes out of sight in a cupboard. Elinor ordered a very small glass of white wine from the chiller. When he brought it for her she squeezed and pinched his ass.
“I see a spot down there on the floor,” she announced pointing to the tile right beside her stool. He got down on his knees to wipe the floor for her. By the time he’d finished that to her satisfaction she was pointing her foot at him for his kiss.“I think my shoes need a buff, what do you think?”
He moved to buffing her shoes with a little chammy that he kept in the corner closet for just this purpose. As he finished buffing each shoe, she raised her foot a little so he could plant a heavy kiss on her instep.
Elinor told him to come stand behind her and massage her neck and shoulders. While he did so her hands manipulated his penis and testicles. After a while she turned and pulled him to her and kissed him hard and smacked his behind a few times, not a spanking, just dominant love play. His cock throbbed and pulsed and issued a glob of pre-ejaculate that he caught on a piece of paper towel before it could land on Elinor’s thigh. Goddess help him if that ever happened!
The scene was over after a few more kisses. His hard-on still throbbed, but Elinor was not about to let him come just then. She made him kneel for a minute of contemplation. He controlled his breathing as she had trained him to do over the years and his erection slowly subsided.“How’s your morning going?” he asked after a little while when the tremor wouldn’t show in his voice.
“So so, those people at Grace and Favor are a pain. But I think we’re making progress. Martha had a horror story to relate. Bill’s got heart disease for sure.”
“Oh no, he’s only fifty.”
“He’s eighty pounds overweight. Martha’s lost control of Bill. She’s considering divorce. Doesn’t see why she has to live with a walrus who’s killing himself with an addiction to ice cream.”
“There but for the grace of the Mother,” he said trying to be as good a wiccan man as possible.
“Yeah,” she smiled at him. “Right. So how was your morning?”
“Good, I think I really got my spanking lady’s expression right. Would you take a look, if you have a chance?”
She smiled. “Love to darling.” She looked at the clock. “Mmm, precious, I would really like to go upstairs and have you eat me from end to end, but it will have to wait. I’ve got to call USU and do this conference.”
Elinor gone, he checked laundry, moved the sheets to the drier and then went back to his studio.
For the next two and a half hours he devoted himself to idea sketches for a series he was doing for a private customer. In these sketches a man was bound up with rope and then punished in a variety of ways by a middle-aged woman wearing sweat pants, bra and Reeboks. The best one in his opinion was the one that had the woman flogging the man with a leather belt after tying him over an old fashioned TV console. There was a scattering of porno videos on the floor, some broken. He was tied up with clothesline, with his pants pulled down below his knees. She was whopping away on him with that big leather belt. His ass was cut and striped quite thoroughly. The woman was getting a workout.
His watch beeped him and he set aside his work, went down and took the car out and drove to Katherin’s school. Traffic was light and he made it in time. Katherin was pretty quick coming out and she got into the back, as was her habit. He drove her to the mall where she exited with a curt, “I’ll be back here at five-thirty. OK? Don’t leave me hanging around here.”
He drove to Jennifer’s school and collected her and a couple of her friends and drove them to the soccer fields. Jennifer’s friends sometimes asked him why he always did the driving. He explained that his wife’s work had to be done in the day, but his own could be finished up later on. She just didn’t have the time in the day and he did.
He let them loose, the Blue Devils versus their archenemies, the Southside Grasshoppers. The green fields were covered in girls playing soccer and, farther away, some softball games. It was nice to get outside, he told himself, taking a few deep breaths.
Then he drove down to the shopping center and did his usual high-speed run through the Shoprite, getting everything on the list and out of the checkout in under twenty-six minutes.
Then it was time to go and pick up Katherin, who had waited exactly a minute for him and was mighty pissed off.
“Dad! You’re supposed to be here for me. What if some creep had been bothering me?” This was a big thing for her at this time, there were “creeps” all over and they bothered girls who went around in black leather, tight skirts and torn stockings.He apologized. It was the best policy. When he just said he was sorry she usually quit. She grumbled and fell silent as they drove through greener fields to the soccer fields. Blue Devils were gathered around in a sombre mood. They had lost 3-2.
Jennifer was upset. She rode in the back while her friend Sansi rode up front. Sansi was a very bright child with parents who were second generation immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. She was also a great winger and had scored six goals that season. Sansi was philosophical about losing that day. Their goalie had just had had a bad one.
He and Sansi talked soccer all the way back to the school parking lot where he dropped her off. She lived just beyond it, where her father had his medical practice.
Back home he let the girls out and then unloaded the groceries onto the Red Flyer wagon. It took about ten minutes to get all the groceries put away and then it was time to put together a nice little dinner for his women. While he worked he ate a bowl of bran flakes with skim, a papaya, a couple of kiwi fruit, some dried apricots and figs and another tiny bowl of nuts. He washed this down with a ginseng spritzer. Elinor and Jennifer came in to eat together. They enjoyed a vegetarian casserole with homemade bread, baked the day before, but still fresh-tasting. Elinor had white wine and Jenni had milk. For dessert there was a nice piece of chocolate cake to split between them.
Elinor had had a good conference and was in a cheerful mood. She and Jenni were going to play some music together later. Jenni was an intermediate pianist and organist and Elinor played electric guitar. They liked to do blues tunes together. Jenni was in the middle of a vast exploration of blues and women’s blues. Wimmin’s or Womyn’s music it was sometimes called, and it was the hot thing in their house.
Katherin remained in her room until everyone had left the kitchen. Then she would appear and raid it for her own meal like a raccoon or some wild animal that was never to be actually seen at night.
Steve went back to work in the studio. He had a neat little Java applet graphic he was finishing up for another pro Domme’s web page. The graphic showed a slave male being ridden by a woman with a riding crop. The man crawled along on all fours and the woman rode on him and cropped his behind every couple of strides. She was a Betty Page-type character with knee-high boots and the man was a huge, football player type.
He worked through the evening and made some solid progress on the graphic; it would be ready to send to the client the next day. Then he shut down the computer and hurried down to the basement where he pulled out the sheets and got the iron hot and started pressing them. Elinor liked everything neatly pressed and put away before the end of each day. Laundry wasn’t allowed to hang around getting moldy in bins, nor were cleaned sheets left sitting in driers.When they were done and everything was put away, he hurried back upstairs. Elinor was on her computer, chatting on the IRC, which she did most evenings for an hour or two. Jenni was finishing her homework at the dining room tables. Katherin was? Well who knew what Kath was up to in her sacred tower?
Steve went back downstairs to his little shower stall and took a good shower. Then he carefully inspected his ass and thighs. Elinor didn’t like to see hair on a man’s ass. It was disrespectful of her in her role as Matrimonial Disciplinarian in the household. She didn’t like to see hair on his thighs either. She didn’t mind it on his genitals, or even a little on his chest. Nor did she make him shave his armpits like some of her friends made their husbands do. So he had things to be grateful for, which went without saying, of course. Still it was a difficult trick, shaving one’s legs and ass to make sure that not a single dark curly hair would be there to anger one’s woman and overlord. He soaped and shaved and inspected carefully with mirrors and flashlight. When he was sure he hadn’t missed anything he dressed in bedtime silks and went upstairs. Jenni was in the bathroom. She heard him go by and she called out “Good night, Dad, I love you.”
“Good night, Jenni.”
Jenni stuck her head out. “Good luck, Dad. Mom’s in a real good mood tonight.”
“Thank you, Jenni.”It was a strange mixture of parental love and humiliation that filled him as he said it. Sometimes it was hard being a father in a household run on femsupremacy rules. Still, for Steve there was no other choice.
Inside the bedroom he turned down the coverlet and gave the room a once-over inspection. Then he knelt on the floor in his usual place, where a fluffy pink rug was set for Elinor to step into bed from.
Elinor came in softly singing a Web-blues tune she was fond of. She smiled as she closed the door behind her.
“I think your spanking lady is just perfect, honey,” she said as she sauntered up to him. “Gennifer will love it.” As she came she pulled aside her nightgown to show him the filmy pink panties she was wearing. His cock hardened instantly in his tight silk undershorts.
“Mmm, we missed out this morning, need double duty tonight.” She took his head by the hair on the back and held him while she swung one leg over his shoulder and pressed her panty crotch to his face. She held him thus a moment so he could breathe in her intimate scent and then swung it back and turned and pulled her gown away from her shoulders and dropped it to him. She looked down at him over her shoulder while she lifted her hair up in her hands and slowly rocked her hips up and down so that her buttocks moved hypnotically in front of his eyes. When she pressed her ass backwards towards him, that was Steve’s signal to put his hands on her hips. She put her own hands on her heavy breasts and lightly fingered her nipples while Steve began to worship her ass.
It was Thursday night, and a night for uncomplicated lovemaking. Elinor loved to receive oral sex and she had trained Steve to do it in all the ways she liked. When she’d had all of that she could take she would reward her husband in one of several ways. Either vanilla sex, with her on top, or a reward face-sit during which she would masturbate him three or four times. Either way when she was finished, his balls would be empty. And thus the day ended, with Steve cuddling his wife and ruler as she slipped happily into sleep, served and serviced to the absolute limit of a man’s ability.
Copyright--Permian Systems 1997.