It was a cold winter night, but the old house was warm with songs she couldn’t understand, drinks that she could barely stomach, and smoke that made her eyes sting. In short, Rachel was probably too old for this shit.

But when her fellow street team members had heard that it was her birthday, they’d spared no time organizing a party for her, and she didn’t see any way of backing out. The kids – and yes, they were in their early twenties, but they seemed like kids to her – had an energy that was both tireless and seemingly infectious.

Privately, she didn’t feel comfortable spending her birthday at the apartment. Since she’d instituted her spanking fast (There had to be a better word for that), Bertie had been depressed and mopey, but recently something had happened to make him quietly supportive instead – and it turned out that was worse.

Rachel had told him that they would have to put their sex and disciplinary games on hold, but not why. And unless she was somehow able to string together the sentence “My boss told me that while I’m in training, I can’t spank you anymore” with a straight face, he wasn’t going to find out.

She could always ignore Mr. Hardecker’s command—surely he couldn’t know out if she did—but the reminder of her last meeting with the station manager gave her a cold chill despite her heavy pullover and the heat of the room.

“Want a toke?”

Rachel shook the terrifying image out of her head. Mr. Hardecker’s intimidating visage was replaced by the glassy-eyed skinny kid who she’d once caught twirling microphones like nunchucks.

“Thanks, Leon, but I’m good.” She held up a dark glass of something that his housemate Stephen had brought back from the old country that tasted like fermented pine needles. When he looked disappointed, she added, “It’s been a while, I don’t think I’ve still got a head for it.”

“How old are you now, anyway?”

“Come off it, Leon!” bellowed Stephen from nearby, “Three things a lady never reveals: Her age, her weight and…” The heavyset young man trailed off, the rest of the punchline lost in a haze of his own Baltic brew.

Rachel stuck out her tongue. Leon only knew that she wasn’t in school, and was older than he was – by how much, she’d kept a casual secret. It hadn’t stopped him from trying to guess repeatedly during the time they’d worked together.

“She’s thirty-nine,” came a woman’s husky voice from beside the front door. She sounded like she’d jogged the whole distance of the campus to get there. Maybe she had. Rachel had hoped that she’d left for the winter break, but like Rachel herself, Amy wasn’t a student anymore and evidently didn’t have anywhere better to be.

The padded coat she was wearing would have swamped Rachel, but it fit across Amy’s broad shoulders like a second skin. Her skin was flushed, either from running or from coming in from the cold. Her eyes fixated teasingly on Rachel from across the room.

Physically, the muscular young woman checked all the boxes on Rachel’s same-sex attraction card. Hell, it seemed that everyone in the street team wanted to get with Amy (And if the girl herself could be believed, many had). But after what had happened in the studio garage the previous month, Rachel had found out what really got Amy off – not just having power over her partner, but taking that power from them.

Rachel was not going to get caught alone in a room with Amy again.

Oblivious to the tension between the two women, Leon’s eyes were still widened from the reveal.

“Thirty-nine, shit! I knew you were older, but I didn’t think you meant like legit old—“

“Have you celebrated yet?” asked Amy.

“What are you talking about, girl? We’ve got tunes, we’ve got refreshments, we’ve got sweet libations…” he took another drag on his joint, “Didn’t think to bring a cake, though. Damn, now I got the munchies.

“Leon, honey, you’re being dense. Did you give our girl her birthday spanking yet?”

Rachel smiled innocently, fighting every instinct she had. Amy didn’t know much – she didn’t know that Rachel had a history with BDSM, or that she and Bertie spanked each other. What she did know was that Rachel had been sent to work with the street team as a punishment, and that the reassignment hadn’t been the only punishment that Mr. Hardecker had handed out.

“I think I might have outgrown that tradition,” said Rachel, forcing a laugh.

“Really?” Amy replied, “More than anyone, you must know that you’re never too old for a good spanking. Isn’t that right?”

Leon waved a hand. “Rachel, you don’t have to do this. She did this on my birthday, and I couldn’t sit the whole next day. Wisdom of experience here.”

Amy wasn’t going to let this go. Rachel didn’t know what game the other girl was playing, but getting a second shot at smacking Rachel’s ass was part of it. If Rachel didn’t play along, Amy had the threat of exposing Rachel’s secret arrangement with their boss.

Worse, if Amy went back to Mr. Hardecker on Monday and said that Rachel wasn’t working out on the street team, Rachel was done – not only at this job but at any other at the station or at the network.

She was going to have to play Amy’s game. But Rachel wasn’t without strategies of her own.

“Leon, perhaps you’d care to do the honours? This is your house, after all.”

There was no way he’d been expecting that. Leon choked, taking care between coughs to place his spliff in a nearby ashtray. Rachel picked up the joint, took a deep puff, and held it until her eyes watered.

“Before I change my mind,” she completed. She turned around in her chair, kneeling on the seat with her elbows folded on the backrest and and her ass offered enticingly. Deciding that her pullover was in the way, she tugged it off and dropped it on the floor, leaving her in her tank top and sweatpants.

Leon hesitated and rose unsteadily to his feet.

“You sure about this?”

Rachel could see Amy seething in the corner of her peripheral vision.

“I’m sure. You seem more gentlemanly than the alternative.”

He didn’t need any more encouragement. He placed his hand on Rachel’s butt, sizing up the target. He began to rub in slow circles, savouring the moment. It was not an unpleasant feeling for Rachel, either – but he didn’t seem to want to stop.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, “You just got a lot of booty for a little girl.”

“This little girl is twice your age, and would like you to get started before somebody…” she gestured to Amy, “gets impatient.”

The risk of losing his surprise opportunity kicked Leon into action. He leaned over and lightly popped Rachel across the beam, the force and sound of impact absorbed by her cotton-blend pants. Under his breath, she could hear him whispering “twenty-two, twenty-three…”

Rachel got the impression that if given the choice, Leon would have just fondled her buns indefinitely, but he did his duty. He popped off with one “for good luck” and threw his hands in the air, the ceremony complete.

Or so he thought.

“Hey, Stephen!” Rachel heard Amy call out, “Don’t you live here too?’

Leon’s dozing housemate lurched awake at the sound of his name. Even in his balsam-laced state, he saw Rachel bent over on the chair with Leon and Amy standing above her and put together what was happening.

“My turn, is it? Stand aside, my brother, I will show you how it’s done in the old country.”

“Didn’t your country ban spanking in, like, the nineties?” asked Leon, but Amy shushed him.

“This is cool with you, right? Rachel?”

The weed was starting to cloud Rachel’s head, but she held on to one thought: She was not going to give Amy an ounce of satisfaction. She nodded and wiggled her butt for Stephen’s benefit.

His hand came down with more strength than Leon had attempted – but he hit her tailbone instead of her ass. He cursed and shook his hand.

Amy chuckled. “How the fuck could you miss that?”

“She’s too short,” Stephen grumbled, “I have to bend over more than she does.”

“You’re drunk. Why don’t you just put her over your lap?” She leaned in so Rachel could see her and whispered, “I hear she likes it that way.”

“What?”

“It’s fine,” said Rachel quickly. She stepped off the chair, leaving space for the big European kid to plop himself down. She laid herself down over his knee with practiced ease. Maybe it was Stephen’s added bulk, or just the smoke keeping her mellow, but his lap was surprisingly comfy.

She was also pretty sure she could feel his dick hardening beneath her, but she let it go.

Stephen apparently didn’t share Leon’s appreciation of her curves, as he started right away. Rachel had been worried that, as wasted as he was, he’d have no inhibitions about spanking her, but she hadn’t needed to worry – his slaps sounded louder than Leon’s, but were slow and measured, almost lazy. She rocked back and forth in his lap for a couple dozen swats before Stephen quit, wiping at his forehead.

It had been too long since she’d had a spanking just for fun, without expectation of punishment or sex to follow. She was going to have to do it again sometime.

Amy was clearly unimpressed. “Dude, you’re supposed to count them.”

“So many rules,” Stephen wheezed. “We’re just enjoying ourselves, right?”

“It’s a tradition, Stephen, of course there are rules.”

Crawling off his lap, Rachel would have tuned out the argument, but something about it raised her hackles. She saw the nature of what Amy was doing now, and what Stephen was about to say.

“Why don’t you show us how it’s done, then?”

Leon leapt to her defense. “I don’t think Rachel agreed to that.“

“It’s fine, she can pick up where I left off.” Stephen belched and vacated his seat. “If we are to count, I think I was at twenty-five?”

“Oh, I think I’ll be starting from the top,” said Amy, approaching Rachel with a predatory smile. “But I have to wonder what kind of effect this is having on our birthday girl. Why don’t you show us, honey?”

Rachel grimaced, but lowered her seat to just below knee level, reasoning that her lavender granny panties covered enough.

She heard both of the boys gasp. Surely she couldn’t be more than a little pink back there…

“You know you’re wet, right?”

Amy was right, there was a damp spot at the crotch of Rachel’s panties, small but embarrassingly obvious. Rachel blushed and raced to grab her drawstring, but Amy was quicker.

“I think this party’s just getting started.”

She grabbed Rachel’s elbow and pulled. Hobbled by her pants at her ankles, Rachel fell into Amy’s lap with a grunt. She tried to push herself up, but the bigger girl’s elbow held her down between the shoulder blades, her wrist seized in Amy’s grasp. She was trapped.

“One!” Amy announced, followed by a painful splat as Rachel’s ass jiggled with the hit.

“Two!” The second was louder, ringing even over Leon’s music.

“Three!”

Amy’s hand was hard and calloused from a lifetime of sport, and unlike Leon or Stephen, she wasn’t holding back. Without the cover of her sweats, Rachel felt every hit, and gritted her teeth with each fresh impact.

“Still holding up down there?” Amy teased after the tenth swat.

“Fuck you, bitch.”

“Ooh, feisty! See how you like this, then.” Amy’s fingers reached under her waistband and yanked. Rachel didn’t have time to react to her sudden nakedness before Amy resumed her assault. “Eleven! Twelve!”

She should have just let Mr. Hardecker fire her. Fuck him, and fuck Amy, and fuck these spankings.

But not only had she gone over her boss’ knee willingly, she’d asked him to do it. Why?

Because he’d been right.

That night in the recording studio, Mr. Hardecker had basically called her an immature child wasting his time and her own with idle fantasies and misplaced efforts. He’d said that she needed to decide what she wanted to do with her life, not in some imaginary future, but now. That being an adult meant having to commit to something real.

And right there, over Amy’s knee with her bare ass getting redder by the second, Rachel made a commitment. That she was going to see this through, that she would finish her exile and leave the street team behind for good.

And she was going to make Amy pay.

 “Thirty-eight! Thirty-nine! And one to grow on!” The last spank brought a tear to her eye, but at last it was over.

Amy relaxed the pressure on Rachel’s shoulder, dropping her to the floor. Rachel scrambled to put her pants and panties back on before Amy helped her back to her feet.

“Happy birthday, honey. How about a hug?” Rachel begrudgingly wrapped her arms around Amy’s waist. Amy leaned in to her ear and whispered, “I am so turned on right now. If the guys weren’t here, I’d have you on your knees licking my pussy.”

She kissed Rachel on the cheek and turned back to Leon, asking him what kind of refreshments he might still have. Rachel barely heard them.

Hands shaking, she quietly started to pick her clothes off the floor. For the first time she was grateful she’d chosen to wear the loose-fitting sweatpants.

“Can I walk you home?”

Leon’s face wore both guilt and concern.

“No, go enjoy your party.”

“I should probably stop. I got an exam tomorrow.” He paused. “I’m sorry about Amy. She gets really… aggressive when she takes an interest in you. That’s what she says, anyway.”

“I thought you and her…”

“We made out once after some drinks, mostly for her reputation. You know, as the girl who knows the station so well because she’s been around a few times.”

 Rachel blinked. “So that’s not true?”

“Maybe? I know better than to call her a slut to her face, though.” He peered cautiously into the next room, where Amy and Stephen were knocking back the last of a bottle. “Between you and me, there are worse reasons to be working as an intern for two years.”

Amy looked to be taking an interest in their conversation, so he handed Rachel her pullover and quietly asked her to text him when she got home.

It was about a twenty-minute walk back to Rachel’s apartment. It felt longer from the twinge she felt with every step, that the cool winter breeze didn’t soothe nearly enough. She’d endured this same sensation on her birthday for years before, she’d endure it again this time.

Maybe she had started this job as a woman-child with no focus or discipline, and maybe it had taken her until the age of thirty-nine to realize it, but as of this moment she was done with this schoolyard bullshit.

The next time Amy tried something, Rachel would beat her at her own game.