Cecelia was in an irritated mood as she walked home from school. She'd explained to the coach that she did do sport. Cheerleading was a sport. He wouldn't have a bar of it. All the girls had to try out for the new girl's baseball team he was putting together. All girls included cheerleaders, he said. I'm eighteen and in my last semester Cecelia had protested, not that it had done much good.
So she'd tried out for his silly team. She demonstrated that her woeful batting ability was equalled by her abysmal catching skills. The highlight came when he suggested she might be a pitcher.
Her first pitch had been straight but hadn't quite reached the batter. Throw it harder the coach had said. So she'd thrown it harder and the ball had sailed high and fast and in the wrong direction. Try again, said the coach. So she'd tried for a third time and her grip slipped, the ball went straight up and managed to come down behind her.
The coach had waxed sarcastic after that. There might be a worse player than her, somewhere in the world, he'd told her, but he would pray each night that he never met them. He had been the one who insisted that she try out, not her. If he wanted some forward flips she could do them. Cheerleading and acrobatics were fine. Throwing a ball? Who needed it?
Arriving home, Cecelia was strolling down the driveway when she nearly tripped. The fact that she'd tripped on her younger brother's baseball seemed to add insult to injury in her present state of mind. Muttering to herself about inconsiderate brats she picked up the ball and threw it down the yard as hard as she could.
She watched, irritated, as the ball sailed off at an angle, vanishing over the fence and into the neighbour's yard. Mike can just go and fetch it himself, she was thinking, when there was the sound of a crash and the tinkling of broken glass. With the sound of breaking glass came another sound.
"What the fuck?" cam an infuriated cry. "Mikey, you unspeakable little turd."
Before Cecelia could make good her escape there was a scrabbling sound from the fence and the head of their next door neighbour appeared over the top of the fence, a furious look on his face. Cecelia winced. Sam looked rather formidable at the best of times. This was plainly not the best of times.
She and Mikey had nicknamed Sam the Unlikely Hulk. You take a man with the height, bulk, and muscles of the incredible Hulk. You then place a hand on his head and compress him, knocking a good foot off his height but keeping all that beef and muscle. That was Sam. He looked as though he could bench-press a refrigerator - for his warmup.
"Where is he?" came the enraged demand. "I'm going to strangle him. I'll string him up by his thumbs and buy a stockwhip, just for him."
"He's not here," said Cecelia in a very small voice. "There's just me. It was an accident. Um, did something break? The ball didn't hit the house."
"No, it didn't. It scored a bullseye on the pane of glass I was carrying. Do you know why I was carrying a pane of glass?"
Cecelia shook her head.
"I didn't think so. It was because I needed that pane of glass to replace the window that Mikey broke yesterday. He didn't even give me a chance to install the blasted thing. I warned him that the next break was going to cost him. Where is he?"
"Um, at football practice, I think," Cecelia said.
Sam looked at her hard. No Mike meant someone else threw the ball. Easy enough to guess who.
"Come around here," he snapped. "Damned if I'm going to yell at you over the fence."
Sam vanished. Cecelia chewed on her lip. Should she go around and confront him or not? She'd better, she supposed. Otherwise he'd come around and complain to her parents. Dispiritedly, she dumped her bag next to the door and headed around to get her lecture.
Sam gave her a full voltage glare as soon as she turned up.
"I was doing the repairs myself because it's cheaper than getting a glazier in and the insurance excess is probably more than the pane of glass. Of course, the second pane of glass isn't covered by insurance as it wasn't on the house when it got broken."
Cecelia let him rant. Keep him talking and he'd eventually wind down and she could escape.
"What the hell were you doing with the ball, anyway?" he finally demanded. "I didn't think you were a baseball fan."
"Get real," Cecelia snapped indignantly. "As if! I nearly tripped over the ball and so I tossed it down the yard."
"Maybe so, but why choose my yard?"
"I didn't choose your yard. The ball just happened to go there."
"You mean that you threw the ball into your own back yard, quite a big yard at that, and missed?"
A hard done by look was all that Cecelia could manage. She was so over this. He might find the whole thing amusing but she didn't. As it was her father would probably dock her pocket money to cover the cost of the glass.
"I guess you can consider yourself lucky you're not Mikey," Sam told her. "I promised him a hiding if he was careless enough to break another window. I'd put you on the same warning but I doubt you'd be lucky enough to hit a window if you tried. Or the house," he added.
Cecelia gave him a nasty look. "Oh, yeah, I'd like to see you try, you fucking loser," she thought resentfully.
Sam's face resumed its angry look.
"I beg your pardon?" he said softly.
Cecelia blinked, shock stealing through her. She hadn't said that aloud, had she? From the look on Sam's face, she had.
Afterwards Sam was willing to concede that if the garden bench hadn't been right there next to him he would probably have contented himself with giving Cecelia a few more harsh words. As it was, he sat down, at the same time snagging hold of Cecelia's arm and jerking her across his knee.
With one swift motion Sam flipped Cecelia's dress up clear of her bottom and dropped two firm spanks upon that bottom. Oddly enough this was all it took to calm him down. Unfortunately, having Cecelia draped across his lap with her panties on display was also sufficient to bring his sense of humour to the fore.
"This is all wrong," he said dryly, giving Cecelia a feeling of deep relief. A short-lived feeling of relief, it turned out.
"If I'm going to spank you I should do it properly," he told her. "That means you won't need these."
With that he very calmly pulled Cecelia's panties down, while her eyes went wide with shock.
"What? You. I." All Cecelia could do was splutter, her face burning bright. He was looking at her bare bottom. Bare other parts, too. She hastily brought her hands around behind her, trying to cover herself up.
"Don't be silly," Sam reprimanded her, pushing her hands out of the way. "Now where were we?"
A couple more hard spanks landed on her bottom.
"You were careless and broke my window." A couple of more spanks. "You were rude to me instead of apologising." Spank. Spank. "Your language was not the sort of language I'd expect a nicely brought up young lady to use." Another couple of spanks.
Sam paused at this stage, his hand casually rubbing her bottom.
"Is there anything I've forgotten?" he asked, fingers idly massaging.