punished lucas

Chapter 6 Reflections

Lucas didn't want to go to bed hungry either, really, but no way did he plan on leaving the privacy of his room anytime soon.

The minute Dan exited his room he lay face-down in bed and hid his face from view, allowing his tears to fall unrestrained now that he was alone. With his butt throbbing the way it was, and his dad's threats still echoing in his head, he felt like a bad little boy and hated it, like he'd regressed ten years in the span of ten minutes.

It wasn't fair.

Every man's life was his own to live and Lucas Eugene Scott was very nearly a man in all the ways that counted. Okay, so maybe technically he wasn't eighteen yet ... and he hadn't graduated high school ... and he was still living under a parent's roof, but so what? Underage or not, he hadn't deserved punishment for taking calculated risks with his own life, and he definitely hadn't deserved an over-the-knee spanking, which was the most childish of all childish punishments. He hated his dad for giving him one and he was never, ever going to forgive him.

Or so he thought.

Slowly - very slowly - the resentment Lucas felt was supplanted by regret, and the regret by remorse, the turning point coming only when he swapped Dan's face for Keith's then reconsidered his father's actions accordingly. Given how much his uncle loved him, there was no doubt that Keith would have flipped out on him big-time once he learned that Lucas had been deliberately avoiding his heart medication. Sure, an actual spanking wasn't likely at his age ... but it also wasn't outside the realm of possibility either. Keith had definitely applied his hand to Luke's teeanged bottom more than once in the past, and each and every time he had, the reasons for it had involved safety. The last time had been a year ago and the time before that had occurred when Lucas was thirteen, but as the memory of those incidents came into sharper focus, and Lucas recognized the similarities between Keith's parenting style and that of his younger brother's, he knew he had to stop crying and feeling sorry for himself. What he needed to do instead was man up, go find his dad and apologize for his behavior like he would have to his uncle.

First though, he needed to wash his face, then go see Nathan and apologize to him too.

Lucas gave himself another few minutes to recover, then rolled out of bed with a hiss, wiped his eyes, and went down the hall to the bathroom. In there, he had specific plans to avoid his reflection, but curiosity won out after he had peed, and he couldn't help but study the blotchy face and puffy nose staring back at him, neither of which had looked this bad since Brooke's pregnancy scare in junior year.

If he'd been living here back then, would his dad have spanked him for that too?

Lucas shuddered to think. He lowered his pants to mid-thigh, then lifted his shirt and looked over his shoulder at the full-length mirror. What he saw pretty much reflected how he felt, but still Lucas wanted to crawl into a hole and die. His bottom cheeks were red and handprints were still visible along the outer edges, but worst of all was the ache that lingered, the intense soreness he could still feel under the skin plus the heat that radiated from it. Put together, it was all more than enough to remind him of the bad boy he had been, and it stressed how the sons of Dan Scott are punished ... if they are bad enough. With a face almost as scarlet as his behind, Lucas pulled up his pants, then washed his hands and face quickly, and left the bathroom.

As he walked over to Nathan's bedroom, however, his footsteps slowed. It struck him suddenly that Nathan must have heard his spanking in detail since he'd been right next door the whole time. He must have heard every slap and every yelp, and when Lucas had been sobbing afterwards under his pillow, who knows? Maybe Nathan heard that too.

Was it possible for a guy to die of embarrassment just from a six-minute spanking?

Lucas was starting to think so. Blushing harder than ever before, he procrastinated in the hallway outside Nathan's bedroom while he winced and rubbed his butt and wished that he just could leap-frog a month or two into the future when everything was back to normal. He couldn't though, and having to apologize while he still felt so self-conscious was obviously his just desserts for past transgressions. How he wished he could take back the way he'd reacted months ago when Nathan had confessed he'd received a belting from their dad! He definitely understood Nathan's pain and humiliation now, as well as the courage it had taken to admit something so shameful and private.

Why the hell had he teased and snickered at his brother for so long?

Cursing himself for being such an overconfident dickhead, Lucas took one last deep breath and forced himself to stop rubbing his behind. He knocked on the closed door before him, then entered without waiting for an invitation.