RANSVESTIA

"I can't. I just can't," I sobbed.

"You can and will," he assured me.

And shortly I did, sobbing all the way. Not daring to face anyone, put them by the door, rang the bell, and ran.

The return trip was no less tearful. What my punishment would be, I couldn't imagine, but something dreadful awaited me, a thrashing perhaps, or something worse. Police? Jail? The worst a fourteen year- old could imagine.

"Your mother is waiting for you in the kitchen," my father said, adding by the brief delay to the awfulness of the punishment to come.

My mother was sitting at the table, a pile of rags in front of her.

"Take off your clothes," my father ordered.

"No," I objected.

He started toward me, but my mother rose to stop him.

"He will, Arthur. Give him time. Do as your father says, Lynn."

Reluctantly, I stripped down to my shorts. My father made a move to finish the job, but Mother rose again to intercede, and I took off the shorts.

"You are terribly scratched," she said, wiping me with a moistened towel. "I should put something on them."

My father whipped a rag off the pile and thrust it at me.

"Put 'em on," he ordered.

What had seemed to be a rag was an old pair of my mother's panties, stretched and grey. I tried to put them on as ordered, but the elastic in them was so stretched that they fell right off.

"You'll have to pin them," my mother said searching her pockets. "Here."

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