Chapter 25: Ruthie's Birthday Wish

That night, after her classes were finished and she had eaten dinner with Mike, Ruthie accompanied him to his room and allowed him to make love to her. She surprised him by getting on her elbows and knees, spreading her legs and lewdly exposing herself. Before he entered her, he took a couple of pictures. She closed her eyes and fantasized about being spanked and photographed during one of her art class modeling sessions ... yes ... getting with the belt right in front of all those students who drew her every day. She actually did respond to Mike ... a little ... which was not common for her at all.

Once he was asleep, Ruthie took out two picture cards that fit into her mother's digital camera and placed them next to her computer. One of the cards had been filled to capacity for a couple of years and was kept locked up in a jewelry box with Ruthie's passport, ID cards, and her one credit card. The second card was still in the camera, but it was almost full. She inserted the older card and started going through the images she had taken of herself during the first three years she had been in high school. The oldest pictures on the card were ones of her with her cousins and a few of her that her mother had taken the year after she had moved to Salinas. But then, starting from the middle of her freshman year; began a vast collection of pictures she had taken of herself. All of the images on the card from that point forward were nude self-portraits.

Ruthie already had been running around her apartment in the nude for nearly a year and was used to staring at herself in the mirror when she started to take pictures of herself. A few days before she started, she had seen Rosa using a delayed focus to take a group shot with some friends. The camera in Ruthie's apartment also had a delayed focus and, remembering how Rosa used the function to include herself in a group shot; Ruthie wondered if she could use the delayed focus to take a self-portrait. For several weeks she had been curious to see what she would look like photographed in the nude. During her daily morning "me time" she experimented with the focus and finally learned how to time her movement so she could set the camera and move in front of it before the flash went off. The first several pictures came out blurry, but then she got a very clear one of herself sitting on her bed. For a long time she admired that first picture, a casual pose of herself naked and looking into the camera. That image and pose were the first of many she would take of herself in the nude over the next four years. She experimented with positions and lighting, keeping the pictures she liked and getting rid of the ones she didn't. Over time her collection grew and her ability to take self-portraits improved.

The contents of that picture card and its successor were her most prized possession, and yet they were a possession that up until that afternoon had been a total secret from the entire world. She had conflicting feelings about the collection of images, because she was proud of them and wanted to show them to someone, but at the same time she was desperately afraid of them getting out. Now she did have a person to safely show them to and they would remain a secret, because Hartman was sworn to maintain patient confidentiality. Whatever the counselor thought of the pictures, she would have to keep quiet because of the rules of her profession. For Ruthie that restriction was perfect.

Ruthie had never made any back-up copies of her photo collection. It was one thing out of many in her life that she had procrastinated. She had bought two thumb drives, one for her entire collection and the other to copy just the pictures she was planning to show to her counselor. When she counted the number of pictures stored on the two cards she was surprised, because she counted over 900 images altogether, of which nearly 800 were "naughty" pictures. That was just her high school collection. Mike had several hundred more recently taken pictures stored in his camera. Figuring that night was as good a time as any, she quietly took Mike's card out of his camera and added his pictures to the collection stored on the thumb-drive. Adding Mike's pictures raised the total to 1500 files, almost all of which were images of Ruthie's exposed body. Just the thought of having posed for so many pictures aroused her.

Within the collection there were about 200 images she had taken during the months she was experimenting with self-spanking. Most of those 200 photos were taken during or after her sessions with the bath brush, displaying her bare bottom in various shades of red. The remaining self-portraits were taken while she was holding the bath brush in her hand and masturbating. She spent a long time looking at those images on her computer screen. They had been taken nearly four years before, but Ruthie still found them very erotic. She really did look sexy posing with her red butt for the camera. The very last picture of that batch had been taken right after she had giving herself that really severe spanking that left her bottom swollen and covered with welts, just a few hours before her gym teacher saw her in the nurse's office. Following that last spanking picture there was a four-month gap in the images because she had been too scared to take any more, but she could not bring herself to deleting the ones she already had taken. Starting on her 16th birthday the pictures started up again, but from that point forward the images were just nudes.

As she looked through the spanking images, she thought about sorting out which ones were the best, but decided that it would be better to let Dr. Hartman know the full story of how obsessed she was about inflicting punishment on herself and documenting the results.

During her next appointment Ruthie handed a thumb drive to her counselor. She was extremely nervous as she stood next to Hartman's desk. She felt as though she had gone into Hartman's office, taken off her clothes, and was standing naked next to her counselor. In a way she was indeed standing naked next to her counselor, because the pictures graphically exposed her and left absolutely nothing to the imagination.

Hartman looked though about half of the images in silence. She then pulled the thumb drive and handed it back to her patient. She was calm, so Ruthie had no idea what effect, if any seeing those pictures had on her.

"A question. How old were you when you were posing for those pictures?"

"For the ones you saw, 15. I was 15 years old."

"I suppose I'm not going to be able to talk you into getting rid of them."

"Why?"

"You need to understand that what's on that thumb-drive is about as illegal as you can get. People go to jail for years for having stuff like that on their computers."

"Are you gonna report me?"

"No. That's not my job. And I'm not passing judgment on what you were doing, nor am I passing judgment on the fact you like photographing yourself. I'm simply warning you those images will get you in a lot of legal trouble if they ever get out."

Ruthie was annoyed that was her counselor's only reaction to the contents of her thumb drive. She had been hoping Dr. Hartman would be scandalized, or better yet, perhaps aroused. Instead she looked at them dispassionately and the only comment about them that she had was that they were illegal. Yes, Ruthie already knew that. She wasn't sure how to proceed. Hartman broke the silence.

"So ... this is what you were doing right after you had that disappointment with Mrs. Peters?"

"I guess it wasn't right after ... maybe I started a couple of weeks later."

Ruthie then told the story from beginning to end, starting with how everything started when she overheard a conversation not meant for her ears. Hartman pointed out that what the conversation did was give her the idea of using the bath brush for something she had been wanting to do anyway. The two women spent several minutes trying to unravel Ruthie's mix of religious guilt and burning sexuality. Hartman pointed out that Ruthie needed an outlet for both her guilt and her sexual frustrations and it was her bruised bottom that paid the price.

Hartman pointed out that Ruthie was extremely lucky that her gym teacher did not report the "abuse", because under state law she was supposed to do so. Hartman could imagine how scary that must have been for her client, wondering if her "secret" would be exposed. Given the religion that was being pushed on her at the time, it was easy to picture how Ruthie must have been on a guilt trip for months afterwards for nearly having gotten her mother in trouble, which was indeed true.

"I'm wondering if that scare that you had was sort of a watershed event in your life. I'm wondering that because it seems you got a lot more into serious reading and adult topics after you turned 16."

"I 'spose maybe that's true, Dr. Hartman.

"And you never got back into punishing yourself?"

Ruthie shook her head.

"Is that something you'd ever think about doing?"

"I'd love it. But it would have to be just right, and I don't see how I'd ever find anyone who could do it 'just right'. I mean ... people are into all kinds of weird shit ... blood, black clothing, high heels, tattoos, punching holes in their skin, pissing in their faces ... and I wouldn't want to do any of that, or even look at it. I'd just want it to be simple ... I take off my dress, get my ass spanked, cry a bit, and get held. I don't want to have to deal with any of the weird shit."

"Have you brought this up with Mike?"

Ruthie shook her head.

"No. I couldn't picture doing anything like that with him."

"Why's that?"

Ruthie thought for a minute. Why couldn't she picture doing anything like that with him? Was it her dislike of sex? Was it that she didn't want to risk messing up the relationship? Was it that she still was holding on to her fantasy with Mrs. Peters? Was it that she didn't trust him? Or maybe she didn't trust herself?

"I don't know. I never thought about it."

"Well, I think you should consider talking to Mike about your fantasies. I'm not saying actually do anything, but it might help your relationship if you get to know a bit more about that part of each other. I'm going to guess you never asked him about his fantasies either."

Ruthie shook her head.

"I'd hope your relationship would be about sharing. You two are leaving out a lot if you're not talking about your turn-on's."

Hartman proceeded to help Ruthie put her episodes of self-spanking into perspective, and in doing so helped her client resolve some of the guilt she felt over what she did to herself when she was 15. Hartman surprised the student by telling her that she was by no means the first client who admitted to inflicting self-punishment for sexual pleasure. "It's a lot more common that you realize. And you think that the others who've come into my office don't have the same worries about it that you do?" Hartman also pointed out that a lot of religious sects, ranging from the Catholic Church to radical Muslims, encouraged their members to inflict self-punishment.

By the time she left Hartman's office, Ruthie felt a lot more confident about herself, that maybe she really wasn't as much of a freak with her sexual fantasies as she had thought. Because of what she had learned in that session, she decided that she would indeed share some of her fantasies with Mike. She also fully intended to share her collection of photographs with him, perhaps as a birthday present. That was the one piece of Hartman's advice she would never follow: there was no way she'd consider deleting the pictures she had taken of herself throughout high school. They documented an important part of her life, they were irreplaceable, and they meant too much to her.

Ruthie's 19th birthday was just a few days after she shared her "secret" with Dr. Hartman, at the end of March. She had never bothered to tell Mike about her birthday because stuff like that had no meaning for her. However, he knew the date because it was on both her California state ID and her student ID and there were plenty of times she had left her ID's on the spare desk in his room.

Mike was not romantic, nor was he the sort who would risk wasting his money on something Ruthie wouldn't like. She would never have to worry about him buying her lingerie or any other gifts that men typically buy for their wives or girlfriends that make them roll their eyes. He was not going to try to guess what she wanted. He simply asked.