Time. One word, four letters, an enigma and a conundrum. Something that you either never contemplate or allow it to blow your mind trying. There are so many books on the subject telling you that you cannot do this or that, that you cannot travel in time. There are just too many controversial theories of time and space.

But not for Isabella. She understands it. She was born understanding it. It’s second nature to her, just like three-dimensional space is second nature to the likes of you and me.

Isabella can flow through time like it’s a river with no particular source and no known end.

She’s not alone either. There are many Isabellas throughout the world. They call themselves timekeepers, constantly on the move, analysing and keeping time in check. They make sure no one alters timelines to suit themselves. History must be preserved in this world in which all of us inhabit. It’s a full-time job.

Except Isabella is guilty of doing just that. The consequences of historical change are so minuscule that nobody else can detect them. But it happens.

She lives with her husband. She has two kids, but they have not inherited her special gift, and she shouldn’t have married a normal person like David McGowan. Throughout her teens and middle age, she was happy. Their life together was full of fun and happiness, but recently, with the children now grown up and living their own lives, her needs have changed, and she no longer looks at her husband with the same desire or longing.

There were other normal people in her life, such as Matthew Delaney, and yet she chose David to settle down with and have children, a life of relative normality, at a time in her life when she wasn’t flitting through time correcting it, tweaking it, making it fit the path of least resistance. There is a path of least resistance, but the likes of you and me can’t detect it.

If you change time too much or bend space too much, it will resist. It will stretch at the seams until it springs back into place or, in the worst-case scenario, snap in half.

Isabella knows this only too well. She has spent her life welding back the cracks. Often travelling in time to mend each seam, stitching time back together so that every moment follows on from the previous one. The one big NO, that is drummed into every timekeeper at an early age, by the organisation she belongs to, is that you never alter your own timeline. That can have disastrous effects, and meeting yourself in the past would result in future turmoil. Time would surely be twisted and bitter if that happened.

The trouble is that there came a time when Mathew Delaney was occupying her mind a little too much. There were too many times when she wondered – what if? The filthy kinks in her mind were vying for attention, pushing all normal sexual thoughts aside to make room for them. She had approached her husband to see whether he would fill her void, but she was rewarded with a resounding no. They didn’t interest him. It was such a shame, she thought.

She analysed the sequence of events over and over in her mind. One small change, just to see how Mathew Delaney would have behaved on that night, five years ago, when he phoned her and she couldn’t meet with him.

He was visiting the city and called her to see if she would accompany him for an evening meal at Harriet’s Rooftop restaurant in Toronto, and a bit of hanky-panky, as he put it. She remembered the feeling that his question sparked in her, and she became flustered and uncertain. It put her in turmoil. She wanted to meet with him, and yet the gravitational pull of her family commitments was just too much. He was a special man, the only man she had confided some of her strangest sexual desires to, even before she had kids. And yet her kinks were only strange to Isabella; most other people wouldn’t have batted an eyelid, except her husband, who had shunned her when she mentioned them to him.

Mathew just chose the wrong night. Isabella had already promised an evening out with her family. But if he had only phoned the week before, giving her the heads-up, everything could have been so different. And if that were just one moment’s difference, there wouldn’t be any future impact – would there?

Going back in time to change events would be like waving a red flag to the organisation she belonged to, and she wouldn’t dream of doing that because she loved her kids, her husband and all the friends they had made together. She loved her life. There was just one thing missing from it. The only option she could see that would work was to intercept her timeline in the past, take it over as her own, thereby creating a spatial loop where two of the same persons exist at the same time. One would be visiting Mathew Delaney, and the other, going out with her family. It would cause an anomaly in the spatial dimensions, leading to nowhere in time. It was risky business.

And yet, how could changing one moment of time hurt anyone? Especially if the timeline of that moment and her current present never intersected. Could she be sure of that? Isabella reasoned that if she got away with it, she would have an extra memory of that night, an additional experience which she would have had, had she agreed to meet Mathew anyway.

She was pondering these very thoughts when…

~~~~~

Isabella stepped back in time five years. She entered Mathew’s workplace a few hours before he was about to travel. Placed an entry in his diary telling him to phone Isabella, at a time and day that was precisely one week before he would think of phoning her. Her other self would be otherwise engaged at that time, leaving her to take the call and arrange to meet him. Her other self wouldn’t be affected in the slightest.

The plan had worked.

She was present in the house to pick up the call. It was brief. She had told him she would be there and meet him. The real Isabella continued with her own timeline, and on the same night, one week later, one Isabella visited a restaurant with her family, and the other went to Harriet’s Rooftop.

Isabella’s smile broadened into a sexy grin when she met Mathew. The meal was gorgeous, and they chatted like old friends. Sexual innuendoes set the tone of their conversation from the start until the time they left the main restaurant and headed up a few steps to a rooftop terrace that hid them from the main eating area.

Isabella headed for the glass balcony, looking over her shoulder to establish that Mathew was following closely behind. For a brief moment, she let the memory of her other self invade her thoughts, but pushed them away as soon as Mathew’s hand rested on her bottom.

The city lights twinkling through the cold air made her shiver. She felt the hot spot of his hand on her buttocks and smiled inwardly.

“No one can see us up here,” Mathew said.

Isabella bit her lower lip and pushed her backside towards his hand. Scenes and scenarios raced through her mind, each one taking precedence until the next one came along to replace it. It was a never-ending stream of filth. The feeling of his fingers caressing the back of her thigh, beneath her short skirt, made her clutch the railings tighter. There it was. In her mind, she had focused on the one, no two, of the filthiest moments that she wanted to experience. All she had to do was guide Mathew in the right direction and let him take it from there. She was sure he was the right person for the job.

The feeling of his finger sinking into her cunt made her nod her head in appreciation. He wasn’t slow on the uptake, and she clenched her muscles to let him know he had made the right move.

She desperately wanted to turn around, sink to her knees and release the monster he had hidden in his trousers, but she was relishing the feeling of his fingers stroking her inner depths and exposing her sex to the night air.

Secretly, she loved how quickly her depravity developed. Pushing her bottom back to meet his thrusts allowed Mathew to hold his fingers still and let her do the fucking. A string of expletives left her mouth to float away on the breeze.

Some call it telepathy, but Isabella was anything but telepathic, and yet, she yelped in surprise when his fingers were removed, suddenly allowing his hand to slap her ass hard, nearly pushing her over the bannister, stopped only by his other hand on her shoulder.

She felt the full-on strike of his hand. It wasn’t a pat or a smack. It didn’t tickle or sting or make her buttocks wobble. It was the full swing of his hand, the full force. She felt her bottom give way completely, so much so that even her love handles shook with the force. The sound alone would have alerted the authorities if they were listening. The red handprint appeared instantaneously.

“You like that?” He asked.

“Fuck! Yes,” she replied.

Mathew didn’t need to be told twice. He stroked her bottom. It looked like he was trying to smear the pulsating red spot over the rest of her buttocks, but all he was doing was contemplating. How hard? Which one? How many times?

The thought made him smile. His excitement reached a fever pitch. It never failed to amaze him how many women liked to be spanked. The first smack of Isabella’s ass was hard, and he half expected her to yelp, turn around and slap his face.

When she slipped forward over the railings and absorbed the sheer force of it, and then to turn her head to tell him she liked it was on another level.

He checked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was creeping up on them. Raising her skirt and tucking it into her panty line allowed him the full pleasure of her bare bottom, with only the string left to disappear down her crack.

He stroked her bottom. First one cheek, then the other. Isabella waited and waited and waited. Every time his hand came away from her body, she tensed, prepared herself mentally, ready for impact, only to find he stroked her bottom again.

The cat and mouse game went on for a while.

Mathew leaned in closer, “How much do you want this?” he asked.

Isabella was breathing erratically. Her lips quivered uncontrollably. She was shaking with desire and expectation. Turning her head, she looked into his eyes.  “Do it hard and fast.”

“Hard and fast – what?” he asked.

“Please,” she replied.

“Please – what?”

Isabella blinked, closed her eyes and slowed her breathing to almost nothing.

“Please, Master,” she said, knowing full well that she was giving herself to him, unreservedly.

His hand was raised high, and his mental state convinced him that this woman wanted nothing more than to be spanked hard. No, not wanted, more like desired, needed, was desperate for.

His nostrils flared at the thought, his head shook from side to side.  Deep down, he couldn’t believe his luck. Isabella Ryan, of all people, wanted her ass spanked.

His hand came down hard. Not once, not twice, but several times. Isabella muffled the sound with her arm at first, but as the strikes hit one after the other, she was forced to separate them and hold the railings firmly. She had no option but to cry out. At least both buttocks got the same attention, and the same red stain slowly crept over them.

Mathew stopped suddenly. His hand was shaking with excitement, but the sounds of crying slowly registered. He wanted to caress Isabella’s bottom, but in the heat of the moment, he simply unzipped his trousers, removed his rock-hard cock, lined it up with her soaking snatch and fucked it into her.

The gulps of air that Isabella was taking in suddenly got extruded. His cock was big, huge in fact, and to plunder her pussy in one go was a testament to her level of excitement. She couldn’t have resisted the verbal moan if she wanted to.

“Fuck my ass,” she whispered. Wishing him rather than telling him.

Mathew kept pushing his cock in and out of her juicy, tight slit and loving every moment, vaguely aware that something was uttered at the other end.

“Fuck my ass,” she repeated. A little louder this time.

Mathew leaned forward, “You want it harder? Is that what you want?” he asked.

“Isabella turned her head towards him.

“Fuck, my fucking, ass.” She commanded.

Mathew straightened up, his mind swirling in disbelief that Isabella had shouted at him and with a request that he wouldn’t have expected on a first date. And yet, this woman was everything he had ever wanted or could expect. He pulled out of her cunt and immediately pushed into her anus. His cock slipped in, and he buried it to the sounds of moaning, overcoming the resistance of her backside pushing back to meet him.

It’s rare when you find the woman of your dreams. And here she was, ass bright red with handprints, a sizeable cock pounding her tightest opening and sporting a mind that was instructing him on how to take her in the filthiest way. What more could any man want?

While pushing into her, he squeezed her bottom.

“This good enough for you?” he asked as he bottomed out in her depths.

There was no reply, not from Isabella anyway.

There was a coughing sound to their left when some other person had inadvertently stumbled upon their tryst. Mathew pulled out, standing to Isabella’s left with his back to the direction of the sound, hiding Isabella’s body in the process. He stood upright, looked away from the intruder and stuffed his cock back into his trousers, which allowed Isabella time to raise herself, flatten her skirt, only to find it sucked up all her juices that were running down her thighs into the soft absorbent fabric.

“We’d better go,” said Mathew.

“You’re place?” Isabella asked, knowing full well that she hadn't had enough of his cock in her ass.

Mathew nodded. They left the restaurant and caught a taxi to his apartment on Parkside Drive adjacent to High Park.

They had only just closed the door when Isabella stripped naked and made a beeline for the sofa. She placed her hands over it and waited for Mathew to catch up. She giggled when she saw his cock bounce ahead of him.

“My ass, now!” She declared. She hadn’t banked on the six of the best.

“The red marks were fading,” he said.

The fuck was just as furious as the one on the rooftop bar. It was an all-nighter, allowing Mathew to plunder her pussy as well as her ass. It was simply the best night ever, for both of them, and while he never got to taste her snatch that night, he was sure that there would be plenty of time to do so in the coming days.

In the morning, Isabella left a note for Mathew on her side of the bed and jumped in time to her present day. The contents didn’t convey the most thoughtful of sentiments, and she was hard pushed as to how to let him down. Telling him she was a time-travelling double of the woman he had the hots for was somewhat unrealistic. But she had to be harsh so that he wouldn’t contact the real Isabella.

~~~~~

It had only been a few moments when Isabella awoke with her husband next to her. A certain heat emanated from her body, like she had just masturbated for the last thirty minutes and hadn’t achieved an orgasm. The memories of that moment with Mathew invaded her soul and had changed her. The memories modified how she behaved and how she wanted to continue with her relationship. She hadn’t factored any of this into the analysis at the beginning. In fact, she never once thought about how this would affect her in the slightest. She only ever thought of the sexual feelings that she craved so much. It was as if she missed that particular sexual act with a vengeance.

Her mind was racing as she showered. She could still feel his hand marks on her bottom, even though it had happened five years previously. She wanted him again. She wanted him to take her in the shower, right now, caressing her, pulling her ass cheeks apart, pushing his fingers into her. Fucking with her mind. Telling her how beautiful she was one moment and spanking her ass so hard the next, it sent shivers up her spine to think she craved those things. She wanted his cock in her ass one more time.

By the time she left the shower, she missed him so much. Craved him like it was yesterday. Became sorrowful that she hadn’t taken the opportunity when it arose all those years before.

As soon as she sat down at the computer, she knew what the search engine would be looking for: a person, a name, a lifestyle, a telephone number, and an address.

She was horrified to find an obituary.

She immediately started searching the timelines, dipping back in time to various places to glean information from the moment she left Mathew Delaney with that note. Isabella collated and read the facts with dread.

Summer 2021: He read Isabella’s note with a heavy heart and didn’t try and contact her. It was a one-night stand, and he fully understood that her family came first.  However, his one night with Isabella affected the rest of his life.
August 2023: Lost his job and split from his wife after only one year of marriage. The two children they would have had in the next two years would not be born.
March 2024: Died in a car crash from drink driving.

Isabella could already feel the historical changes taking effect. Every ripple in time affected her in this way. The rollback of several timelines from people who once existed but now don’t. The death of several people that would have been prevented had Mathew been alive. The undoing of friendships that once existed, the fall of businesses that would have benefited from Mathew’s existence, and even the emergence of unsavoury politicians that he had prevented from coming to power. She felt every ripple, every cold thread of time un-weaving itself; history was breaking apart, disintegrating. The feeling crept over her body like a cold shiver that she was unable to shrug off.

She closed her eyes as a certified dread filled her soul. Any moment now, she thought.

Then there was a knock on her door.