The Punishment

a spooky journey into places we only go in our minds.... :-) Could you? Would you?

By patty ©2003

The silence was deafening. That there was no one in the waiting area was both a relief and a disappointment. Sara didn’t really know how she would feel if she had company waiting for this particular appointment, but there were no distractions for her in the room, and that was unnerving. Even the embarrassment of company would be preferable to the nervous solitude she endured now.

“How much longer?” she asked her sock feet. They had no answer. The wall didn’t either. There was no clock, and she’d been stripped of her purse and watch when she was directed to the room, so even if she’d been given a span of time, she had no way to measure it. At least not a method she could use without devoting thought and effort. Concentration was beyond her capabilities for the moment. Anxiety and nervous energy prohibited it.

She lifted her bottom from the seat, and balanced her weight on her arms in an L-sit, holding her balance in the posture for the count of seventy at one point. She paced and counted the steps around the room, across the diagonal and along each side. She caressed the wallpaper examining the linen texture and the minute flaws in the seams.

Anxiety bubbled up in her chest at intervals, each time her awareness of the silence and the impossible wait became real.

“Where is he?” she whispered, half afraid she would get an answer. And again her obstinate socks gave her none.

He’d told her to focus and think. He said she should try to find the mindset. But she couldn’t. What was there to think about after all, she wondered. “That I’m scared shitless, or that I need my head examined?” What mindset was there for her to find after all? “A mind set that concludes this wait is worse than what I’m going to get?”

Anxiety bordering on panic bubbled again. Sara had to stand and pace again to release it. The door was locked! “Gawd! I can’t stand this!” she yelled and thumped the door with her fists.

There was no answer. Time and silence simply continued.

“What will it feel like?” she asked the carpet. When the plush pile didn’t answer, Sara stood and slipped her hands into her sweat pants down over her cool bottom. The spanking she had the night before was long gone from the flesh there. Her skin was soft. The only sensation other than the texture of feathery hairs and skin stroked by cool fingers was the tingle of fear and the tension of anticipation that ebbed and flowed between her legs.

What would her flesh feel like in a few hours? How would she feel after this was over? “Oh man! I can’t believe I’m doing this!”

But the real question, the one she was afraid of was “Do I really have a choice?”

She promised her husband she would honor his decision. She was to be severely and soundly punished. She’d pushed the line on purpose, and now she faced her own promise. She faced a test of trust: trust that her word meant anything, trust that she would be accountable for the flaunting and teasing of their bonds together, trust that her commitment to him and their vows was worthy of his.

A caning for punishment, a caning at the hands of a master, a test of submission by proxy, this is what she faced.

The argument had been fierce when Miles told her she had earned, and was going to get spanked with, the cane, but that he wasn’t ready yet to do it himself. Sara fought him, but in the end, she knew she’d reached the place where the rubber met the road when it came to her faith in her husband’s authority as her disciplinarian. She was after all, guilty of the crime. There was no going back. Could she accept his call? It had been her choice to go this far in the first place. It had been her choice to do the thing that put her where she wanted and needed a punishment more brutal than her heart could accept from the man she loved.

Miles would see the punishment later on video tape, but he would not be with her to encourage or help her submit. She would have to do it alone. The loneliness was part of it too.

Sara managed to become still and lost in her thoughts. All sense of time was long gone, but by the time the door opened, she felt that she had been still, thinking about her promises and goals, for close to an hour.

“In here,” the master directed. “Strip to your skin.”

The command was stern and cold.

Sara gasped and swallowed. She started to object.

“No talking,” he pre-empted her objection, turned and left her again.

Sara scanned the new room. It was stark and clinical. A short padded bench covered by a clean white sheet occupied the center of the room. There were leather cuffs mounted to the legs at ankle height, and two more extended up through holes in the sheet from the top end. A pillow rested between the cuffs at the top end, and a bolster rested in the middle. A low coffee type table displayed an array of spanking implements. Three straps, a longish thin paint stick type paddle, and six canes were laid out.

The whole scene made Sara start to tremble. She fought tears, and she wanted Miles.

“I don’t think I can do this!” she worried, squeezing her hands together along the front band of her sweat pants.

“Strip now, and move over to kneel on that mark by the table,” the master’s voice boomed into the room on speakers.

Sara startled and whimpered, but she complied. In a minute or so she was nude, and kneeling beside the table where she had little choice but to examine the tools that would soon be used to punish her. Goose flesh raised and prickled on her flesh. Her groin throbbed and the skin on her bottom buzzed.

After a few minutes, she closed her eye. Looking at the implements was raising her anxiety level back up to where it had been in the waiting room. Behind her eyelids, her mind began to chant.

“Please get this over with. Please. Please get this over with. Please.”

It became a mantra that occupied the next twenty minutes until the master returned.

“Stand up!” his voice startled her again, but this time she was grateful to hear it.

Sara obeyed.

“Over there,” he directed her to the end of the bench with gestures of his hands. When she was there, he moved to refine the position of her feet, and placed the bolster on the end in front of her hips.

Sara started to bend down over into the position she knew was expected.

“Stand until I tell you otherwise,” came the scolding command.

“I’m sorry,” she answered.

“You’re sorry?” he asked with what sounded like a sneer.

The cold impersonal atmosphere made Sara feel lonelier than she ever had before.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Good, that’s a start,” the man’s tone changed like a chameleon and became gentle. “Now, tell me what you are sorry about.”

Sara closed her eyes. What did he expect her confession or an explanation for her nervous movement a moment ago?

Over the next few moments the master helped her with the answer. He wanted both, and she gave them to him. The exchange slowly bled her of the powerful anxiety she felt. By the time his touch guided her torso down and her hips over the bolster, all that was left of the intense aversion Sara had been feeling, was moderate fear of the punishment to come, and resolution to accept it just as she promised she would.

Mild panic resurfaced when she felt the cuffs close around her ankles, but his voice soothed and reassured her.

“This will help you submit Sara. You won’t be distracted by worry that you can’t stay still. Taking your punishment and the pain will be secondary. You will take it, because you will have no choice, and it will be the worst you have ever endured.”

Somewhere in her mind she knew that the statement bordered on insane, “let me tie you up so you can’t do anything to protect yourself,” and yet she felt the truth of it. She was here to be punished more severely than she ever had been before. More severely than the man who loved her felt able to manage, as severely as her actions warranted, and as severely as she deserved to be punished. She knew she could not take that on her own, and she was grateful that she only had to give over to this means to help her have what she wanted. ...

The punishment that she needed.

He began with the straps, licking her hard with each until she writhed with the burning pain. In sets of ten, he strapped her for twenty minutes. Each of them delivered a unique brand of pain. Hundreds and hundred of spanks scorched Sara’s bottom and upper thighs. The technique of using breaks between sets and gradually building the severity of each stroke until the last of each set was like a brand, was both the only reason Sara was still with him in the ritual, and why she was desperate that it be over at the peak of each set.

When he put the straps down and left her, Sara sobbed quietly relieved to be alone. No longer lonely, but wanting Miles to sooth her.

She would never test his love for her again. She would never lie, or dishonor him again.

200 very hard paddle strokes was next. They were delivered in only a minute. There was no time to cope with them. All Sara could do was scream. When that was over, she cried and sobbed uncontrollably. The fury of it more than the pain, was overwhelming.

The master left her alone for an hour. In that time the throb of her bottom became her company. It took her inside herself, through the meaning of her submission to this kind of thing, and into the place in her soul where her need for it lived. The pain eased, and the lingering throb soothed. Sara was almost asleep when the master returned.

The cane was next. She would have thirty strokes, and she knew with the first that she would die before it ended.

The implement seared into her thighs with a white hot line of ice and then fire. Sara felt her skin implode with the impact and the pain tunneled and spread deep into her flesh and out across the surface. She had barely adapted when the next stroke laced into her.

Her body strained to escape, but there would be none.

Ten strokes completely covered her upper thighs with pulsing knotted welts. Sara was desperate, and yet still had the presence of mind to wonder how it was possible for her flesh to feel both thickened and hardened, and liquefied at the same time.

The next ten strokes began at the top of her bottom, and worked down. The pain was just as terrible. But now there was something else. Each impact pulsed through her groin. The imploding undulations of flesh massaged through to her labia. The caning was a brutal masturbation, and Sara felt herself succumbing to it.

At first she struggled and bucked to fight it, but when he directed the last ten strokes over the bottom half of her backside, she couldn’t. Orgasm took her with the twenty fifth stroke, and by the thirtieth she was completely spent.

Nothing remained of any emotion but resolution and peace. It was over. She was punished. Never again would she deserve something so awful. Never again would she need anything so complete.

Time continued, and Sara recovered. The master waited and watched. When she finally lifted her head to look back and ask with her eyes for release, he raised the cane and spoke.

"Now we will get started with your punishment," his expression was cool. The smirk she'd heard earlier in the tone of his voice was now painted on his face.

Panic returned. Now the real meaning of the bonds that held her where she was sunk in.

The next stroke of the cane seared into her soul, and she knew in that instant, that there was nothing she had ever known in her life before that would ever be the same again.