The Joy of Contrition

by Ashley Zacharias

These were the moments that Caroline loved best. The minute or two of keen anticipation that passed between when the final knot in the ropes made her decision irrevocable and her suffering began. She dreaded the pain that was coming but she no longer had any choice but to accept it. She was committed to suffer.

Her senses were never keener. She was aware of everything. She never felt more alive.

Her entire body quivered with tension. Slow, heavy waves seethed through her gut. Every breath was deep and loud in her ear.

A cane.

How could she have dared to ask to be caned?

Spankings were fun. Mario’s hand was soft. Playful. Floggings were roughly sensual. The leather flogger was a toy that sang of sex when it slithered and slapped. The wooden paddle could bruise her ass but its bark was worse than it’s bite.

A rattan cane was another matter entirely.

When the UPS truck had delivered it on Tuesday, she had taken it from its box and put it on the coffee table. For the past five days, it had laid there, its slim form promising a dark time. Every evening, she had sat on the couch with the cane resting in front of her while she read, prepared lectures, and marked assignments. Every time she had looked up from her work, she was reminded anew that fearsome punishment was coming on Sunday. Seeing it made her heart pound loud in her breast and her ass twitch and ache in anticipation.

Night after night, gazing on the long, slim rod, she had imagined feeling each cut driving deep into the big muscles of her ass. The damage would be severe. The pain, agonizing.

A cane had no purpose but to punish. The sole function of each cut was to make the transgressor regret her transgression sincerely and deeply. At the end of the punishment, she would be left in agony, ruing her sin and vowing to never sin again.

Caroline had not had a productive week.

Now, naked, tied bent over the end of the dining room table, her heart pounded harder than ever as she reveled in the dread of her imminent suffering.

“Are you ready?” Rory asked.

Caroline’s ass twitched involuntarily in expectation of the first cut. She grabbed the ropes that stretched her wrists toward the distant corners of the table and replied, “Give me six of your best.”

Rory wondered if he could do it.

He loved to dominate his woman. He was thrilled when she bowed her head before him and told him that she would do whatever he asked. What man could fail to be excited by that offer? When, on his command, she sank to her knees to minister to him with her mouth, he grew as hard as granite. He knew that she hated to take his cock in her mouth, hated the taste of him on her tongue, hated gagging when he pushed against the back of her mouth. And, when he finished, he insisted that she swallow what he pulsed into her. She hated that the most of all. Her distaste for every aspect of the act made the experience all the more enjoyable for him. It was not because he wanted her to be miserable for misery’s sake, but because her willingness to endure so much for the sake of his pleasure proved that she loved him deeply.

When he spanked her, he loved watching her bend before him in utter submission, offering her ass to his abuse. He loved feel of her flesh under his hand. Loved the twitching and squealing. Loved the blush of her nether cheeks as her ass reddened.

The flogging and paddling were less sensual than spanking by hand, but offered their own rewards. Teary eyes were beautiful eyes. Especially because she invariably sobbed promises of pleasures to come between her pleas for mercy.

The cane, though, was a different matter entirely.

Six cuts of the cane would be torture, pure and simple. Six of the best. She had been clear and blunt in her instructions. He was to hold nothing back. Every stripe should be laid on her ass with his full strength.

She would have no safeword. She had told him that he should interpret every word she said as a request to proceed. “No,” would mean, “Yes.” “Stop,” would mean, “More.” “Mercy,” would mean, “Harder.” “Please,” would mean, “Thank you.”

If he did not deliver a full and complete measure of the most severe punishment he could, she swore that she would never forgive him.

She told him that the merciless administration of the cane would prove to her that he was a man worthy of her admiration.

She told him to make the cane whistle as it cut toward her ass.

Whistle.

He wondered if he could do it.

Her ass was beautiful. Round. Pale pink. Unblemished.

He loved her ass. He could stare at it all day. Now, looking at her tied, bent, waiting for him, he wanted to throw the cane away, drop his jeans to the floor, and penetrate the dark pink lips that peeked between the topmost reaches of her thighs. He wanted to make sweet, languorous love to his woman while she was tied in this most submissive position.

He wanted to dominate her. He did not want to brutalize her.

He stepped to the side of the table where she could see him and slowly unbuttoned his shirt. The man wielding the cane should strip to the waist so that his arm would not be impeded in any way. He could see his woman’s eye drawn to his right arm, appraising the bulge of his bicep and the articulation of the myriad of muscles in his thick forearm.

He was a strong man.

She watched him pick the cane from the table where it was laying beside her head. He swished it though the air to limber his wrist and get a feel for the implement.

It whistled only when he swung it with unrestrained force.

She watched him with wide, round eyes.

When he walked back behind her and took his position, she flinched and grabbed her ropes more tightly.

He told himself not to worry. A few years ago, he had thought that he wanted to be a paramedic and had completed a number of courses in first aid and emergency medicine at the community college. If something went wrong, he knew how to administer first aid to her while he waited for a response to a nine-one-one call.

He had no reason to hold back.

He raised the cane high, paused to take careful aim and brought it down with his full strength.

Its whistle was punctuated by the snap of the rattan across her flesh.

Caroline’s scream echoed through the house. The pain was instant and intense. Severe.

She squirmed in her bonds, trying to escape the pain. She felt her ass jerking and writhing.

Her calf muscles bunched as she rose to her toes. Her feet, bound together at the ankles, danced to the tune of her pain.

Arrows of hurt shot from her great lower muscles through her torso, stealing her breath. She had to gasp great gulps of air between her screams.

The great anticipation was over. Now she knew the agony that a stroke of the cane could produce. All that was left was the lesser anticipation of the second stroke that would double the pain.

Now that her suffering had begun, she hated everything about it. She hated that she had begged for this. She hated that she was submitting to it. She hated that she had no choice but to endure another five cuts.

Hating it was right. She wasn’t supposed to like to be punished. She was supposed to hate it and, thereby, regret her sin.

She had done wrong and she deserved nothing less than the most severe discipline.

She deserved five more strokes. She needed five more.

The initial sting slowly subsided into an ache. Her screams faded to whimpers.

“Thank you,” she said. Her voice sounded low and rough in her own ears.

Rory watched the stripe develop on her skin, turning from white to pink to red as the blood returned to flood into the damaged flesh below the skin. A welt was rising. That had to hurt like hell.

He was in no hurry. He would give her ample time to experience every nuance of each cut. Time to appreciate the subtle differences between the sting that was produced by the initial damage to flesh and nerves and the ache caused by the pressure of the blood as it seeped from a myriad of tiny broken capillaries to fill the spaces between the cells.

She had thanked him for inflicting that stroke on her ass. Did she really enjoy suffering? Was she wired to feel torture as a sexual sensation? He wished that he could get into her head and feel what she was feeling right now.

Or maybe not.

He had listened carefully to her screams. They were not screams of pleasure. Her brain was not so mis-wired that the cane was giving her an orgasm. She had been screaming in agony and now she was whimpering in pain. He could not doubt that she was hurting.

He was no masochist. He did not want to feel any unnecessary pain on his own body. He would certainly not seek it out as she had. He couldn’t even imagine directing another person to hit him as hard as they could. He could never tell them to ignore any pleas for mercy. Caroline had commanded him to bind her and then beat her six times with all his strength no matter how she screamed, disregarding anything that she said. Rory would never be able to force such words past his own lips.

Did that make her braver than him?

It didn’t matter. He was happy to do as she asked. She would survive the beating and she would respect him for being strong enough to give her what she wanted and they would both get what they wanted.

“Prepare for the second stroke,” he said.

When she gripped the ropes, the muscles in her arms were corded from the effort.

He raised the cane high and made it whistle again on the downstroke.

Caroline screams redoubled as her pain was redoubled.

Her entire body contracted. Her legs pulled back and her torso pulled up, desperately fighting against the ropes as she tried to reduce the tension through her buttocks.

It did no good. She was bound too tightly to straighten her hips more than a fraction. Her struggle only pulled the ropes at her wrists and ankles tighter.

Through a red haze of agony, she wondered if she could survive another four strokes.

That was a nonsensical thought. She would survive because she had no choice. She was powerless to stop Rory. Her instructions had been clear. She had decided to suffer the punishment that she had earned and she had put herself in this position where the punishment would be delivered no matter how desperately she wanted it to stop.

Her sin had been severe so her punishment had to be equally severe.

What would her students think of her now? What would they say if they could see their professor, nude, tied over her own dining room table, her ass raised high in the air, striped by two thick red welts, waiting for another four to be delivered?

Had they ever, in their idle moments when their thoughts drifted from her lecture, engaged in kinky fantasies about her? She was older than them, but still young enough to be sexy. And she was pretty. Maybe even beautiful to some eyes. Had they ever imagined seeing her nude? Spanking her?

If they did see her like this, would they understand that she was giving them the justice that they deserved? That she was making herself suffer in order to be fair to them?

What about one student in particular? What about Kyle Wolfe? Would he be disgusted to see her like this? Or would he be turned on? Or would he be both disgusted and aroused at the same time?

Like she had been a week ago when she had told him to close her office door and lock it.

“Again, please,” she said. Her voice was weak. She had to force the words out.

She gripped her ropes with all her strength.

Again.

Rory looked at the two red weals that blazed across her pink skin. He had done that to her. He had put those two stripes there. He had forced those screams from her throat.

He felt powerful.

His earlier reservations were barely a memory. She had proven that she could take what he could deliver. She wanted to take it. She wanted to feel his masculine strength imprinted on her flesh. She wanted him to prove that he was a real man.

He felt like a real man.

He flexed his shoulder and assessed her ass.

He had struck her as hard as he could. But he had more. He took a deep breath and reached down into himself to draw on his reserve. Somewhere in his core, he had strength that he had not yet brought to the surface.

He knew that he could do better this time.

He raised the cane. This was what she wanted. She had asked for this. She was offering herself to him with love and he would return that love by driving the cane into her with all force that he could muster.

A third time the rattan whistled through the air. A third time it snapped into her flesh.

A third time she screamed in agony.

The pain was unbearable.

Surely she must be bleeding. Surely she must be irreparably damaged. Surely she would be scarred for the rest of her life.

This was exactly what she deserved.

Every professor knew that there were lines that could not be crossed. Taboos that should never be violated. Ethical rules so clear and strict that they barely need be mentioned.

But they were mentioned. They were laid out explicitly in the university regulations.

A professor is in a position of authority. Her power over her students is implicit and irrevocable. No professor should ever engage in any sexual act with any student.

Any violation of the rule should be punished. Severely.

A willful voilation deserved no mercy.

She remembered the feel of Kyle’s cock in her hand. Thick and hard and hot. Wonderful.

Her hand was not sufficient. She had to have that wonderful manhood in her mouth. Had to. His perfection held her in thrall. She had no choice but to sink to her knees and start kissing that soft, smooth, ever-so-sensitive skin with her ever-so-sensitive lips.

Then, to part her teeth wide and take him into her wet, eager mouth.

The memory of his taste lived there still. It was a flavor like no other. It was the flavor of youth.

When he had thrust deep into her throat, she had taken as much of him as she could. She knew how to give great head. If she concentrated, she knew that she could swallow the greater part of any man. He deserved her concentration. She had taken almost all of him into her throat.

It took but a minute before he filled her mouth with another flavor. She had backed away to ensure that the salty, musky taste of his seed spilled across her tongue where she could appreciate it like a connoisseur savoring a fine vintage. A vintage, not of age but of youth.

Letting it spill it down her throat would have been a waste of a precious gift.

Kyle had been so appreciative. When she had looked up at him, he had looked down at her with great happy-puppy eyes and told her that she was wonderful.

She had told him that he deserved all the pleasure that she could give.

As soon as he had left the office, she had stopped suppressing her guilt and had let it wash over her in a great swell. She had done a terrible thing by giving a student great pleasure and deserved a punishment that was proportionally severe. Before she had left the office that afternoon, she had gone online and ordered the cane. Thirty-three inches long and five-sixteenths in diameter. She ordered one with a schoolmaster crook so that Rory would have no doubt that its purpose was punishment. She had earned as much pain as he could administer.

“I’m ready,” she told him in a tremulous voice, the words more a modulation of her whimpers than a separate enunciation.

Rory looked at the three welts and wondered if he could lay the fourth stripe between them. He decided instead to aim low, just above the crease at the top of her legs.

Her ass had begun to dance an involuntary jitterbug, shaking and twitching of its own accord. To him, it looked like that part of Caroline’s flesh was trying to shake itself free of the bone and tendon that held it in place so that it could shuffle away and hide.

He was entranced.

He reached down and laid his hand against her buttock so that he could feel the violence of her spasms.

She was giving him a precious gift of her suffering. He wanted to give her something in return. Some precious token of his love for her. Tomorrow he would take her to a jewelry store and buy her a pair of earrings. White gold the color of her skin, with red rubies the color of the welts that she would be wearing on her ass.

He would have to max out his last credit card but it would be worth it. Every time he saw her wearing the earrings, he would be reminded of the gift that she had given to him this day.

Tomorrow he would give her jewelry. Today he would give her his brutality. She had asked for six of his best and he would deliver.

He raised the cane and brought it down on the exact line that he wanted.

He was making a thing of beauty. A work of fine art sculpted into living flesh.

Caroline bellowed.

It was a bestial sound. The bellow of a cow when it feels the teeth of the tiger bite deep into its flank. The sound, not only of pain, but of despair. Hopelessness made audible.

She struggled desperately against her bonds, tried to scramble away from the beast that was devouring her body, crushing her will, damning her soul.

She did not want to be here. She wanted to be free of her bonds. She wanted to be free of pain.

She had reached the point where she would do anything to get away from the cane.

She didn’t need six cuts. Four was enough punishment. Six would be appropriate if Kyle were currently her student but he was not. He had taken a course from her last semester. She had been careful not to seduce him until after the new semester began. She deserved consideration for that. Giving him oral sex was still a violation of the university code of ethics because of the possibility that she could exert influence with his current professors or because he might want to take another course from her next year.

A student could feel coerced by a professor’s authority in any circumstance.

But her violation was not as serious as if she were directly deciding whether he would pass or fail her course. Any threat against him would be indirect, any coercion attenuated.

She had suffered enough for her sin. She wanted the punishment to stop now.

Maybe she could convince Rory to stop despite all that she had said to him.

She forced herself to stop howling. She gasped for breath.

She began to beg. “Please don’t hit me again. Please. I’ve had enough. I can’t take any more. Please. Please. Please. I’ll do anything you want. I’ll make you feel good if you untie me. I promise. I’ll make you feel so good, you won’t believe it. Anything you want. Please don’t hit me again. I’m begging you. Untie me and I’ll beg you on my knees. You don’t know how much it hurts. I didn’t think that it would hurt this bad. Please stop. No more. Please. Have mercy on me.” Her face was soaked with tears. They were puddling on the table. Her hair was floating in a pool of tears.

He walked around the table until he was in front of her, leaned close, and said, “That was four cuts. Two more and it’ll be all over. That’s all. Just two. You can take two more.”

“No, I can’t. Really. I really can’t. I’m calling safeword. Red. Stop. Aardvark. Whatever word you need, I’ll say it.”

“You have no safeword. That was your deal. What did you tell me? ‘Stop’ means ‘More.’ ‘Please’ means ‘Thank you.’ ‘No’ means ‘Yes.’ Okay. I understand. This is how you’re thanking me for being merciless. You’re welcome. Now I’m going to give you your next cut. Have you noticed that my technique is already improving? Each cut is worse than the previous. This next one is going to be a real bear. You’re really going to thank me for this next one.”

“No.” Her voice rose to a shriek. “Please stop. If you do this one thing for me, then I’ll do anything for you. Anything.”

“You remember what you said. You said that if I stopped for any reason, you wouldn’t think that I was a real man. Well, I am a real man and I finish what I start.”

He did not think about the irony of that statement. In truth, Rory seldom finished anything that he started. A decade ago, he had dropped out of university after three semesters, abandoning his original plan to become a high school chemistry teacher. After a couple of years of bumming around, he started a paramedic program at a community college. That sounded like it would be more fun than teaching. But the program turned out to be a lot of hard work so he dropped out of community college to print and sell tee shirts. But it was more fun to hang out at the beach than spend hours in his parent’s garage pulling a squeegee so he let that business fade away. In the last ten years, he had held eight jobs. Currently, he was drawing unemployment and should be looking for a job. But the economy was bad so he figured that looking for work would mostly be a waste of time.

The only thing in his life that he had pursued with any determination was dominating Caroline. At first, they had been dating casually and having sex equally casually. Then, she began asking for ‘favors’. She wanted to be tied up a little. Spanked a little. She didn’t have to ask too many times before he took the initiative. He liked being on top in every relationship in his life. That was why he dropped out of school and quit every job. He never accepted the authority of a teacher or boss. He told them what he would do to get a grade or earn a paycheck. Invariably they wouldn’t accept his terms. When they tried to tell him what he had to do, he walked away.

The surprise today was how much he liked hurting Caroline. He was a natural dominant but not a natural sadist.

Her screaming, howling, and sobbing did not turn him on. But her begging and pleading did. And the way her body twitched and writhed under the impact of the cane was a pure delight.

Her reaction to the cane was more intense than her reaction to the flogger or paddle. As long as she wasn’t suffering permanent damage and as long as he was certain that she would still love him, he could enjoy what he was doing to her.

When she begged, he listened closely to what she said. The one thing, the only thing, that could stop the beating was if she threatened to stop seeing him any more.

And that was the one thing that she had not said. She had promised him delights if he stopped but she had not once threatened to stop loving him if he continued.

So he continued.

He raised the cane and swiped it through the air without touching her.

She screamed when she heard the whistle and flinched violently in her bonds.

He found that so satisfying that he was tempted to do it again. But he decided that a second false stroke would be too much of a good thing.

He raised the cane and brought it down hard. He cut at an angle from the top edge of her right cheek to the crease at the bottom of her left. The stripe that blossomed across her bottom intersected each of the previous four stripes, creating four points of especially intense pain.

Her shriek was ear-piercing. Her entire body spasmed as though she were tied with live wires.

When her shrieks faded, she was left panting like an overheated dog. Her instinct was to try to dissipate the pain through her mouth the way a dog would dissipate heat.

When she stopped struggling, her arms and legs were sore where she had been straining against the bonds. Her ankles and wrists would be chaffed when they were untied.

She feared that she would bear scars from these cuts for the rest of her life.

It was not worth it. No matter how satisfied she had been to have Kyle’s cum in her mouth, how wonderful to look up at the contented expression on his face, it was not worth it. No sex was good enough to justify enduring this torture as a consequence.

She silently vowed with all her heart that she would never offer her sexual favors to a student again. No student, ever.

“I can take one more,” she said, as much to herself as to Rory. “I can take it.” She said it, but she didn’t believe it.

He did. He looked at the five red weals striping her ass and decided that a caning wasn’t so bad, after all. Sure, she squealed. Sure, she writhed and struggled against her bonds. Sure, she begged him to stop. But what was all that, anyway? She was just acting the way that she thought that a woman should act when she was taking a beating. But she wasn’t like other women. She didn’t feel pain the same way as they did. Caroline was a masochist. That meant that she liked pain. That was the definition of a masochist.

He was not as certain that he liked it. Administering the cane was not as much fun as he’d hoped. He would have been just as happy to see her submit to a playful spanking as to a full-fledged caning. Happier. He could already see that, after the last cut had been delivered, she would be distracted. She would be hurting. She would be wondering how long it would take for the bruises and welts to fade.

He would demand a reward for having done this too her. A blowjob would be appropriate. But he didn’t expect it to be a great blowjob. The caning had not given him enough stimulation. A spanking would have given him more physical contact. Laying her across his knees so that she was squirming against his cock while he slapped her naked ass with his bare hand would have been far more arousing than this rather sterile torture where the only thing that touched her flesh was the lifeless rod in his hand.

This was enough to make him hard, but it left him far from the edge of orgasm.

She was going to have to suck on him for quite a while to make him cum.

As he raised the rod for the last cut, he felt a clinical detachment. The placement of the cut was obvious. It would have to be laid from her upper left cheek to the bottom of the right so that it crossed all five previous strokes. That would leave an ‘X’ pattern over the four parallel stripes on her ass.

At least he could strive for good aesthetics.

The cane whistled through the air and then cracked across her ass.

Her scream was no less intense for this being the last cut. To the contrary, she had no reason to hold back. She could lie across her dining room table and suffer for as long as she wished. She did not have to prepare herself for any further cuts. She didn’t have to clear her voice to beg for mercy. She didn’t have to do anything but wallow in her overwhelming pain.

Her ass was well-tenderized meat now.

If she had any appetite for supper, she would eat it standing up. For the next few days, she would eat all her meals standing up. And she would sleep on her stomach at night.

Her ass might still be too sore tomorrow to wear jeans or even panties. She might have to lecture in a skirt, naked underneath. The thought made her moist between her legs.

She heard Rory talking in the background but she had no interest in what he was saying. This afternoon, only the cane spoke to her in meaningful terms and she had understood its message, loud and clear. It’s meaning was etched on her ass as clearly as if it had been written in words: “You are suffering because you seduced a student. If you do it again, you will suffer more.”

That silent message was repeated with every throb of her ass. Over and over again. “Don’t seduce your students. Don’t seduce Kyle again.”

Kyle.

She drew a picture of his face in her mind and held it there. He had a beautiful face. Especially when he was smiling in post-orgasmic contentment.

Imagining his face was like a balm for her tortured mind.

Would he smile so sweetly if he saw her like this, bound and beaten? No. Definitely not. He would look at her in disgust and horror. He would not understand. Kyle would never be able to give her the punishment that she needed.

She could rely only on Rory for that. She needed Rory more than Kyle because men like him were far more difficult to find than pretty boys like Kyle.

He was still talking so she made an effort to listen to his words. He was demanding that she had to give him a blowjob. Okay. She nodded. She would do that. For him.

He smiled and began untying her hands. Freeing her would take some time because she had pulled the knots so tight. Silly man. He should get a knife from the kitchen and cut the knots. Why did he think that he had to save the rope? She could buy all the rope she wanted at the hardware store.

When she was free, she would sink to her knees and give him the blowjob that he wanted.

It struck her as strange that all blowjobs are the same for all men. Every man likes to get sucked off. Every man enjoys his orgasm when it comes.

Blowjobs were not all the same for her. Giving some men blowjobs was a pleasure. Kyle was young and eager. The act was quick and passionate. Blowing him was joyful. Giving other men head was tedious. Rory was her age but he drank too much too often. He was hard to arouse and took so long to come that her jaw ached. Blowing him was a job.

A necessary job because she needed him to do what he did – dominate her. Make demands on her. Challenge her to accept humiliation and degradation.

But she also needed what Kyle did. She needed her pleasure. Even if she had to trade pain for it in equal measure.

What was the equation? How much pain would she have to endure if she took more pleasure from Kyle? What price would she have to pay if she brought him to bed and let him fuck her the way a man should fuck a woman. If she pulled his naked body against hers, welcomed his cock in her cunt, and brought herself to screaming ecstasy, what would it cost her? Eight cuts? Ten? Twelve of the best?

Her ass was burning and throbbing. Her whole body was aching as though it had been racked. Her throat was raw from the screaming. She was in agony after six of the best. Twelve would be too many. Eight would be enough punishment for making love to Kyle. Sure. Eight. She could endure that many. After her ass had recovered from this six, she could take that much again plus two more.

Seducing Kyle would be a treat to savor after she finished marking the midterm exams next month.

She would invite Kyle here, to her apartment. He would know why and come with young, eager desperation.

And, a week later, she would ask Rory for eight of the best.

When her ankles were free, she sank to her knees and unbuckled his belt. She had to keep him happy so that he would do his part to keep her happy. Keep her happy by making her suffer in just the right amount.

She and Rory had an understanding.