Sunday, November 4, 2007

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Cane

Photo from Red Charls. Note the quivering end of the cane.


The cane was once my ultimate squick. As a college girl, encountering my first spanking films and stories online, it was "the thing to be avoided." Most of my time was spent on Laura's Spanking Corner, and if a story, even my beloved schoolgirl stories by Mary Catherine and Daria Little, started to become a caning scene, it was the back button for me. My terror was not decreased in my search for free videos and encountering snippets of what was then Rigid East. I remember watching in utter horror as Pavel Šťastný caned a Czech girl strapped to her desk. (I just looked this film up on RGE Films and the girl was Drahuše Brdečková in "From the Headmaster's Study: A Note for Absence.") The clip was only 30 seconds and it was far too much for me.

See a preview here.

I maintained this squirmishness until my mid-twenties, when I met the man who would become my husband. Flirting in the bookstore in which we both worked, our jokes and teasing comments made it more and more obvious that we were of like minds with the exception that, as we are in most things, we were opposite sides of the same coin. We quickly learned that he was a top and I was a bottom. Then came the terrifying news. I was still afraid of the cane. It was his favorite implement.

He called it the whippy stick. I called it the "No, no, no way in hell am I getting beaten with that stick" stick. He took advantage of our place of employment and special ordered me an early favorite of his, a Blue Moon novel by Richard Manton called Fancy Girl. Rife with delicious punishments, it also included the first caning scene I read in its entirety. I'm still not sure which made me so wet upon reading it--the scene itself, or the knowledge that it was something he wanted to do to me.

So it came to be that he caned me two years before he kissed me. We went on the first of our now many implement shopping trips. At Target, we found a perfectly flat-backed square wooden hairbrush, an item that maintains a place near the bed or the schoolbench to this day. At Home Depot, in the outdoor gardening area, we found a bundle of dried bamboo. Red-faced, I was made to carry it to the cash register. No one could have known that the bamboo canes were to be applied to my bottom rather than a gardening purpose, but one look at my face and I'm sure my excited shame showed through.

The events that transpired back at his house are now a blur of exhaltation and agony. I know he cut the bamboo down to cane-lengths, about a yard long each. I remember the swish as he tested them against the air. I believe that he warmed my bottom with hand and brush before the caning, but what I remember clearly, so clearly, is being told to bend down and touch my ankles--a new position for my limited spanking repertoire. I remember trembling.

He told me to count, and I tried. Each stroke brought a pain so quick and sharp, unlike anything I'd ever felt, that with each stroke, I thought that I would die. Three sets of six. I lost count on the way to six at least once. I'm sure I cried, but the only wetness I now remember is the one between my legs, juices webbing across my thighs, aching for the touch that would for years be denied. Even so, the stripes and bruises left on my flesh were indelible. The cane had claimed me. So had he.

We whisper now of how I will be caned. Whether he'll strap me to the bench or bend me down to touch my toes, my tears leaving tracks on the hardwood floor. Whether I will count or if, as he likes to tenderly threaten close to my ear, the caning will just go on... and on. I like to tell him how much I want it, how much I deserve it--as long as it's not happening yet. Once I am in position, waiting for that first stroke, I am again terrified, trembling and convinced that I can't take it, that I will never be able to count to six, or tweleve, or twenty-four, or more. Then he begins, and my only fear is that he will stop at six, or twelve, or twenty-four, or...

The book that started it all, and my very first spanking-related gift.