She’s been a perfectly good girl. And yet, she is there, and stage one has just ended. 

But good girl, bad girl, trickster or treat: who cares? She’s got a gorgeous arse, and she colours beautifully.

Is this a trick or a treat? If you could hear the squeaks while we built up the heat for this photo, you’d probably guess. 

Either way, trick or treat always starts here. Never where it ends, though.

“No, of course I haven’t finished dealing with you. Stay where you are until I call you. And if you let that cane fall?”

“I’ll get double, Master?” 

“At least. And the same again tomorrow. So… don’t. Just stand still and wait.” 

She was learning, the hard way, that I wouldn’t accept her not telling me an assignment is due, and then missing the deadline. She’d do the assignment after punishment, and she’d hand it in, though lateness meant it would only be marked out of 80%.

And she’d be sitting very uncomfortably while she did the work. 

As usual I pretended to do other things, but really I just watched her. The beauty of her submission, and the bright blush of her well-spanked ass. She made my living room beautiful. 

Love had everything to do with it. But love sometimes hurts. 

The beautiful Zoë bends over a prie-dieu. Waiting for the riding crop.

The prie-dieu was once a religious tool, for waiting humbly while addressing a god: why is life so hard? Why are you punishing me? How can I serve you better? 

I saw this one in an antique shop somewhere in the Australian outback, and immediately knew that I had to have it, for depraved, kinky purposes. The overlap between religion and bdsm is deep and emotionally complex. But it’s not today’s topic.

Today’s topic is peace. There’s always great calm before the storm, and there’s a different kind of calm afterwards. So here she is: beautiful, calm, conscious of the future.

Arethusa has been spanked long and hard over his knee, on her bottom and the backs of her thighs. Not for any fault; just for the sensuality and the emotion of it. Now she waits obediently while her Master takes a break. She stands as he told her, between the two doors that emphasise the different ways they can go, now.

The next stage will bring sharper pain than his hand; she knows that. But she doesn’t know which implement she should be preparing herself for. It will hurt, heat and mark her: that’s all she knows. In the last stage he will take her, but she doesn’t know which part of her body he will use. She’s not even sure which she hopes for. There’s something sweet about it not being her choice.

Doors are choices. They open into the future. But a submissive doesn’t choose which door opens. Arethusa waits.   

Arethusa would smile at her marks when she saw them in the bedroom mirror, ruled straight and neat across her bottom. 

This was a punishment for untidiness, that had meant she’d lost all her university assignment materials, so that she was already late with an essay before she’d started it. So we searched her bedroom, and finally found the papers among stacks of paper concerning other things.

So she did the essay first, with me helping on the appendices. Then she tidied her room, with her Master watching her, cane in hand.

Then, and only then, she could bend over and receive the punishment that had been hanging over her for about a day and a half. 

It was one of her more severe lessons. I’d worked up a steam of righteous masterly wrath. But the harshest thing, in a way, was my making the marks deliberately messy. No tidy collection of lines. When she looked at them in the mirror, they reminded her of the consequences of messiness. 

(But when you have a Master, loving but with a taste for giving her stripes and tears, and a masochistic slavegirl, can you stop her caning from being sexy? No, it turned out we couldn’t. Worthy experiment, though.)

Afterwards is such a good time. For both dom and sub. It’s a time of sweetness, and stillness. If the dom has given the submissive pain, there’s only one thing to do, as they both re-enter consciousness and know where they are in the world, and to each other.

Pain can lead to joy, of course. But so can comfort. 

There’s the storm, and there’s the calm afterwards. My slave was tired, with that lovely deep soreness, and blissed out, and she kind of passed out. 

I took this while I was on the way getting us a cup of tea, nature’s other great restorative.  And I had to wonder which was sexier: her ass or her stripey socks. Obviously her ass came in far ahead on points, but sexiness was the winner on the day. 

A palimpsest is a scroll or page, anyway a writing surface, on which older writing has been covered over by new writing placed over it.

Or, if you’re a slavegirl and you’ve misbehaved seriously, three times in one week, you finish up with your ass and thighs looking like this.

And though it might look like damage to someone who doesn’t know how good that feels, the lust and the love behind it, it’s a sight that makes you smile, whenever you happen to catch sight of your ass in a mirror.   

A pink girl in a rosy room. Her bottom is already blushing, more than a little, but her Master has told her to put her cuffs on. He plans something, for which she shouldn’t be able to move. That’s always a time for silence, reflection, and anticipation, for both of them. He watches her readying herself. She may be blushing, but to him she glows.