Arethusa had been a good and blameless girl recently, and she knew it. She knew her Master knew it too. Her behaviour for once had nothing to do with why she waited, hands on head and freshly spanked, in that dream-like room, all softness and drapery except for the cane on the table beside her. 

There was not punishment coming, though in a sense it would feel very similar to it. But her Master was in a mood she’d come to know well, a mood that took them both to exhausted, dark and pleasured places. In that mood he needed her subservience and her pain, and then for their bodies to merge.

He liked to leave her time between the spanking and the cane, a time for feeling and imagining. A soft time before their time became wild, harsh and urgent. For now, Arethusa waited, and imagined possibilities, things that had happened before and would always happen again. She dreamed.

In which the lovely Zoë discovers that a well-heated arse sometimes leads to immediate comforting and if necessary consolation, but sometimes they have to wait.

Hands on head. In the corner.

One of my favourite paintings is Renoir’s “Nude in the Sun”. I love this image, with the lovely model’s skin dappled by the shade of trees, and glowing in the sun, for some of the same reasons.(Though in most respects except for the light and shade on the model’s body they’re nothing alike.)

It’s not just that Zoë’s a beautiful woman, it’s that she makes the whole place, the setting, beautiful.

A slave girl can too get a moment’s peace. And when she’s tired because you made her tired, and she sleeps because you made her calm and safe, a Dom’s heart gets all warm and gooey. It’s just how it is. 

But there’s something about those socks with the horizontal stripes. I’m not sure why this is so strongly true, but sideways socks are sinfully sexy. On… Sunday.

This is a nice image of a girl, Arethusa, well paddled, her ass and thighs glowing, warm and buzzing, bending over the bed, about to be fucked. It’s clear, and warm, and it’s the out-take. Why? 

Because the one I used, a fuck-up from a photographer’s point of view, better captured the sense of movement, the rush of heated red sex. Here it is again.

I liked the “mistake” much more. So the well-taken photo became the out-take. 

She knows she disobeyed a clear order from her Master. It concerned study, so the order was given for her own good, and she knows that, too.

She knows her Master is angry with her, and He is going to punish her severely. There’s a riding crop on the bench, and she knows she’s not just going to feel its tassel. But that’s in perhaps another hour’s time. 

In the meantime she has to wait in the corner, hands on head. Facing the room so she has to look Him in the eye whenever He passes. Wearing a sign that names the offence she’s going to be punished for.

She feels … small. She feels sorry; she cannot believe, now, that she didn’t prepare for the exam, as He told her to do. What was she thinking?  

No one is going to see her, while she waits, but Master. She knows that in His current mood, if He could bring in witnesses to watch her flogging, He would.

She wonders how that would feel, to get her flogging in public. Just as painful, of course. But humiliating.

She’d say, if asked, that she’s not into humiliation. But there is something in that thought – the watching crowd, all of them knowing that she’s a bad girl who has to be punished – that seems arousing. She’s already aroused and wet: part of her is going to love her flogging, riding on waves of pain and expiation, knowing that Master will be hard for her during, and especially afterwards. 

Right now she feels … humbled. Is that the same as humiliation, or is it something different?

Sometimes

There’s nothing more relaxing, I’m told, than lying over a pile of pillows after a good flogging. 

And nothing more relaxed than that submissive, if the Dom has done her or his work right: not too heavy, but above all not too light. 

What stayed in my mind most, though giving this flogging was a pleasure, was remembering having growled “you stay in place” a couple of times, and being obeyed. 

In those moments we know who and how we are. The gift of pain, and the gifts of authority and submission. 

I did well, I think, and she had done well too. I told her so. No wonder she’s blushing. 

Model and star: The lovely Zoë.

This is a very famous image, and I’m not the first to photograph it. But this is ˆmy ˆphoto. 

It’s from the walls of a temple in Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, India. It was not, at the time, inappropriate to have such joyous, benign, sexual images as part of a temple. 

(The official version of Hinduism now prevalent is more sexually conservative. This is a trace of a nearly vanished past.)

Three things strike me about these. The first is the artistry. There are hundreds and hundreds of these sexual images on these temple walls, showing different positions, and each gives attention to the sinuous eroticism of the flesh, and to make sure the humanity and the affection of the various sexual groupings are apparent to the viewer. 

Second, this is a very benign, pro-love, humane universe, as depicted on these temple walls. We’re not used to finding that in religion.

The third is related to that benign worldview: a kind of human humour. The man on the left and the woman at the right of the lovers are not lovers themselves, it seems. But they are inspired by the sexuality of the scene they’re witnessing. Both the man and the woman are masturbating. Everybody is taking pleasure, as they can.