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.