Claire stood up, and I held her. She put her arms round me and pressed her body tight.I kissed her forehead, and she let her head hang over my shoulder, weeping silently. Or mostly silent. 

I put my hands on her poor, welted bottom and she hissed in her breath. But I pressed harder, then began to knead that flesh, knowing that it would hurt but that she would experience it as a kind of relief. 

At last she looked up at me. “Do you think I’ve paid yet? Have I had enough? It hurts soooo much.” 

I had never felt that she had done anything wrong. But we were doing this to work out her guilt for fucking her husband’s friend.

My instinct said she needed more, before she would definitely forgive herself.

She needed to remember this as the time she’d been driven to the edge of what she could stand, and then taken further. So I said, “Your arse is likely to hurt for about a week and a half. Then the marks will be gone, and this will be a memory. You’ll need to rely on that memory to feel you’ve paid. So… what do you think, Claire. Have you paid, or do you need more?”

“Oh god, sir. It really hurts. I never got the cane like that when I was a girl. But… I think I need another dozen, at least.”

So I kissed her mouth, and we held each other like lovers. She could feel me hardening for her. Because the sexiest thing, between her and I, as the punisher and the punished, was not her beautiful naked body.

Nor her helpless presentation over my desk, or her gasps and stripes as the cane did its work, wonderfully hot though those things all were, but her acceptance and submission. We were going to fuck as soon as possible after this had finished. I knew she felt that desire too, that powerful sexual heat from her own submission, though we didn’t speak about it.

Instead I patted her poor, ridged and welted bottom. Her eyes told me she didn’t feel that as pain. “Then go back to the desk, Claire. And bend over.”

Claire nodded, then looked up to kiss me one last time. “Yes, Sir.” I released her and she turned back to the desk, where Maddie was waiting for her. Maddie kissed her mouth too, then helped her down.

I did not believe Claire deserved this punishment. And I knew she needed it. She had to forgive herself, and have that forgiveness stay securely with her. So I raised the cane again, and whipped it down, biting into the backs of her legs, at the softest, best padded part of her upper thighs. Claire screamed, all of her former dignity and self-restraint gone in one stroke, while Maddie held her firmly down.