A Lady Pays Her Penalties Read online

  He was anxious to see if he could do better so, before her shrieks had subsided noticeably, he raised the cane and let fly with the third stroke.

  Her shriek flew up a full octave. She sounded like the world’s worst soprano singing a one-note aria. She pushed herself half upright, her hands leaving the seat cushion, releasing the tension in her buttocks to try to reduce the pain.

  “Hey! Get back down there! You’re only half done!” he snapped and she obediently forced her head back toward the seat cushion.

  This stripe fell below the first and was parallel to the second, the trio forming a tilted, elongated Z that was not quite closed at the corners.

  He waited until her shrieks subsided to ragged sobbing. That took a long time two or three minutes but he did not mind. He was in no hurry.

  This time he gave her lots of warning. “Ready?”

  She nodded her head.

  “Brace yourself. This will be the worst one yet.”

  She whimpered through the gag and gripped the cushion at tightly as she could.

  He flicked the switch through the air a couple of times, making it whistle.

  She whined in fear.

  He raised the cane high and paused, watching her big muscles twitch and quiver, then brought the cane down hard in at an angle that cut across all three previous stripes.

  Laying in the cane at this angle reduced the force of his stroke slightly but that small mercy was overwhelmed by the agony of the blow overlaying previously damaged flesh at three points; he was rewarded with a whole new chorus of screams. It sounded like three different women were screaming behind the one gag. Leslie had developed a whole new talent as a screaming virtuoso.

  He hoped that the neighboring rooms were unoccupied, or if they were, that the occupants would think that a TV was blaring, because this gag was proving less effective with every stroke. “Hey, Leslie,” he hissed, “Try to keep the noise down a little, okay? You don’t want to have to explain yourself to the management, do you?”

  She heard him because her screams lapsed into sobs immediately. She was almost out of her mind with the pain; it filled her whole world. But, through the fog of agony, she knew that, as bad as this physical pain was, the humiliation of having to explain her situation to a stranger would be far more agonizing for her.

  She gasped for air. The pain was literally taking her breath away. On top of that, she had to draw air around the gag because her nose was clogging up from her crying; but it was difficult to breathe around the gag because her mouth was filled with saliva and she was drooling copiously on the seat cushion. On top of all that, her diaphragm was compressed across the back of the seat. She feared that she might suffocate. Her misery was complete. She took as deep breath as possible and blew out her nose. She was beyond caring about the chair.

  Two more, she told herself. Only two more. I can stand that. I can. I will. I have no choice.

  She never considered standing up, unbuckling the gag, and telling Craig that she had changed her mind. Leslie could no more chicken out than she could sprout wings and fly. It was not her nature.

  Then she heard Craig say, “Let’s try this. Let’s see if you can take this next stroke without a sound. No howling or screaming or crying. Not even a whimper. Let’s see you take this one in complete silence.”

  Leslie shuddered. This was not the deal. There was nothing in the instructions about being silent.

  “What do you say? Will you give me silence?”

  She nodded slowly. He was doing her a hell of a favor by spending his day punishing her. She owed him at least this much consideration in return.

  “Quiet now,” he cautioned, and let fly.

  When she heard the dreaded whistle, she clenched her ass tight and bit the gag as hard as she could.

  Her backside instantly blossomed in a new explosion of agony. She stopped breathing. If no air flowed through her throat, then she would make no sound. But she could only hold her breath for seconds before she was gasping for air again.

  She could feel her legs dancing in place uncontrollably, her body trying to escape the pain even though her mind would not let her run away.

  As she concentrated on not screaming, not whimpering, not even sobbing, one thought intruded. One more. Only one more stroke to endure. Suffer only one more and she could stand up. One more and she could walk away. Just…one…more.

  Craig waited until she settled down again. He was not going to deliver his last stroke to a moving target.

  Eventually her legs stopped dancing and she bent her torso down as far as possible to present, one last time, the perfect target for his brutality. But her ass kept quivering violently, vibrating with tension. It was not something that she was doing voluntarily; he suspected that she did not even know that it was happening. It was just a reflexive response of her muscles to the deep damage that they were sustaining.

  The five stripes were rather haphazardly placed, different lengths crossing at odd angles. It was hardly artistry, but he decided that it was safer to make sure that they all fell close to the center of her buttocks. If he struck too high, he risked damaging her back; too low and would hurt her legs. The ass was the safest target, especially for blows this hard.

  As he watched her waiting submissively for her punishment to end, he glanced at the five remaining envelopes that he had brought from the car and revised his thought. She was not waiting for her punishment to end; she was waiting only for the first part of six to end. After this was over, she still had a full day left to endure.

  While waiting, he reviewed his technique the way a violinist in a master class would review his bowing. What would happen if he put more wrist action into his stroke? He could probably add considerably more speed to the cane just before it landed.

  He would try that with his last stroke. He owed it to her to make this stroke a good one. She had asked for punishment and he had agreed to deliver to the best of his ability.

  So he delivered a full measure.

  With the extra snap of the wrist, the last stroke was the most vicious of the set. The flexible willow switch struck so hard that it wrapped itself partway around her right buttock, leaving the longest stripe of the day. As the white mark bloomed to angry burgundy, small beads of scarlet blood welled up in the five places that this stripe crossed earlier stripes.

  The beaten woman’s screams sounded inhuman through the gag. She howled like a banshee, a long, shrill ululation that could call the dead from their graves and summon the hounds of hell.

  She tried to rise, but could not stand straight – the muscles in her buttocks were too damaged, the pain too intense. Her hands fluttered at her sides, wanting to caress her burning nether parts, but fearing to touch anything lest she elicit a new wave of agony. She staggered two steps to the bed and fell upon it, curling into a loose foetal position next to the open suitcase, and let her howls fade to deep, racking sobs.

  Craig looked at the poor woman’s mouth still wrapped around the end of the penis gag, her jaw opened as far open as she could extend it to allow breath to enter and sobs to leave; then looked down at the injury that he had inflicted on her buttocks – exactly six deep red furrows, each flanked by stiff ridges of swollen flesh. He worried that he had beaten her too enthusiastically. He should never have laid his whole strength into his strokes. He should have pretended. Playacted the part but pulled his punches. Let her feel duly punished without giving her the full British boarding school treatment.

  He sat beside her and stroked her head tenderly, then said, softly, “I’m sorry.”

  She snapped around to look at him, her red, tearful eyes suddenly flashing in anger. She jerked away from him, pushed herself off the bed despite the new pain that she was inflicting on herself, and hobbled over to the desk. Instead of simply unbuckling the gag and pulling it from her mouth to speak to him, she grabbed the pen and a pad that was emblazoned with the Princess Hotel tiara logo, and scrawled in a fast, barely legible script, “Don’t you dare fe
el sorry for me! And don’t you dare feel a second of regret for doing what I instructed! Don’t you dare!!!”

  She hobbled back to the bed, thrust the note into his hands with an angry glare, then fell back into her foetal position and began sobbing anew, letting her pain fill her completely, washing away all thoughts, all regrets.

  * * *

  Leslie stayed on the bed for almost half an hour. Craig brought a box of Kleenex from the bathroom and put it beside the bed so that she could wipe her nose delicately and frequently. She looked grateful for that small mercy.

  After her sobs had subsided to whimpers and then her whimpers gave way to moans and finally her moans fell to silence, she gingerly rose from the bed, gag still in her mouth, drool flowing freely, and shuffled over to the bathroom to gaze long and hard over her shoulder at the damage that had been inflicted to her backside. The striping looked as bad as it felt, but she was relieved to see that there was little blood, apart from the few dots that had been left by the final stroke. She had feared that she had been cut to the bone; her ass felt like it should be hanging in shreds.

  Gingerly, she let her fingertips explore the welts, ever so gently. The mortified flesh felt stiff and unnatural. She wondered if the strokes would leave permanent scars. She hoped not because, though she was not fond of her ass, judging it too big and fat, she did not want it made any more unsightly. As it stood now, she wouldn’t be appearing in a high-cut bathing suit any time soon. If she had known two hours ago what she knew now, she would have cut a smaller switch. Much smaller.

  She turned from the mirror and saw Craig watching her. She held up two fingers, signaling that she was ready for the second envelope. Her day had now begun in earnest. It would be a long time before it came to an end.

  * * *

  Craig ripped open the second envelope and read:

  You get to relax. I do not need your help to administer this punishment. I can do it by myself. The only caution is that you must not assist me in any way, no matter how much I might beg or plead though the gag and no matter how long I take to build up enough courage to free myself. You may only release me if something has gone terribly wrong and you have already called an ambulance.

  P.S. I hope you like baldies.

  He did not like the sound of that at all. Was she planning something that could result in a trip to the emergency ward? He hoped that she was joking about that. Funny stuff. Ha, ha. Her self-destructive streak scared him stiff. Sometimes literally.

  He wondered what “baldies” meant? Surely she did not intend to shave her head.

  When he looked up from the letter, he saw that Leslie was already rummaging through her suitcase. She pulled out a pair of handcuffs, a long strip of cloth, a big white jar, and a handful of little plastic spatulas. His mystification deepened when she began warming the jar in the microwave oven. He realized that she must have checked to make sure that the rooms included microwave ovens before she chose this motel. Leslie was a thorough planner. Craig had to give her credit for that. He suspected that she kept a whole drawer full of To Do lists next to her bed.

  While the jar warmed up, she kept herself busy by forcing the one corner of the six foot long, two inch wide strip of cloth through the hole in a standard handcuff key and tying it securely in place with a proper reef knot. When the microwave dinged, she extracted the jar, fiddled around with a little plastic spatula, poking at its contents, then re-heated the jar for another quarter minute. After repeating this ritual twice more, she was satisfied by its consistency.

  She gathered the jar, spatulas, and cloth strip (with the key firmly attached), laid them out on the coffee table. Then she pulled a chair close. Finally, she fetched a bath towel from the bathroom and laid it across the seat of the chair. She groaned in misery through the gag when she lowered herself gingerly onto the chair. Her beaten ass must be hurting like hell.

  When she raised her legs, spread them across the arms of the chair, and grabbed the jar, Craig understood what evil thing she was about to do to herself.

  She scooped a liberal daub of warm brownish wax out of the jar and spread it in a small patch through the hair at the base of her pubic triangle, then grabbed the strip of muslin cloth an inch from the end of the handcuff key and embedded it firmly into the wax, coating more wax over the top of the material. Over the next couple of minutes, she applied the wax to her entire triangle of pubic hair, embedding the muslin strip as she went. Rather than a single big patch of wax, she had been careful to create a dozen small patches, each separate from the other, each with a different part of the muslin strip embedded. There were loops of about six inches of muslin between the patches. She would not be able to remove the whole strip with a single quick yank, but would have to pull it off piece by piece.

  When she was finished, she minced back to the bed, trailing a three-foot length of muslin. To Craig, it looked like her pussy had sprouted a tail. Without giving herself time to think about what she was doing, she snapped the handcuffs about her wrists behind her back.

  Now she would not be able to reach the key that dangled so enticingly close below her pubic patch until she had removed the entire muslin strip starting at the free end – a process that would entail pulling out all of her pubic hair, one painful patch at a time.

  She had a full, thick mat of hair – obviously she had not shaved in some time in preparation for this event – and every one of those well-rooted hairs was now embedded in the hard, cold wax.

  Leslie walked over and looked at herself in the full-length mirror, assessing the predicament that she had devised for herself, hoping that she could find a flaw in her plan now that it had been turned into reality. If she could find an easy way out at this point, she would take it. Her penalty was to put herself in this predicament and get herself back out. It did not specify a particular method of escape. She moved her handcuffed wrists as far to one side as she could and then back to the other side. She satisfied herself that she could not get to the wax directly. Her only option was to pull the ripcord.

  She squatted so that the cloth was lying on the floor, and then took a half-dozen little steps forward until she could grab it with her hands. She tried pulling. It was no use. She could not get her hands far enough between her legs to pull down on the cloth, and she could not slide it between her legs. As soon as she pulled, it was forced up into her cunt where there was too much friction to move it. Trying to pull it across her clit and through her labia would cause more pain there than the ripping of her hair from her flesh.

  She sighed in frustration through her gag.

  Her next attempt had slightly better success. She dropped the strip to the floor, squatted down, put the ball of her foot firmly on the end, and then stood up. Or, at least she tried to stand up. When she was half way up, the cloth drew taut and began pulling her hair. She tried to force herself up further, screaming through the gag, but could not do it. She was pulling too slowly. The idea was good, but her execution was lacking. She squatted again, took a few deep breaths, and then tried to snap to her feet in one motion. By focusing on her effort to straighten her legs and ignoring her crotch, she managed to rip out the first chunk of hair – a patch about an inch square. Craig heard the hairs ripping out of her pussy scalp. It sounded like defective Velcro. She screamed through the gag in pain and shock, then looked down to see the hairy chunk of wax hanging on the muslin strip. The newly bared patch of skin on her mons pubis glowed bright pink.

  Waxing is normally done when the wax is still soft enough to peel the hairs away in a running line – painful enough at the best of times. By now, though, Leslie’s wax patches were solid and she was pulling whole chunks of hair out all at once – a considerably more painful process.

  She repeated this action several more times: squat, step, stand, scream through the gag, then look down in dismay at how many patches were still left to go. And the process was not made any easier by the preceding caning – every time she had to squat and pull the major muscles in her ass
taut across her pelvic bones, she groaned in agony. It was a slow, cruel waxing to be sure.

  She was panting around the gag with the accumulated pain before she was less than half finished. Then she got another brilliant idea. She hobbled over to the corner of the bed, dragging several feet of cloth dotted with little wax scalps across the carpet, squatted down, and working blind with her hands behind her back, managed to tie the free end to the bed leg. When she was finished, she stood up; bent over as far as she could so that the cloth was clear of her crotch and then took two running steps. Before the second step landed, the cloth strip pulled taut and successfully yanked three tufts of hair free before killing her momentum. She screamed, first in pain, then in triumph at the amount of naked crotch that was freshly revealed.

  Three more times she backed up, took a run, and screamed through the gag. The final pull that cleared the last patch of hair from her pussy lips was almost anticlimactic.

  Now the muslin strip lay free of her, stretched across the room, studded with a dozen patches of hairy wax, leaving the bright steel handcuff key lying on the floor within reach. It took some effort to pick up the key because she wanted to avoid resting her damaged ass on the dirty carpet. She first carried the towel from the chair and laid it on the carpet, then sat on that to reach the key. After a couple of fumbles, she managed to get the key into the handcuff and release herself.

  She could not speak around the penis gag that still filled her mouth, but the look of triumph in her eye said, “That’s how self-bondage is done!” as clearly as if she had been able to articulate the words.

  She massaged her bald pubic mound for a minute, trying to rub the pain away.

  She reached back behind her neck and unbuckled the penis gag. She sighed when the saliva soaked stub slipped from her mouth. She flexed her jaw a couple of times, but remained silent. She could talk now, but she had nothing that she wanted to say.