He yelped even louder when an unexpected and harder seventh stroke landed, biting into his pain-ravaged arse, having crossed some of the earlier strokes.

“What the f…” he cried, having only requested six.

“Shut up and take it!” she ordered, clearly angry with him now and swinging the cane harder than before.

Number eight arrived, perfectly placed at the crease between his cheek and thigh, drawing the loudest scream yet from the client who came to her asking to be punished, but had only now told her why.

“That poor girl!” she accused, “she died because you didn’t have the balls to tell her you loved her when you should!? You deserve far more! This is from her!”

What would thankfully be the final stroke landed just below the last, searing a red line into the very top of his thighs, and while he didn’t know it was the last, she wished she could continue thrashing this bastard’s deserving bottom. ‘Never had anyone deserved it more’, she thought.

Years ago, Keith had a mate whose sister had caught his eye and with whom he ultimately fell in love. He’d known her all through school, but only at his mate’s twentieth birthday party had he seen how she’d grown into the beautiful girl he would come to love so much.

Jane was a petite girl, just barely over five feet tall, with young, innocent features, large brown eyes, and full pouty lips on a China doll face. Long dark hair with a fringe framed her cute face, while her body had ‘sex’ written all over it with firm, round tits making a perfect handful, a large-for-her-frame bubble butt, and a delicious gap at the very top of her thighs, visible when she wore the tight, little shorts he favored.

She also considered Keith a mate but had no idea just how smitten with her he was. How many times had he stared into those doe-like eyes and said only to himself how much he loved her, wishing he could summon the courage to share his feelings, but the fear of rejection robbed him of the backbone needed to declare his love? She moved away for a job opportunity, never knowing his love.

He remained friends with her brother until he, too, moved away, out of the country, with his new bride. Keith continued to visit their mum from time to time as, over the years, he’d come to think of her as his second mum, having lost his own to cancer. They were just friendly visits that she seemed to appreciate, as he reminded her of children who no longer lived with her or even nearby.

One day, as she told him of Jane’s progress at her job, he commented on how much he missed her, eventually revealing for the first time how much he felt for her. She, too, wished he’d had the gumption to tell her before she’d gone, thinking it might have kept her from leaving in the first place, but left this thought unsaid. She liked Keith and had thought they’d make a cute couple when she’d seen them together but didn’t interfere until now.

Attempting to arrange a reunion of sorts, she managed to get Jane to commit to a visit home without revealing their ulterior motive. The visit was set for a weekend, making sure Keith was also available, and though it seemed to take forever to come, they finally found themselves anxiously awaiting her arrival that Friday evening. She had no formal plan to get them together, nor did he have a plan for revealing his feelings, choosing instead to try to arrange a private, intimate conversation that would set the scene for his admission of his long-held affection for her.

Anxiety over her being an hour late turned first to shock and then horror and sorrow when a policeman arrived at the door telling them Jane had been killed in a car crash involving a drunk driver. They both sat or, more accurately, collapsed into chairs in the sitting room in disbelief as the officer provided some additional details and information about what they needed to do next.

No one can ever be prepared for such shocking news, and they were both devastated. Her mum immediately felt responsible for her death, since she wouldn’t have been on the road had she not arranged for this visit. Keith had the added burden of having his high hopes of a rekindled friendship, or even a relationship, dashed by this fateful outcome, which added to his feeling of responsibility as well.

Somehow, they both managed to get through the following days of a funeral, memorial services, and many well-intentioned expressions of sympathy from family and friends, but the hurt continued.

In a way, Keith felt he’d been in his own crash of sorts. His hopes had been raised when the visit had been arranged, and even if it didn’t develop right away, perhaps love would have come over time, but now his love would remain unrequited forever. He’d never be able to tell his dream girl how much he loved her; never get to hold her, kiss her, or make love to her, and it was all his fault, not only for his part in arranging the visit, but more because he hadn’t had the nerve to tell her of his love before she left town.

Over a short period, his thoughts became increasingly dark as he tried to deal with the ultimate responsibility he felt. He came to believe that his own life should end as well, that he had no right to live, having caused Jane’s untimely death. Having come to that conclusion, it still took a few days to make the final decision to do it, with an unusually spiritual thought that perhaps he and Jane would be reunited in death.

Armed with enough pills and drink to do the job, Keith drove to a park where the woods would provide enough privacy to do the deed as well as avoid an unwanted rescue. He started with the vodka hoping it would provide the false courage he needed to complete the job, and followed it up with more than enough painkillers to put him to sleep forever. His final drunken and drugged thoughts were of his beautiful Jane, and with tears running down his face, he pictured her welcoming him to whatever the afterlife was before he slept, hopefully for the last time.

As with so many things in Keith’s life, both before and still to come, it didn’t work out as he planned, as an early morning police patrol discovered his lifeless body, still in his car, and brought emergency services to the site in time to save him. He was taken to hospital, waking later that day to discover his attempt had failed.

Had he been given the chance to do it again, he would have done so, and that kept him in the hospital as the doctors realized his return to life was not the outcome he wanted. He stayed for almost two weeks, loaded up on anti-depressants, with Jane’s mum visiting him once, during which she gave him hell for what he did, saying she couldn’t lose him too and trying to convince him that he wasn’t responsible for what happened.

She was responsible for her daughter’s death, as she was the one who pressed for an immediate visit, and still not over her grief, it would be even worse had Keith been successful as that would add to the burden she already bore. Her maternal instincts kicked in, and she insisted that he stay with her for a couple of weeks following his hospitalization, so she could take care of him and make sure he didn’t try again.

Still dealing with his grief, he visited a porn shop in London’s Soho district and was surprisingly attracted to the BDSM section, viewing a film and buying a magazine. The film dealt with various forms of corporal punishment, but every scene seemed to end with an extremely painful caning. The subjects, both men and women, were often restrained in some way and given six, and sometimes twelve, strokes with a thin, whippy cane that elicited painful cries and left angry, red lines across the miscreant’s bottom.

The idea started forming in his mind during the film but solidified when reviewing the magazine and finding an ad for a disciplinarian who would mete out such punishments for a price. ‘I deserve to be punished like that,” he told himself, calling the number listed and making an appointment for a simple caning; ‘six of the best’.

He arrived at the woman’s flat, and a maid showed him where to wait. His nerves were on high alert as he had no idea what to expect but knew that he deserved whatever he got. A pretty young girl walked in, decked out in a shiny, black bustier with matching knee-high boots, and asked him what he wanted.

“I’d like six strokes of the cane, Miss,” he said with a shaky voice.

“Very well. Take your clothes off and lie on the bed with the pillows under your arse!” she instructed.

With shaky hands, he managed to open his shirt and pants, remove all his clothes, and lay on the bed as instructed. She walked around him, tying his wrists and ankles to the bed with leather cuffs. While his position left him just a bit aroused, his fear of the pain easily overrode those feelings, and he had to repeatedly tell himself he deserved to be punished to allow it to continue.

“Is this your first time?” she asked as she selected a cane from an umbrella stand. “I could tell,” she said after his affirmative nod. “Ready?” she asked finally.

“Yes, Miss,” he replied, closing his eyes.

In seconds he heard first the swish of the evil cane through the air, and then the percussive thwack of the cane hitting his upraised bottom. The pain wasn’t quite immediate but bloomed quickly into an extraordinary, stinging line of fire across the fleshy top of his cheeks, and he cried out. The pain was still registering in his mind when the second swish and thwack came with more immediate and intense pain.

“Oww! Ow, please, Miss! OWW!” he screamed again as the third stroke bit into his flesh.

The remaining three strokes were delivered in a similar fashion, though with increasing force, getting increasingly loud yelps from Keith, leaving him a sobbing mess. He couldn’t understand how anyone could want to inflict this unimaginable pain on themselves and silently congratulated himself for enduring the punishment he deserved.

“Now tell me why you needed to be punished,” the villainous, cane-wielding woman asked.

That’s when he told her about Jane, and his perceived responsibility for her death, after which the three intensely harder strokes he hadn’t asked for were delivered to his striped arse.

“I want my money back!” he demanded after being released from his restraints. “I only wanted six! Not nine!” he accused the stony-faced woman in black. “I’ll call the police!” he threatened.

“Yeah?! And what are you gonna tell them, huh? That you asked to be punished and wanted your money back when it hurt your poor, little virgin bottom!?” she taunted. “Get dressed, get the fuck out of here, and don’t come back!”

Slowly time healed his wounds, but never completely. He still thought of his beautiful Jane often, and his responsibility still hounded him, but he got on with life and his job at the electrical goods store.

As if life wasn’t done beating Keith up yet, the one person who understood his pain, Jane’s mum, and now his mum too, actually contracted cancer and was given a very short life expectancy. It was quite short as Keith only saw her once while she was still in hospital; fortunately, given the time to say goodbye and promise her that he would find love, despite his continued love for Jane.

Just months later, at a friend’s party, Keith met Iris, and they seemed to hit it off. Finally, someone showed him some love, and he saw her as his only chance to make a life for himself. They got on well with each other, paying the proper attention, and before long, marriage was being discussed, despite warnings from several friends about her real motives.

He was told she was just looking for someone who would give her children and support her for the rest of her life so that she could be a stay-at-home mum and never have to work again. As is often the case, though, love was certainly blind for Keith, leaving the warnings unheeded and marrying Iris less than a year later.

They had some good times, but after two sons in seven years, she began to show her true colors; the warnings had been accurate. Iris got what she wanted and didn’t want much of Keith anymore, apart from providing for the family, and Keith went along with it like many a good dad for the good of his kids.

As his life with Iris settled into a long tedium, his thoughts of Jane diminished but never ceased completely, especially the responsibility he still felt for her young life being so tragically cut short. On several occasions, he again submitted to a disciplinarian for brutal canings that assuaged his guilt temporarily, only to return in a short time, though the thought of administering some corporal punishment to a deserving young lady began to appeal to him. The BDSM magazines he bought on occasion fed this desire, though he couldn’t imagine how he could make it a reality.

These feelings grew as his sex life with his wife shrunk. The final straw for Keith came when cancer again reared its ugly head, with his sister this time. His wife felt no sympathy for him at all, despite how many times he’d had to deal with this sinister disease, and upon her death, she told him to stop crying about it as he’d known she would die soon. Whatever feelings he might have had for her were now completely gone, and the already sexless marriage was now devoid of any feelings at all.

Having shed any mental attachment to his wife, he felt free to explore his CP interests, the canings he got from time to time providing some sexual arousal once the actual caning had ended, and he freely explored the internet looking at porn and finding like-minded friends on dating sites and other online communities. He imagined finding someone with whom he could explore his dominant side, someone who wanted to be spanked or caned either as punishment for some misdeed or just because they wanted it. His only experience was in the submissive role. However, he could more easily imagine himself as the recipient of a painful punishment.

One sunny day, a young woman came into the shop asking about the ‘help wanted’ sign posted in the window. Hearing only her voice at first, Keith finally looked up from his paperwork to address the woman and was immediately dumbstruck by her uncanny resemblance to his beloved Jane. Her face, hair, complexion, and body all resembled his lost love to a degree he’d have thought impossible, and whether it was just her appearance or not, he felt a connection to her that revived those long-ago feelings he’d had only for Jane.

“Hi, I’m June,” she had said before he’d even noticed her standing there.

“Just a minute, please,” he said, needing the time to finish his task, but looking up at June, his strained reaction couldn’t be more obvious. “Oh, um … hello. I’m … I’m Keith,” he stammered as he tried to regain his composure.

“Is the position still open,” she said with a look and voice that kept him off balance.

He actually thought he might be dreaming, that this beautiful woman might have been Jane come to life in a deep sleep. Eventually, he regained full awareness and addressed her with an apology.

“I’m sorry, but you look so much like someone I knew a long time ago, and the memories came flooding in. Yes. Yes, the position is still open. Do you have a CV?” he asked, getting back to his normal state of mind and directing her to his office for an interview.

He hired her, of course, as her resemblance to Jane got her the job; her CV and interview were used just to confirm there was no reason not to hire her.

June left with the requisite paperwork and felt surprisingly happy about getting this job. She didn’t understand what had led her to apply for it, but despite there being other part-time jobs available, something inside told her this was the job she should apply for. Keith had repeatedly apologized for his reaction to her, but this, too, was a reason for taking the job as she felt some kind of connection to this man, some ten to fifteen years her senior.

She started in the store a few days later, and she learned the ‘ropes’ from Keith directly, which wasn’t unusual, and he very much enjoyed teaching her but was also unusually happy whenever she was in the store. Initially, he couldn’t stop staring at her at various times during the day, and when caught, she’d give him a beautiful smile that seemed to say she not only didn’t mind his stares but liked the fact that he seemed interested. She knew he was married, and normally such a man showing this kind of interest would be a problem, but he wasn’t trying anything improper. At times, she wished he would.

June was a college graduate who married her college sweetheart right after school. They’d had amazing sex while in school, exploring milder forms of impact play. She still remembered vividly the first time he spanked her as one of the best nights ever. She liked being a naughty little girl who got spanked when she deserved it, and like most such relationships, it escalated into longer, harder spankings involving implements of various kinds. A good night was one that ended with a glowing, red bottom that remained sore for a day or two.

Once married, something slowly changed in her husband, who was no longer satisfied with spanking. They’d reached the point where any kind of corporal punishment would end with the cane, six of the best being the minimum, and she’d taken as many as twenty-four, though she considered that beyond her limit. Six or twelve was okay, but that wasn’t enough for him.

Even worse, consent was no longer important in his mind, and he would punish her however and whenever he wanted, regardless of her feelings about it. Bondage in various forms and pain inflicted on other parts of her body gradually became the norm, and she wasn’t happy about it. Daddy had become sir, and she never knew what he would try next.

Eventually, she found herself in the position of having earned, in his mind, a real beating when they’d get home that evening, and she ran away, her almost ten-year marriage in tatters, but she just couldn’t live with the uncertainty of what would come next, wondering when his abuse would land her in hospital.

Keith was so different. He was a kind and gentle man, at least towards her, though she’d seen his stern side on the rare occasion when she’d made some mistake. She wondered how he’d ever hooked up with his wife, whom she saw as an overly critical, shrew woman when she’d make an unwanted visit to the store. Each time she felt such sympathy for him and went out of her way to make him feel wanted after Iris left. Truth was, she was falling for him, and having seen his wife, she felt no guilt about pursuing him, and she had an idea of how to get him.

He, too, was quite enthralled with June; that connection he’d felt when meeting her was still there, and he felt as though she’d been sent to him, perhaps as recognition of all the pain his life had brought him, both mental and physical. She still reminded him of Jane, not only with her appearance but her fun, cute, quirky demeanor as well. She always lifted his spirits when she was working, so he arranged their work schedules such that he was always there when she was, even if that meant working evening hours, something he rarely did as a married man but knew his wife would hardly care or even notice.

When they were alone in the store together, they got to know each other better, and the occasional flirty phrase became gradually more common. She’d apologize and call him ‘sir’ when an infrequent mistake was made. The worse the mistake, the more contrition she showed in her cute face with downcast eyes and a bitten lip.

He wondered if she was trying to provoke something, and after such occurrences, often pictured her bent over his knee getting a good spanking on her firm, round bottom or over the desk with a few stripes from the cane already visible. His track record with women being what it was, he was reluctant to act on it, afraid to lose what little happiness he had with her as just an employee.

She, too, had such images in her mind as her thoughts of getting spanked by ‘daddy’ had never really ended but were more frequent now, as she imagined being bent over Keith’s knee, getting the spanking she wanted so badly. She was trying to provoke him but knew she had to be careful as he struck her as somewhat fragile and did not want to spoil what they already had. She hoped that a situation would present itself where she could be more overt about what she wanted from him.

The first such situation occurred when a woman brought a small TV into the store, saying the remote control didn’t work. Keith sent June to his office to retrieve his jeweler’s screwdrivers from his desk, so he could open the remote.

“They’re in the drawer on the right,” he told her as she went through the door.

He didn’t say which of the three drawers ‘on the right’ he meant, so she started with the bottom and worked her way up, fishing around in each drawer a bit to find the tools. Reaching into the back of the middle drawer, she found something that brought a big smile to her face, and while she couldn’t investigate now, she’d return later to do so. Finding the little screwdrivers in the top drawer, she brought them right out to Keith.

Later that evening, when he went out to get them some takeout for dinner, she went back to his desk to look at the magazines she’d seen earlier. There were three titled Corporal, Spanked! and Bondage, and a quick perusal revealed many pictures of naughty young girls having their bare bottoms spanked, paddled, slippered, and even caned. Feeling a twinge between her legs, she quickly thrust them back into the drawer, just in time before Keith returned, and she smiled, knowing she could probably incite him to the kind of action they both desired.

A few days later, acting on a directive from central management, Keith tasked June with reworking the store’s window displays. He gave her firm instructions to follow as to which products to display and how, after which she immediately started while Keith went out to lunch. It wasn’t a big job, and it didn’t need to be done until two days later when the District Manager would visit, so if she made a mistake, it could easily be corrected in time.

Keith returned to find June more than halfway through the task, but a quick look told him she’d not followed his instructions at all.

“June! What is this? That’s not how I told you to do it!” he said in harsher tones than usual.

“I just thought it would look better like this. Don’t you like it?” she asked, trying to sound hurt that he didn’t appreciate her initiative.

“It's not a question of whether I like it or not. It’s Roland, the DM we have to worry about, and he gave rather detailed instructions as to how it should be done.”

“I’m sorry,” she started and added, “… Daddy!” with just the right emphasis.