Expressions of Pain

As the cane bites, she reaches reflexively back and digs her fingers into the soft flesh over her hip, tugging at it in a desperate, convulsive way. She lets go. She cries openly from the sixth cane stroke onwards. To keep from screaming she bites the blanket in which her face is buried. By the time we’re done it will be wet with a mixture of tears and spit, blacked with chaotic flecks of her eyeliner.

She apologises every time she screams. Reflexively. A verbal tic. I tell her it’s unnecessary, but she apologises all the same. “Sorry, sir.” She moves a hand to tug at her hip and then snatches it quickly back again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologise for this,” I say.

“Sorry,” she says.

Once, after a particularly hard stroke, she contorts on the bed, arches her back. Her tear-streaked face upturned, a wad of blanket still in her mouth, reaching for her hip to dig and tug the skin there. For a moment she’s elsewhere. Transported by pain. And then, as it withdraws, she spits out the covers and moans an apology before resuming her position.

The moment remains fixed in my head. For a long time after the caning – after we’ve fucked and napped together and been for a walk together and parted company and arranged to meet again, I think about her in that moment of agony – the constellation of all her expressions of pain at once: the tears, her teeth fixed on the blanket, her fingers digging into the flesh of her hip. I try to think of a way to convey to her just how beautiful she is when she willingly suffers so acutely for me, but I can’t really think of the words.