A Caning Story from Janus 90. More stories can be viewed here.

A Room With a View
by John Undermeyer

MY SISTER, Penny, is 23 but could easily pass for 19. She married her boss, Robert, who is twice her age and divorced, with two teenage sons who live with their mother. We told her not to do it. We said that in ten years’ time or so, when Robert lost his vigour and she still needed regular sex, she’d be sorry. She went ahead anyway.

Two months later I married Gus.

‘You don’t understand,’ Gus said to me during our engagement. ‘Penny married Robert because he’s experienced.’

‘Experienced at what?’ I asked, and Gus looked at me as though I’d just been found under a gooseberry bush.

‘At lovemaking, Dopey. Penny had a few men of her own age and they left her unsatisfied. She thought she’d try a one-night stand with Robert and he kept her going till morning. She had no idea it could be so good.’

It occurred to me to ask Gus how he knew this but I realised Robert must have told him. At that moment the man himself came into the room. He was tight-lipped, ashen, and clearly in a rage. ‘I have sent your sister upstairs,’ he said to me. ‘I do not intend to explain why. I am sure Penny would not want anyone to know what she has done. But I ‘m going to punish her.’

Robert was long and thin like a pencil and twice as sharp. He ran his own business and everyone who worked for him agreed he was decisive and immediate in everything he did. Here was ample proof!

‘No need to explain things to us, old man.’ Gus turned to stare out of the window. ‘We’re only weekend guests here, after all.’

‘Thank you, Gustavius.’ Robert looked at me pointedly. ‘Now if I might have a word with Gus alone…’ he began.

I realised I’d better leave the room. Three minutes later Robert appeared in the hall. He had the most evil-looking crook-handled cane in one hand and he took the stairs two at a time without giving me a second glance. No sooner had he disappeared than I felt Gus touch my shoulder.

‘Follow me,’ he said, and proceeded to lead the way through Robert’s big old house to the kitchen where a second set of stairs led up to what used to be the servants’ quarters. When we reached the first floor Gus signalled me to keep quiet and we tiptoed to our bedroom which was immediately adjacent to the one used by Robert and Penny. On the wall to the right of the double bed was a large oil painting. Imagine my surprise when Gus motioned me to help him lift it down. Its removal revealed a wide pane of slightly dimmed glass looking straight into my sister’s bedroom. The scene I saw through this window in the wall was tense and poignant and so shockingly intimate that I covered my face with my hands and tried to hide at first.

‘For God’s sake, Gus!’ I breathed. ‘Put it back at once. They’ll see us!’

‘No they won’t,’ he grinned. ‘On their side this is nothing but a mirror. Robert told me about it when he first decided to buy the house. Showed me this too… watch.’

Gus turned a tiny dial which the painting had also hidden. As it clicked on we could suddenly hear Penny’s voice through the wall.

‘I’m so sorry, darling,’ she was pleading in an urgent, breathless voice. ‘I truly am. I love you with all my heart and wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. But you were away in Denmark and Peter came to the house and we drank and ate and then drank some more and by the time I noticed the clock it was too late for him to leave. I didn’t mean anything to happen…’

I clutched Gus by the arm. ‘Oh no,’ I whispered, ‘she’s been unfaithful to him and he’s found out.’

‘Certainly sounds like it,’ Gus murmured back. ‘I wonder how?’

I slowly uncovered my eyes and peered through the glass at my sister. She was stark naked and I felt a surge of envy at her slender young body, shoulder-length brown hair and pert little breasts. Five foot seven, elfin-like in expression, fragile and pale to look at now and desperately vulnerable as she gazed tremblingly at her enraged husband.

I studied her profile with its fine straight nose and lovely dimpled crescent beneath, which curved down to a ripely full-lipped mouth now open in dismay. She had a firm jawline and a neck as graceful as a sea bird’s. I noticed Gus running his eyes down over her shapely-breasted chest. A groan escaped my sister at her husband’s stern words, and her nostrils widened slightly. Then she dropped her head in complete submission.

‘Why doesn’t she refuse the cane?’ I said to Gus, wondering at her silent agreement. He gave me that look which said simpleton, and I already knew the answer. Penny could refuse the cane but she knew she would be punished in one way or another. Robert could devise something much worse and longer-lasting. They were due to island-hop in the South Pacific this summer. Penny could forfeit that, and never know if Robert took someone else with him. He could easily make up an excuse to have a companion, to help keep contact with the office while he was away.

But right now he was pulling the dressing-table stool out from under the dresser. The seat had a satin cushion-top and was wide enough for two people to sit on. Robert lifted it with an audible grunt across the room until there was ample space around it, then he set it down and stepped back.

‘Over you go.’ His voice came clearly through the speaker into the room where Gus and I watched absorbedly. I marvelled at my younger sister’s obedience. She neither protested nor resisted. There was a dignity in the way she knelt at the stool, placed her hands on top of it, then raised her slim hips and positioned herself so that her tummy lay perfectly central across the burgundy satin, letting her head and hands drop to the other side. Her flowing brown tresses tumbled forward, obscuring her face and brushing the floor.

I continued to watch through the glass, amazed at the strange beauty of the scene. Robert, tall and impeccable in his neat dark suit, stood back to look at her. I had no idea what he was thinking but he paused for a full minute while my naked sister lay perfectly still and silent over the stool, waiting with extraordinary passivity for her husband to begin his punishing work. Penny was presented so that her bottom faced the mirror and Gus and I could see it in all its glory. I was always known that my sister had a lovely behind, but it was Gus who put its perfection into words.

‘I’ve never seen anything,’ he murmured into my ear, ‘that quite so invited the cane. I have admired botties in the aerobic class you go to. I have been attracted to botties on beaches and at your riding school. I have blinked at girls on ice-rinks and on the parallel bars. You have a lovely bot yourself,’ he said diplomatically. ‘But for sheer floggable perfection, for tight, perfectly equal halves of a heavenly apple, for the most seductive tennis-girl buttocks in the whole history of the game – this is the one. The perfectly adorable, cream-skinned, tight, tempting and totally unmarked bottom.’

‘Quite nice, I suppose,’ I said, not without a certain edge to my voice. ‘It won’t be so attractive when Robert’s finished with it though.’

‘Hmm… I don’t know,’ chuckled Gus and I punched his arm, half-amused, half-angry.

‘You’re just jealous, my love,’ he said. ‘You almost wish it was happening to you.’ Gus moved close to me and fondled my bottom. I pulled away but I had to admit to myself that the whole scene was undeniably arousing. And partly the excitement came from secretly spying on Penny when she could have no idea that I was watching her. How embarrassed she could feel if she knew that my gaze was attached to her arched buttocks and my heart was pounding from the thought of the cane.

Gus turned to the mirror again and gazed through. ‘Those cheeks are so beautiful I could almost let her off,’ he said wistfully. ‘It’s almost a shame to bring a rod to them. It’s as if Robert were about to damage a famous painting. Bring a hammer to Michelangelo.’

‘Oh, shut up and watch!’ I practically snarled.

As we now both continued to do, staring fixedly through the secret pane as Robert held the cane in his right hand, horizontally across his chest, and ran the palm of his left hand lovingly along its slender length. He did this several times: stroking the cane, caressing it, transferring the warmth from his fingers into the tenderising wood. After a few moments he stopped the stroking movements and began tapping his palm slowly, edging backwards as he did so, measuring his distance from Penny’s tense waiting body. I was fascinated to see how the cane bent under pressure and now quivered in the air between taps as though it were truly alive and eager to perform its shocking task.

‘That’s about right,’ said Gus in a tightening voice. He was riveted by the scene. I must admit it had me quite entranced, too, even though Penny was my sister. Or perhaps, because she was my sister – I just don’t know. My feelings were so confused. The cane moved upwards till it pointed to the ceiling, and Robert stood on tip-foe. Then, faster than either of us could follow, it whirred through the still air of the bedroom and suddenly it was home.

Deep and solid it struck, sinking into Penny’s fleshy bottom-cheeks. The noise of the impact sounded strangely metallic through the tiny microphone. Penny’s arms and legs all moved and her mane of shining brown hair swished as her head jerked backwards.

The sounds of her pain rushed from her open mouth in breathy cries. Her feet – the soles of which were facing us – drummed on the carpet. Robert kept the cane pressed against her stricken bottom-flesh for about five seconds before lifting it away. It was then that I saw the furrow it had ploughed.

And still, and still, and still, she continued to react to that first bite of the supple cane.

Gus and I were standing close by the spy-window, transfixed by what was happening only feet away on the other side of the glass. I was holding his hand very tightly, and his was squeezing mine.

‘I felt that in here,’ I gasped. ‘I hope she doesn’t have to take too many of those.’ I bit my lip in sympathy. Gus said nothing, but continued to stare intently at the scene. What a charge passed between our palms! How strange I felt inside!

We saw that Robert had shifted slightly when delivering the stroke, and now he moved his feet back into place and slowly raised the quivering wand. Down it came, striking like a furious snake! Penny was still jigging about when the second stroke landed, only a hair’s-breadth away from the first. I marvelled that Robert could be so accurate. Was it beginner’s luck, or…? My thought was stopped in mid-track by Penny’s cries bursting through the microphone. First a long, screeching ‘Aaahhhhgh!’ then by ‘Oh, please… please…’ Her head rolled to and fro, her streaked bottom lifted from the stool and shook vigorously, and her legs seemed almost to be cycling from the knees up.

Each time the whippy wood imprinted its shape into the full, fleshy softness of her buttocks, Penny’s body became taut as a bow-string and I noticed how, in a completely reflex action, her pubis was working against the satin stool-top. It was a grinding movement, a thrusting-downwards of her centre point, squeezing and squashing her abdomen against its flat support in a manner more suitable to be seen by a husband than a sister. Which made me feel even more wicked to be secretly watching Penny receive her punishment for adultery.

This squashing, squirming rhythm stopped as the cane was lifted off and my sister’s bottom tensed, still and fearfully expectant. The pain must have been gnawing like rodent teeth through the flesh of her buttocks, curvily silken flesh which had never before been even so much as touched by an angry spank, so far as I knew – never mind a hard, narrow, burn-producing cane!

I turned to Gus, who grinned at me sheepishly. I had caught him with his hand adjusting the part of himself that was never touched in public. I affected not to notice, then changed my mind and tutted disapprovingly.

‘Sorry, darling,’ he grunted softly. ‘But you must admit your sister is beautiful. So much like you,’ he lied.

‘And Robert is being awfully strict, and I’m only human too,’ I whispered, confessing my own weakness by clinging to him tightly. ‘Oh, that bottom!’ he moaned. Now sparks seemed to shoot through our clothes as we held each other. Four eyes lifted again to the glass. Whatever jealousy I had felt dissolved; we were as one.

Robert’s first two strokes had been calculated, controlled, with a decent pause between them, and Gus and I expected that the punishment would go on as it had started. I had already assumed that Penny would get the statutory six – which, believe me, would have been a terrible punishment no matter how young, healthy and brave you were. But when Robert raised the cane for the third time and brought it swishing concisely down, he began a series of whisking raps to my sister’s flinching, twitching bottom which followed one another as though he were conducting a fast-playing orchestra. Up and down! Up and down! And down again, again, again. The swift staccato cracks of the limber rod against Penny’s jiggling buttocks were clearly audible through the tiny loudspeaker, as were her pants, gasps and whispers.

This absolutely new and different kind of punishment, lighter yet infinitely faster, left Robert with his hair falling over his face, his cheeks puffing, his eyes fixed like some pilot in a storm, his breath snorting as he flicked and tapped and flicked again as if he were almost toying with Penny, although it could not possibly have seemed a game to her. I saw – and heard – that she could hardly bear it.

At first Penny yelped and twisted at the stinging, whippy nips but soon she was writhing so energetically and spasmodically that she had to grasp the stool with both hands to stop herself from tumbling to the floor. This did not in any way inhibit Robert’s spiteful wristy flicks. Gradually the turmoil in Penny’s lovely young body grew desperate, and slowly but surely she wriggled herself to the edge of the stool and half tumbled, half let herself down on to the carpet where she lay kicking and twisting, rising a little off her knees and falling back, undulating like some primeval rippling creature. Moaning, whimpering and yelping as she begged her husband to relent and stop the constant rain of stinging cane-pricks, yet giving herself up to them nonetheless.

As Penny, naked and utterly vulnerable, jerked and twitched on the carpet, tears rolled oilily on her downy cheeks while she looked up at her husband, acknowledging that she deserved this relentless manifestation of his wrath, but pleading piteously for it to stop. Penny rolled a little nearer to the glass through which Gus and I so raptly watched this incredible spectacle. She was kneeling, her bottom up, three-quarters towards us, her face down and hidden when Robert finally stopped his nippy, zippy cascade which made my whole body quiver in sympathy with Penny’s.

Gus gripped me tightly, his eyes glued to the deeply divided moons of Penny’s hypnotically weaving bottom. There were two vivid lines where the first two cane-strokes had fallen, but the rest of her seat was covered in perhaps a couple of dozen red dots where the very tip of the cane had stung like a giant wasp, jab and away, sting and away, prick and away, each wasp-tail adding its own injection of venom into that previously pristine bottom.

The plain result was that Penny’s buttock-muscles were working in a churning reflex action. Her cheeks clenched tightly, squeezing the cleft between them into a ruler-straight line. Then they relaxed, only to spasm tight again, squeezing the firm mounds together. Open and shut, open and shut. It was the kind of movement, jerky and uncontrolled, that I only experienced myself when Gus worked me to that zenith of perfection and I burst forth inwardly, yielding and grateful for his steady loving attentions. Indeed, I had previously had no idea that a cane could make a dainty feminine bottom like Penny’s do what in my experience was normally inspired by the action of another rod altogether. And still the spasms went on! I guessed Penny was desperately trying to dissipate the wasp stings, though the appearance of her posterior contortions gave an altogether different and supremely erotic impression.

The jostling, bucking and contracting had a mesmerising effects on us both as we stood, highly aroused, with our noses against the glass. I think Gus would have liked my sister’s lovely smooth bottom to go on clenching and unclenching like that, rhythmically gripping and ungripping, tightening and relaxing forever. Although I was becoming envious again of the rapt attention he was paying it I sensed that, like myself, he was wondering whether there was any pleasure now beginning to meld with the self-evident pain. I did nothing to distract his looking. I must admit that my sister’s spongy undulations had a remarkable effect on me: I actually felt myself doing it too, clenching and unclenching my own buttocks – whether in sympathy or excited unison I could not be sure.

Finally Penny gained control, first of her stinging bottom and then of herself. She must, I am sure, have realised that although Robert had at first determined to show her no mercy, he had in fact been kinder with his flurry of wasp stings than if he had delivered six single, full-out strokes – and that the darting, nippy cane had stung, certainly, but not burned and flared deep and hard as it might otherwise have done.

We continued to watch through the glass, open-mouthed in a kind of wonder as Penny began to pick herself up, then walked slowly and penitently towards Robert, her head hung down and arms outstretched in entreaty, asking to be forgiven.

‘I’ll never do it again,’ we heard her say in a tiny, plaintive voice, so alien to her normal bright confidence. ‘Not even think about it, my darling Bobby. Not ever again, I really promise. I’m sorry… I deserved it all.’

It was then that Gus switched off the eavesdropping system and told me to help him replace the picture. As the adjoining room regained its boundaries he took my hand and, with a gentle yet urgent movement, reminded me of what I had earlier seen him adjusting. And later than that, after Gus had shown me visible evidence of how eagerly he needed attention, and I had sought tactile confirmation of his stunning firmness of purpose, another set of girlish buttocks began to clench and unclench, tighten and relax beneath him, and another feminine voice was moaning and whimpering, gasping and crying out…

I felt so pleased, and so naughty, that I do believe I deserve the cane.