Under the Whip

At night, this city is hot, and bellows like a large animal in pain. Dance music shakes the old building, sirens shriek below us in the darkness. There is a scream, laughter, the rumbling of heavy traffic. I like this evidence of human life, down in the streets. We are high above the noise, and I’m indifferent to the city’s roaring. He has my full attention.

We’re in the largest room at the end of the apartment’s long corridor. Minutes earlier, we’d been entwined on the sofa, opposite the dark-wood four-poster bed that dominates the space. He’d instructed me to go to the bedroom next door and change into the short silk backless nightdress he’d bought me, and which I paired with gold silk panties and sheer black stockings. Now, I’m facing the four-poster with my wrists bound to each upper corner, my ankles to the posts at the foot. I’m stretched into a wide x-shape, on tiptoes, and I know, because he’s told me, that he’s going to whip me.

Last year, he’d asked me if there was anything I’d like to try and which we hadn’t yet explored. I, warm under a duvet and comfortable in the knowledge he wasn’t going to beat me again that day, had confided that I’d like to know how it felt to be whipped with no time limit and no preordained number of strokes, until we reached the last of my endurance. Now, spread-eagled, I consider the optimism of the me who existed last winter, writing an IOU for present-day me to honour. I’m not sure she was wise to share this fantasy of ours. The whip in his hand is light but cruel, and we have the whole night.

He lifts the back of my silk slip, and caresses my ass through my panties. He discovers the label sewn into the back of them. My standing orders are to remove care labels, but this underwear is expensive and the designer's label is discreet. I’d thought it would be alright to leave it in. “Wash at 40 degrees” he reads, disdainfully, and I’m sure it doesn’t say that. I think the label announces only Agent Provocateur, embroidered in a slanting script. I’m sure of it. Mostly sure of it. Nowhere near sure enough to argue with him. And in any case, he has no responsibility to be fair. “Sometimes the injustice is the turn-on” he once declared, and I agree.

Nevertheless, I’d been preparing for back-whipping, so his delivery of six sharp cane strokes, delivered fast across my ass with no preamble is a shock. Sometimes, pain like this, arriving unexpectedly, makes me feel as though my lungs have shut down. I gasp in air as my pulse starts to race, and in my peripheral vision, I see him return the cane to the sideboard, and replace it with the multi tailed whip. I hope he might start gently. I have no expectation that he will.

Bound as I am, facing away from him, it is impossible to predict where the first stroke will land. He’s not wearing shoes and moves like a cat— I’m not entirely sure where he is, other than that he’s somewhere behind me. Sometimes in these moments I hope that if I find the right pattern of breathing, I’ll be able to master the pain early. I’m trying, with a long, slow exhalation, attempting to calm my racing heart, when the whip claws across my right hip, surely the hardest he’s ever struck me. The impact drives me forward, arching away from the pain, but the satin ties at my wrists and ankles hold fast and there’s no escape. I make up for this in volume — I shriek, towards the ceiling, sounding momentarily like a hideously wounded animal, and for an unsteady moment I think I might faint. I will strength back into my legs and hope the next stroke will be softer.

It lands before I’ve caught my breath. Pain screams across my left buttock and I scream too. I’m briefly glad of the city’s noise, which I’m adding to. Hopefully my sounds of pain will be lost in the night’s cacophony, because now I sense this isn’t a whipping I’ll be taking quietly.

The third stroke is across my shoulders. I don’t immediately register that it’s much lighter than the others — I’m unnerved by the shock of the first two, and I shriek just as wildly as before, in expectation of the agony that I anticipate in the wake of its impact. It does not arrive — this stroke was well within the limits of my tolerance. I understand that his intention is to play not only with my body but with my mind. He’s too sophisticated to simply try to hurt me as much as possible, as fast as possible. He is ensuring that the question — what will you do next? — is the only one I can think of. The possibilities balloon in my mind, obliterating all other thoughts. For now, only he exists. If he chose to, he could hurt me beyond what I could bear. This whip could probably scar me if he were to be careless. He could give me such a frightening experience I’d never want to be whipped again. And the fact that beneath my panic, I know he’ll do none of these things to me, because he is worthy of my trust, holds me in perfect balance, between fear and faith. I think I should tell him this. I want him to understand his power over me. I think he’d like to know.

I often want to talk in the moments I’m least likely to be articulate. This is one such occasion. Endorphins are racing around my body, presumably doing important things to stop me from fainting, and they seem to slow me down. My words sound blurry and slurred, even to my own ears.

“Nothing is more frightening than this” I tell him, knowing he’s still somewhere behind me, and hoping that I’m audible. “But nothing makes me feel safer”. It sounds too tidy to be anything but a silly glib cliché, but it’s the truth. Is it a curse, to need to be hurt, in order to feel so safe? If so, that’s fine. I don’t want it lifted.

His response is from a long way off — I think he’s seated again, watching me from a distance. “You are safe” he replies, in his gentlest voice, the one that contrasts most thrillingly with our evening’s activity. I didn’t need him to tell me, but I like how it sounds, and when the whipping resumes, I hold onto his reassurance as though it was an anchor, and the pain becomes perhaps a little more manageable in consequence.

Minutes pass, impossible to count, and the welts raised by the whip must surely begin to blur into a criss-cross mess covering my back. Each stroke feels icy cold for the first second after impact, then burning heat rushes in behind it, and throbs until my whole back seems to pulse red, in time with my heartbeat. “It hurts” I whisper, unnecessarily. He’s close behind me. I daren’t turn my head — if I do so in the instant before the next stroke, the whip might strike my face. So I stay still, and merely wish him closer.

His right hand caresses my back and the welts burn hotter. “I know”, he comforts me, at once antagonist and rescuer. “I know”. I don’t think he knows, truly, how much it hurts, and I am glad that he does not. Because if he really knew, this compassionate, civilised man, would he still be able to do it? Perhaps so, if he could also truly appreciate the euphoria that comes to me on these occasions, transported by the pain. We will never fully understand how it is, to be each other’s opposite, Top versus Bottom, Dominant versus Submissive. All I can hope is that I’m giving him everything he wished for, as he does me.

He kisses my throat and I tilt my head back, to move my hair out of his way. It tips further than I was expecting — I’m suddenly looking at the ceiling and I discover I’ve entered a rare version of subspace that I’d forgotten about. When this thing we do is sufficiently intense, for a sufficiently protracted period, my muscles seem to give up their ability to hold me upright. My head is too heavy for my neck. I no longer think I’m about to faint, but surely, this isn’t exactly full consciousness either? Like a puppet with half of its strings cut, I’m now only upright because I’m tied that way, and I wonder if I’m really safe to continue.

Perhaps he wants to be sure of the same. Suddenly (maybe suddenly; time isn’t working normally) he’s on the bed in front of me, gloriously close, his face level with mine. He kisses me, bites my lower lip, then his tongue is exploring my mouth. Abruptly, I remember with a jolt of jubilant arousal that this whipping may be foreplay. I remember there’s every chance that he’ll fuck me eventually, and his tongue’s intrusion has awakened my desire to be fucked, hard and relentlessly on this four-poster bed. He pulls away from me, and I find my voice again. “Please fuck me. Please, please fuck me now” I sound desperate. I am. Instead, he reclines on one elbow, half way up the bed, well out of my reach. His white shirt is unbuttoned. In this moment he is incandescent with beauty, with dominance, and I hate it that I cannot reach him. He unzips his trousers, his right hand grips his cock. Once upon a time, long, long ago, he’d shown it to me for the first time, from across a big hotel room. “Would you like to see what you can’t have?” he’d asked. We’d agreed not to fuck that day. I’d already wanted him for many, many months, and if his cock had proved to be average in every way my desire would have been undimmed. But it was by no means average — his cock was, and is, perfect. That first time, I’d reached for it automatically — the rules we’d agreed on wiped from my mind by ardour. Now, I momentarily forget that I’m tied to the bed frame. I move involuntarily towards him and the silk ties bring me up short. He’s stroking his cock with slow leisurely movements and I don’t want him to pleasure himself, because I want to do it. Watching this feels as torturous as the very worst slashes of the whip. I think I actually may whine in frustration. I can’t reach him and I have never wanted him more.

From the bedside table, he picks up a piece of the chocolate we’d bought earlier. He draws close, and feeds me a square of it, then kisses me again before the chocolate has quite dissolved. Our mouths are sticky and delicious, and I’m still gasping from the pleasure when his mouth moves down to my breasts. He bites first one, then the other, and I know even before he picks up the whip again that the hiatus is over and that he is going to hurt me some more, because we’re not near the end of my endurance after all. I’m fully conscious again — alert enough to be scared, aroused enough to savour the fear.

The whipping continues. Hard strokes that drive the air from my lungs and sting so brightly that I briefly mistake the sweat dripping down my back for blood. Lighter ones, that lift my hair as the whip displaces air around me, breezing over my scorching skin. I remember a phrase, “dancing under the whip”, from a long ago children’s book. I recall it exactly, as I do all the references to corporal punishment that I discovered during my childhood. I’d read them repeatedly, trying to grasp at the details that the authors had thoughtlessly omitted. Why, wondered ten year old me, would pain make you move around? Why wouldn’t you just stay still? Surely flailing about wouldn’t lessen your suffering?

The answer is no clearer to me now than then, but as the whip transports me towards delirium, I can see myself as though from above, and it’s clear to me that the long ago author was correct. Keeping still is not an option. I am writhing to the absolute limits of the restraints around my wrists and ankles. The bed frame is shaking, and my head lolls backwards as though my spine has turned to rubber. Dimly, I wonder if this compulsion to move is the bodies’ attempt to distract itself from the pure agony of the first few seconds after each stroke lands? If so, it doesn’t work, but as the strokes mount, my impulse to stir is ebbing away.

Of all the precious moments in this most valuable of activities, this instant, when it comes, as it often does not, is my favourite. It’s the feeling of my body giving up any resistance, abandoning its coping strategies, and simply accepting the pain, along with my dominant’s decision to deliver it. Simultaneously, my mind is offering its own submission. I’m no longer begging for it to stop, or for him to fuck me. I’m no longer trying to influence his decisions, or even hoping for anything particular. It’s a feeling of defeat, I suppose, or perhaps more accurately, of surrender. And I love it, because if I’m the loser, he’s the winner — just as I always want him to be. If I’m defeated, he is the victor, since it is he who has won my surrender. From the outside, perhaps this scene would look as though he’s been hurting me, and of course, he has. But the main thing he’s done, invisibly, is to transform himself into more than a man — to me he’s a king now, or a conquering army. It’s embarrassing to think about this feeling when I’m sober again. It’s embarrassing to type out, and to read back to myself. But it is such bliss, to belong to the king of the entire world.

While I’ve been drifting, euphoric, into this surrender, he’s replaced the whip in his hand with the leather-covered cane. Just as the whipping began with a caning, it is ending. I appreciate the symmetry, and though the strokes hurt, my reaction seems to come from a distance, with the sensation arriving several seconds after each impact. It evens out the intensity, so that rather than a series of peaks and troughs, the burning throb seems to stretch out, endless and intoxicating.

Much of my weight has been taken by my wrists as I’ve gradually subsided, unable to hold myself up properly, and my hands are going numb. He reaches up and unties me, his hands infinitely gentle. The knots in the satin have tightened up and it’s a struggle with which I cannot assist. There’s an easier way to tie them and the thought floats across my mind that I must remember to show him how, one day. I don’t want him to have to fight with obdurate knots, my king-of-the-world. Tomorrow, I will discover that all of me aches, not so much from the impact of the whip itself, but from the tension in my muscles, from dancing under its assault. For now though, my body feels as though it barely exists, as though I’m made of vapour, floating above the bed.

Once he’s freed my ankles too, he invites me onto the bed where he has settled, with his back against the headboard. I complete the task slowly, crawling — my hands are still tingling and a euphoric lethargy has settled over me. But, though the journey seems long, he is at the end of it, and this is all the motivation I need. By the time I reach him, he’s removed his shirt and has reclined back on the pillows. He gathers me in, to his left side, and I press my face against his chest as his arms wrap around me, holding me there, turning us into a serene Taijitu. The bed could be floating on an ocean for all I care. The city could be crumbling to dust around us. Together, we have reached the haven that has awaited us, at the end of my endurance.

Image by Pief