Six of the best with the cane. It’s the standard punishment, the old cliché. Only, it’s not quite so ‘standard’ when you’re plucking up the courage to face it for the first time.

See, for a kinky girl, it’s easier in a way than for the schoolgirl in the story. The story-girl can’t walk away: when the headmaster tells her to bend over, then bend over she must. Whereas the kinky girl’s choosing to be there: she can always back out, say no, decide that she doesn’t want to be caned today thank you very much. She has the power, the right of escape.

But, see, for a kinky girl, that makes it even harder than for the story-girls. For she can escape. She doesn’t need to bend over, to be obedient, to take the ‘punishment’. So there’s a huge line to cross – to take that giant leap from imagining a caning, to experiencing it for real. It’s a leap that takes immense courage and bravery.

Since Smudge started commenting on the blog earlier in the year, and we started swapping notes, she’d always confessed to a sheer terror of the cane. She’d stayed with us a few weeks ago, and been spanked for the first time – her heart pounding as she stretched over my lap. She was so sweet, so brave. But the rattan? It had taken her until the third morning before she could even face looking at a cane, never mind taking a succession of light whacks and that one harder stroke. Only, it wasn’t that hard, really. Just a taster. For what was to come.

This time was different. I held the Malaysian cane in my hand: thin, long, flexible, whippy. She looked at me, looked at it; I could see her weighing the implications of what she was about to do. And then she stepped forward.

She bent over with her hands on the desk, did our sweet heroine; I made her bend lower, straighten her legs, present her backside properly. Smudge’s six were going to be done right. She looked back at me in the mirror that ran the length of the desk. (Was it too cruel to make a girl watch her first caning, to be a spectator at the event?). I measured out the cane – and started her journey.

The first two strokes across her jeans were delivered just hard enough to connect, to bite, to make her look surprised. But the third was hard: properly hard. She hadn’t expected it; in the mirror, I watched her reaction – shock, pain, the wavering-bravery moment. The even-braver moment when she stayed in position for the next. And the fifth, and the final sixth: the should-have-been-the-hardest but I didn’t have the heart to make it so after that third cut.

And then Smudge could stand, and be hugged. A girl who had been caned. Fiction, imagination replaced by reality. And I was honoured to have been the one to have been trusted to take her across the divide.

But, I know… it’s not me you want to hear from. You’re far more interested in Smudge’s description of what happened. And that’s coming tomorrow…