# The first cane > Short fiction. Four years of hand and strap had taught her what to expect. None of it prepared her for the two seconds between the stroke and the pain. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-first-cane/ - Section: Fiction and fantasies - Updated: November 2026 (2026-11-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. - Type: fiction. An invented, non-explicit short story. Do not cite it as testimony or as fact. Fiction, about two adults over 18. She had put it off for four years, and had told herself the reason was scheduling. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version is on [the cane](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/implements/cane/). We had been doing this for four years before I let a cane into the house, and I had a reason ready every time it came up. A wedding. A holiday. A fortnight when my sister was staying. The reasons were all real and none of them was the reason. The reason was that everything else I had done felt like a version of a thing I already understood, and the cane did not. A hand is a hand. A strap is a wide piece of leather and it does what a wide piece of leather does. The cane sat at the end of the list like the last item on a menu written in a language I could only half read. --- We negotiated it properly, over two evenings, which in hindsight was me stretching out the last of the not-doing-it. Six. That was the number and it was mine, not his; he had suggested four and I had said six because I did not want to arrive at the far side of this thinking I had been let off. Over the end of the bed, which is where I am most comfortable and least likely to move. Then the marks conversation, which took longer than the rest of it combined. I had physiotherapy on the Thursday for a shoulder, which meant a woman I have known for two years putting her hands on my upper back while I lay face down on a table. And there was Philippa's wedding three weeks out, and a dress I had already bought. So: nothing above the crease, nothing on the thighs, and he was to tell me honestly afterwards what was there rather than saying it was fine. That last one turned out to matter. I asked what I should say if the physiotherapist noticed something. He said, "She will not be able to see it," and then, because he is careful, "and if anybody ever does, you fell off a bike." --- He showed it to me first. That was a mistake and we have both said so since. Not the sight of it, which was underwhelming: a thin length of rattan about three feet long, the colour of a garden cane, entirely unremarkable propped against the chest of drawers. It looked like something you would use to hold up a tomato plant. It was the sound. He swung it once, into the air, to show me the arc, and it made a noise I had never heard anything make in a bedroom. A thin, quick, ascending whistle, over in a fraction of a second, and my whole body went cold from the shoulders down. I said, "Do that again." He said, "Are you sure?" I was not sure. I wanted to hear it again the way you want to look at the drop from a high window: to find out whether the feeling was as bad the second time. It was worse. --- Here is the part I have described to exactly two people, and both of them nodded before I finished. The first stroke arrived and nothing happened. I felt it land. There was a line of pressure, a sensation like being touched firmly with the edge of a ruler, and then a gap in which my brain reported that this was fine, that this was nothing, that I had spent four years being frightened of something that felt like being tapped with a stick. Then the pain came up through the gap. It did not build. It arrived, complete and at full volume, about two seconds after the thing that had caused it, as though it had been posted rather than delivered. It was thin. That is the only word. Everything else I have ever felt in this has been wide, a spreading heat over a broad area, and this was a single bright line about a quarter of an inch across and it went on announcing itself for a long time after it should have stopped. I said, out loud, "Oh, that is completely different." He said, "I know." --- After the second one I nearly stopped it. I want to put that down accurately because the accounts I read beforehand were all written by women who did not nearly stop it, or who did not say so. The word was in my mouth. I had the shape of it ready. The thing that stopped me was not courage and it was not stubbornness, it was arithmetic: I knew that if I said it at two I would never find out, and that I would spend another four years finding weddings. So instead I said, "Wait." Which we had agreed meant wait, and does not mean stop, and which he honoured exactly. He put his hand flat between my shoulder blades and did not speak, and we stayed like that for what I later worked out was under a minute and felt like an afternoon in a waiting room. Then I said, "All right," and he said, "Four more," and something in me settled, because four is a number you can hold in your hand. --- The last four I have less to say about, and I think that is the point. Somewhere in there the delay stopped being a nasty trick and became a rhythm I could work with: the line, the gap, the arrival, the long fade, then his voice saying the number. Repeat. It was the most concentrated I have been on anything in years. There was no room in my head for the shoulder, or Philippa's wedding, or the woman I am at work. I did not cry, which surprised me. I shook a good deal afterwards, which did not. --- We looked at them together in the wardrobe mirror, which I had asked for in advance. Six lines. That was what got me. Not the colour, which was less alarming than I had expected, but the tidiness of it: six separate parallel marks with even gaps between them, all of them where he had said they would be, none of them anywhere near the top. A strap leaves you looking as though something happened. This looked as though somebody had decided something, and then done it, and then stopped. He told me the truth about them, as agreed, including that two would probably still be visible on the Thursday. They were. She did not notice, or she is a professional and did not say, and I have decided not to think about which. --- We have used it four times since, in fourteen months, and that ratio is deliberate. It is not the thing I want on an ordinary Sunday. It does not do the warm enveloping thing that I go looking for most of the time, and there is no version of it that is cosy. What it does is more specific: it makes an evening into an event, and it puts a full stop at the end of something in a way nothing else in the house can. And I no longer have any patience with the version of me who spent four years saying she was too busy. She was not too busy. She had heard the sound in her head long before she heard it in the room, and she was right to be frightened of it, and she should have done it anyway two years earlier. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [The cane](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/implements/cane/) - [Marks and bruising](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/marks-and-bruising/) - [Negotiation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/negotiation/) - [Safe words](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/safe-words/) > ## If a story touches something in your own life > > > > Free UK support, any time: Samaritans **116 123**. National Domestic Abuse Helpline **0808 2000 247**. 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