Katie....

Story from Blushes 03.

Katie....

Katie's return from her weekend away brought home a girl who, in her quiet, watchful, almost respectful manner, might have been an entirely different person from the rebellious-spirited teenager who had departed so cockily on the previous Friday evening. Collected at the station early on Sunday evening, she humped her one small suitcase into the back seat of the car and then sat beside her uncle in the front for the fifteen minute drive to the house. She was subdued, careful not to initiate conversation yet unusually polite when spoken to, looking for the most part through the windscreen but paying attention in an almost studied way when her uncle made casual observations and asked questions of her about her two days at Grogmore House. She kept her hands in her lap, her pleated skirt dipping down between her thighs as she nervously interlaced her fingers and untangled them over and over.

Once at the house she asked to be allowed to change out of her uniform, but her uncle said he wanted to see her in his study – she could take her luggage upstairs and have a wash but she was to come straight down again. Katie didn't argue – even that was odd; in the normal way she would have stamped her foot and insisted upon having her own way. Instead she lugged her case up the stairs and into her bedroom, dashed some water on her face and appeared in the study looking fresh and pink cheeked. Warily she stood just inside the door with her hands behind her back – not slouched impudently against the doorframe as she might ordinarily have presented herself, had she presented herself at all, but standing demurely upright, her feet together, her eyes watchful but without the bright challenge about them which had so frequently been there of late.

"I understand you had a little set-to with Mr. Warrender, Katie. Is that so?"

"Er – yes." She pushed a stray strand of hair out of her eyes, looking embarrassed.

"I further understand that you came off somewhat the worse. Hmm?"

Katie said nothing, though her rueful expression confirmed her tutor's telephoned report. Her uncle twirled his finger in the air.

"I think I should like to be allowed a glimpse of the battlefield. Perhaps you'll show me."

"P-pardon –?"

"Turn round, Katherine, and show me your bottom."

A week ago such an instruction would have been greeted by a derisive giggle – this evening Katie's skirt slipped obediently up over he hips and her long-ago discarded navy knickers brought back into service on the advice of the tutor to whom she had been sent, were peeled rather reluctantly down off the impudent pertness of her buttocks.

Even from across the room, the swathe of cane marks underscoring the roundness of her bum cheeks was very evident. Enthralled at the sight – one he had never seen before, although he had often enough imagined it in moments of vengeful frustration – Katie's uncle gazed at the still reddened marks whilst a grin, perhaps of triumph, spread across his face. Peeping shyly over her shoulder – before this past weekend she hadn't ever allowed any man to see her naked bottom – Katie watched him anxiously. Leaving her just as she was – and why not – to reflect on the events of the past couple of days, Katie's uncle opened the brown envelope containing Mr. Warrender's written report which he had sent home with the girl.

"Disobedience, disrespectful language, unhelpful attitude – six strokes of the cane, eight strokes of the cane" – there was a list of the canings Katie had earned herself, and at the end of the report, the laconic observation: "Katie has chosen to do it the hard way; perhaps she will have a different attitude next time, should you find it necessary to send her back." No explanation of how the man had managed to deal with the girl, nor, indeed, of how he had even got her to stay within range whilst he got her knickers down. But there, in all its punished glory was the evidence of his achievement – Katie's unhappy little bum insouciant as ever but autographed now by the man who had whipped the cockiness out of the girl. The very sight was enough to stir one to suppose that if it could be done by Mr. Warrender, then it could be done by anyone else, provided they were equally determined. And Katie's uncle was determined. He was, however, going to cheat, aware that it might not be that easy.

"Katie – you may as well know that I mean to resolve this matter of your previous mis-behaviour in this house, by which I mean that I insist there is to be no repitition of it."

Katie turned her bottom away and stooped to pull up her knickers, a flicker of the old resentment showing in her face.

"Leave them where they are! Being bare-bottomed is something you're going to have to get used to from now on."

Uncertain of herself, though plainly on the verge of rebellion, Katie's fingers slipped slowly from their grasp on her knickers and she stood up again, her skirt falling across the tops of her legs.

"Hold your skirt up, Katie. Modesty is something you're going to have to forget about for the time being."

Katie thought about that. The whirring cogs were almost audible as her hands dallied with the pleats of her skirt, then, in a way that seemed to say, "well, alright, if you insist – but don't expect me to take much more of this –!", Katie's little pubic nest made a belated reappearance, snuggled demurely between the tops of her legs. Her uncle sensed the advantage he had been enjoying slipping away; he would have to play his ace.

"Did you notice anything while you were up in your room, Katie?"

Katie considered the question suspiciously.

"No," she said, cnallengingly.

"Behind the door?"

"No. I don't think I looked behind the door."

"Then I suggest you do go and look."

Uneasy, Katie looked at her uncle for several seconds before she turned away, reaching for her knickers again.

"Leave your knickers, Katie" said her uncle patiently.

With a glance over her shoulder that said "This is positively the last time I let you bully me into this kind of thing." Katie let go of her pants and went brusquely out of the room.

"And hold your skirt up."

"Christ!" said Katie under her breath, peevishly yanking up her skirt up round her hips before realising that he could no longer see her anyway. A minute later she was back, her cheeks pale and her eyes defiant – but she was holding her skirt up.

"Well?" asked her uncle quietly.

"What's that for?" she demanded, though it was a demand tempered by caution.

"I should have thought you'd have learnt what canes are for in the last few days, Katie. They're for whipping naughty girls' bottoms."

"My bottom?" Her skirt drooped across her tummy as she forgot about holding it up.

"Yes."

"You're goin' to cane me?" She looked both indignant and frightened at the same time.

"Yes."

Katie's skirt fell back to its full length.

"I won't let you cane me! You're not allowed to cane me!'

"I thought you might say that, Katie –" He studied her carefully, trying to judge the degree of her resistance exactly, "– there is always the alternative of course – or rather, there are two alternatives."

Katie stared at him, her cheeks colouring rapidly.

"What alternatives?"

"The first is that you behave yourself impecably –" she said nothing, but it seemed to her uncle a vain hope that she might consider that option anyway, "– or you'll be sent back to Mr. Warrender."

Katie seemed to shiver at the mention of that gentleman's name, but she rallied at once.

"I won't go! I will not go!"

"I think I could arrange things so that you did, if I wanted you too."

"You couldn't. You couldn't make me go back there! I wouldn't do it!"

"I could sell your pony."

Dumbstruck, Katie stared at him with her mouth sagging wider every moment.

"You wouldn't! You pig – you can't sell Brucie – he's mine!"

"He's mine, actually, and yes, I could sell him."

Panic stricken, Katie began to blubber protests.

"I could take you away from Ferndale and send you to the comprehensive –"

"All my friends are at Ferndale –!"

"Ferndale is expensive, Katie dear."

"But – but –"

"I could decide that a girl who didn't think she ought to behave herself properly – and that she shouldn't have her bottom caned if she didn't – simply wasn't nice enough to go to ballet lessons –"

"Oh, no –!"

"Or to her friend's house in Scotland for the holidays –"

"Oh –!"

"Or to gymkhanas – not that there would be much point, without a pony –"

Katie's tears began to roll brightly down her cheeks. Her lips moved, but soundlessly. Her uncle realised that he had won her over to his point of view.

"Katie –"

"Y-y-yes?"

"Katie dear – pull your skirt up again – and come over here."

With leaden steps and slow, Katie came, her tummy uncovered again and her knickers slipping further down her thighs with every fateful step.

In the matter of the options her uncle had outlined, Katie had realised that by far the safest so far as her bum was concerned was that of being well-behaved – 'impecably so', as he had put it. And she had tried – oh, how she had tried, but never having had any practice in being well-mannered, polite and respectful she had found herself falling far short of the required 'impecability'. She had in consequence, been getting some practice in the taking down of her knickers, blubbering apologies, wriggling her bottom around whilst the cane stung it's naked vulnerability, and acting in general just like a thoroughly well punished naughty girl would whose uncle had had enough of her misbehaviour. It had never ocurred to her to plump for the other option – a return visit to Mr. Warrender, the tutor who had sent her home a changed girl after a weekend's 'course of tuition.' The very thought of that dreadful two days still gave her butterflies in her tummy.

Those butterflies were taking flight as she lay nervously in her bed, listening to the clock in the hall downstairs striking eight o'clock. Sunlight was still streaming through her bedroom window – she had been sent to bed at half-past seven, a ridiculous time for a girl of her age, but something she had of necessity got used to in the past week or so. She lay with the cover pulled up to her nose and looked out of the window at the rustling leaves of the trees outside, and did it because if she didn't she would have to look instead at all the things in her room which inevitably reminded her of how much her life had changed since her uncle had taken up the cudgel – the cane, actually, in his case – in the cause of re-educating his potentially delinquent charge.

Chief amongst the reminders scattered about her bedroom was that wicked, frightening cane, dangling with passive malevolence on a hook behind the door. How she hated it; the dismal, bum-twitching "click-click" it would make every time the door was opened or shut, the way it greeted her in the morning, just sitting there waiting for it's opportunity to whip across her squirming buttocks in retribution for some piece of misbehaviour or other, and some evenings, like now, when it seemed almost alive and actually to know that soon it was to be taken down and swished across naked, trembling bum.

There were other reminders, too; a wardrobe which had once held pretty, grown-up dresses and feminine clothes and underwear, these days containing instead cut-down – or rather cut-up school skirts and gingham frocks, their hems hardly low enough now to cover her bum even when she stood up perfectly straight, leaving her thighs bare for virtually all their length and her knickers underneath on display whenever she so much as bent to scratch her knee. And those knickers! Pairs of navy-blue school pants – knickers she hadn't worn for three terms at least and which she'd supposed must have been thrown away long ago, now resurected and there in the wardrobe, the only items of underwear she was allowed, and all of them faded and pulling at their seams, especially now that she was having to stretch them over her filling-out hips – none of them fitting her with any degree of modesty, all too snug between her legs and round under her bum-cheeks, and wearing-out the faster now by virtue of their being pulled up and down, on and off, more often than knickers, in the normal way, were ever meant to be.

So Katie stared out of the window rather than have to be confronted by all those reminders of her sadly changed circumstances, knowing that at nine o'clock, less than an hour away, she would be getting a visit from her uncle and would be crying herself to sleep again that night.

Her bed was warm and the house was quiet – Katie watched the trees branches swaying in light breeze and slowly, despite the likely outcome of her uncle's nine o'clock visit, she fell into a half-sleep, troubled by confused recollections of Mr. Warrender's house, seeing again and again the steep stairs up to his attic room where she'd been sent, protesting tearfully, to be given her punishments, all canings, all on the bare bottom, all indelibly imprinted on her memory – and at the time, on her bum! She saw, as if from some point outside of herself, her young body being stripped absolutely naked – she had been too embarrassed to tell her uncle about that – and herself being spreadeagled, legs stretched wide, wide apart, and the cane whipping across her bottom while she struggled helplessly, unable to do anything to avoid the cane, while her cries grew louder and her bottom more violently agitated with every stroke.

And then there was the other thing, which she knew her uncle must have sanctioned, must have arranged with the tutor beforehand or surely he wouldn't have dared do it to her; which had left her confused, bewildered and still humiliatingly spreadeagled when he had finished with her and then simply told her to get herself dressed and be back in the schoolroom in five minutes, with never a word of warning about saying nothing, which meant he must have had permission or surely, surely, he just wouldn't have dared!

A sharp "clickety-click" dragged the sleepy girl back from those troubling recollections and into the present with a tummy-flipping jolt. Her eyes snapped open to see the cane swinging behind the half-open door, her uncle coming into the room, his hand reaching out for the cane. Her heart pounding, the butterflies running riot inside, Katie's mind was a maelstrom of protesting, rebellious thoughts, but the one thing uppermost in that kalidescope of emotions was the certain, inescapable knowledge that whatever the price she had to pay here, she was never, never going back to Mr. Warrender's frightening house!

Pale-faced Katie slipped blearily out from the warmth of her bed and stood timidly beside it, her pyjamas rumpled and her hair straggling across her face. The button at the waistband of the pyjama pants was unceremoniously slipped undone and the trousers slithered to her ankles. Her top was simply rucked up high under her breasts and a little nudge in the small of her back had her toppling clumsily across her bed, face-down, her feet still tangled in her pyjamas, her hips lifted by strong hands and two pillows stuffed under her tummy so that her bottom was plumped out across the edge of the bed. The cane whipped across her bum: "Hands behind your back!" Her wrists were held as she gasped with the sting of that first stroke, and then her caning began, twelve strokes to come, the first one not counting, and the pink-flowered coverlet blurred behind a mist of tears as the regular "swhitt-swhitt" of the cane whipped Katie's quivery bottom into just the kind of lewd, provocative undulations that must have prompted Mr. Warrender to overstep the limits of his brief, and which the girl might have made some effort to subdue had she not been too busy crying to look over her shoulder at the unusually absorbed gleam in her uncle's eyes.