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The cane came down again. It hurt so much that I forgot everything. My bottom squirmed and I screamed and screamed because that seemed to lessen the agony just a little.
Mama Bear had to remind me again to count.
"Susanna," she said, but before she could continue with the warning, I remembered, my tummy lurching in desperate fear of another extra lash.
"Six, Papa, thank you!"
"We're halfway done, Your Royal Highness," the colonel said, his voice again becoming formal.
It took me a moment to realize that I had started to nod my head, slowly and sorrowfully. My eyes were closed, and I could feel the tears leaking from them. Suddenly I understood what it meant to be penitent. It seemed strange, and it made me wrinkle my forehead in puzzlement as, through the haze of my backside's agony, I pieced it together.
Of course I had known what it meant to feel sorry — to feel remorse. I just had never actually felt it myself. I cared about other people's feelings, sure: I didn't like to do things that made them mad at me, or sad about something I'd done. But I'd never actually felt true regret for any of my misbehavior. Naughtiness had always seemed like a category assigned to free-spirited young women by so-called serious, authoritative people like my grandfather. Like, say, officers in the military.
Like my new Papa, and my new Mama, and… I absolutely couldn't think of Sergeant Karl as Baby Bear at this moment. And the master sergeant who taught me to suck a man's penis.
I felt a tremor of desperate need travel through my hips, the sensation so closely allied to the terrible soreness in my backside that I could never have teased the two apart.
No, I had never felt actual penitence despite even the awful punishment my bears had visited upon me thus far, after finding me with my shirt up and my jeans down in the master sergeant's bed. One hand between my thighs. The other…
I felt my face go crimson once again, as I remembered it: how wild it had made me to put my hand behind me and play with the most private part of my body. How very accurately it had predicted Papa Bear's promise of his ultimate possession of my conquered body.
"Look at me in the mirror, Susanna," his deep voice said.
As I raised my head again and opened my eyes, I had a brand-new feeling, a kind of shame I had never experienced, and I realized that it came from my just-discovered penitence. I didn't want to open my eyes, but it wasn't because I had any desire to disobey the colonel. No, my heart quailed at the idea of looking him in the eye, knowing how very thoroughly I had deserved the terrible consequences he had taken it upon himself to mete out to my bare bottom.
I felt my face crumple as I met his eye in the reflected scene. But the expression on Papa Bear's face, though it remained serious, told me that he could see far enough into my heart to know that I had begun truly to learn my lesson.
My eyes opened further, and my lips parted: I didn't have anything to say, really, but I felt like I should. Then I realized that actually there were words I should maybe say, pressing on the back of my throat it felt like.
I'm sorry.
I thought I had probably screamed it before, trying somehow to get out of my horrible punishment. I hadn't actually felt it, though. Now that I did, some part of my mind didn't want me to say it: the still-defiant princess who didn't know what it meant really to apologize lived on in my head.
"You're taking your whipping quite well, Your Royal Highness," Papa Bear said, his voice grave despite the satisfaction I could see in his eyes and understand in his words.
Again, Your Royal Highness. I blushed anew as I saw it: the colonel wanted to emphasize the sheer distance between my station as the princess of Forthia and what I had done here in the bears' cottage. In his words I thought I could hear — or perhaps my newly expanded imagination created the idea — centuries of tradition: the princesses of my little nation corrected with their drawers lowered and their bottoms bare, by a responsible officer of the palace guard.
For a moment, I almost gave in to the good-girl side this horrid ordeal seemed to have uncovered in me. What Papa Bear had said did make me feel good, and the idea that I might actually thank him for his praise occurred to me. I wondered if I should assure him of my gratitude for his high regard, the way a princess in the olden days might have thanked the officer who whipped her.
Having failed in some small aspect of her royal duty — having been caught playing with herself in the privy, perhaps, while she thought of the handsome prince to whom her father had betrothed her — she would feel true thankfulness for the stern military man's correction. When he complimented her for her meek comportment as he humbled her under the cane, she would of course express her understanding of her duty, and of his, in gentle words.
But as I looked into the colonel's face, and my eyes flicked to the major and the master sergeant standing beside him, I knew that wasn't for me. I had to find a new path, although my new Papa had certainly humbled me, as well as teaching me fascinating, exciting, and at the same time terribly disturbing things about what I really needed.
"Am I supposed to take that seriously?" I asked. "I just wet your fucking carpet, didn't I?"
To my amazement, they laughed. Mama Bear laughed loudest, throwing her head back and emitting a peal of silvery sound. Papa Bear chuckled. Baby Bear guffawed. At first a thrill of embarrassment and rage rose in my chest, because I felt certain they meant to ridicule me, but then I saw the way they looked at me and how it seemed to show sympathy, and even affection. I could see that despite everything each of them liked me, in their own way.
Baby Bear liked me because I was sassy. Mama Bear liked me because I was independent — defiant, even. Papa Bear liked me because… I swallowed hard as I read it in his eyes. He liked me — maybe he was even starting to love me — because despite all my heedless conduct, I was smart and thoughtful.
"I suppose I should give you an extra stroke for swearing," he said. "But I'll just warn you."
The major spoke, then, her voice still full of mirth despite her humiliating words. "Well-behaved princesses don't say fuck, you fucking little whore."
A shock of arousal so strong that it made my whole body shake went through me at the utterly degrading way this officer of my nation's army had just addressed me. I felt my eyes flash in anger as much at the way she knew how to manipulate me as at the words themselves. When I looked at the colonel, though, I saw him assessing my reaction, and the anger ebbed away as suddenly as it had come.
A lump came into my throat and new tears sprung up in my eyes that didn't have anything to do with the terrible soreness of my backside. In that moment I realized I wanted to be sassy, and defiant, and still thoughtful at the same time. I didn't know how, but I could see in Papa Bear's face that he thought he could help.
Then the words just came out.
