I hit Camille a number of times, without stopping, measuring every stroke, I didn't want to hurt her more than necessary and I didn't want her to be turn off by this. More than that, I didn't want to scare her out of the work. I was in a very tight situation where I could not overstep my bounds, Bounds that I had to set because she could not.

There were unspoken bounds of course, which are set by common sense. Our agreement was to work on this torture scenario and nothing else. However, our agreement was not specific as to how far I should go. It was I and I alone who had to set the rules of the game.

I've learned, early on in my life, that a woman can go very far with a man if she indeed trusts him. What was the basis of that trust, was never clear to me, perhaps just their feeling, in my particular case, that I was an ok guy.

The first time I played this game I was young, very young and so was my playmate. Two young people playing with ropes and whips on a lazy afternoon after school.

But as I grew older and wiser and my relationships became more complex, I was never sure why women accepted to be part of my, to me, very strange world. Did they like me so much?

There was Margot, not too long ago, who hanged from this very same beam and stoically suffered the whip. And Marie, who was more than just a willing playmate. She was a true masochist who was more than happy to be in that position. And in between there was Rosie, also known as my 'torturadita', baptized with that title by one of the few Jan's ladies who never had the chance to taste the whip... Ceci.

I could tell that Camille was not like Marie. In fact I thought she would be the opposite. I truly believe that she would enjoy more whipping somebody than being whipped like she was now. But she was engaging. She was doing her part better than anyone before and the fact that she was not "enjoying" it, as it were, made this exercise the more real to me.

I hit her again and again, not counting how many times or for how long as the time seemed to have stopped. The sounds of the street outside were faint in my ears. Better yet, they did not exist, even if I was dimly aware of them.

I was sure that for Camille time did matter. She was at the end of the rod, feeling it on her tight skin. Those two contradictory states of mind, mine and Camille's, came to a juncture in my mind, even if it was for a brief, all too brief, moment where I paused for less than a second to apraise the situation. Camille didn't seem to mind, she was not distressed enough for me to stop, so I continued, confident in the idea that she would let me know if I had gone too far.