Ritual and Release

The letter had been a constant presence in his coat pocket all afternoon, though it held no warmth—just twenty-three neatly typed lines on cream bond paper, signed with a signature so familiar it awakened something in Richard that he hadn't allowed to surface in years.

He sat alone in the reading room of the Bath Club, a place where silence was king and the wallpaper was unchanged since the Falklands War. Even at fifty-four, he exuded the aura of old money and effortless authority: his suit was custom-made, his brogues polished to a shine. He was the chairman of the museum board, a trustee of two hospitals, and had recently been appointed to the Honours Committee. His peers respected him, and younger men sought to emulate him. He had a lovely, if somewhat distant, wife, two grown daughters, and a view of the river from his drawing room in Belgravia.

However, there were nights when he would sit up suddenly in bed, gasping, caught between arousal and shame, as a phantom voice whispered, "Touch your toes, Harrowby. You know the position."

Headmaster Elbridge had ruled St. Augustine’s like a minor deity—stoic, demanding, and terrifyingly precise. His discipline was meted out with ritualistic care. The scent of leather polish, the swish of air before the impact. Richard had detested it then. Or claimed he had.

But over the decades, as prestige wrapped around him like a stifling cloak, something changed. He began to crave that absolute clarity—pain as penance, humiliation as relief.

Last month, after three whiskies and a particularly mortifying charity gala speech, he did something unthinkable. He searched for Elbridge.

To his surprise, the headmaster was still alive—eighty-seven and living in a modest stone cottage near Norwich, long retired and widowed, without children. Richard first wrote with polite formalities, then dropped all pretenses.

The letter he received this morning was brief. One line stood out:

"I find your proposition strange, but not entirely unwelcome. Saturday next. Four o’clock. You will bring your own cane."

Richard carefully folded the letter and returned it to the envelope. His hands shook. Not from fear—no, not exactly. From anticipation. From need.

From the exhilarating, terrifying certainty that something within him would finally be set right.

The train rattled through the countryside toward Norwich, turning the hedgerows into streaks of green and grey. Richard sat tensely in a private compartment, his cane—a dark Malacca with a polished hook—wrapped in brown paper beside him like a concealed secret. His palms were clammy despite the November chill.

He had informed his assistant he was going for a relaxing weekend in Norfolk. He had told his wife nothing.

The cab from the station traveled down a narrow road lined with bare oak trees. The driver occasionally glanced in the rearview mirror, perhaps curious about the man in a camelhair coat and shiny shoes heading to such a secluded spot. Richard, however, met the look with composure. He’d mastered that long ago.

As they rounded a bend, the cottage appeared—stone walls, steep gables, and a roof covered in moss. No gate, no welcoming sign, just a weathered wooden door.

Richard stood in front of it for a minute before knocking. His heart beat steadily—slowly and heavily, like a war drum.

The door opened.

Headmaster Elbridge—now just Mr. Elbridge—stood there in a cardigan, dark pants, and slippers. He had aged noticeably: his back bent, hair white and sparse, but his eyes remained sharp and penetrating.

"You came," he said without emotion.

"I did." Richard’s voice, to his dismay, wavered slightly.

Elbridge’s eyes dropped to the package in Richard’s hand. “That will do. Come in.”

Inside, the cottage had the scent of tea, firewood, and an older, nearly institutional cleanliness—perhaps floor polish or starch. The sitting room was simply furnished, with a wing chair, a fireplace with a low flame, and the room’s main attraction: a long wooden bench with a neatly folded tartan throw.

Richard swallowed hard.

"You are not the first," Elbridge said softly, moving to the sideboard to pour a single glass of sherry. "But perhaps the most determined."

"I need this," Richard admitted, surprising himself with his sincerity. "I don’t know why. Or maybe I do. But I need it."

Elbridge didn’t look at him. He took a sip, nodded once, and gestured to the bench.

“Remove your coat. Your jacket too. Fold your trousers neatly and place them on the chair. Pants down to the knees. You will present yourself as you would have at school.”

Richard hesitated only a moment before obeying. The ritual settled over him like incense—removal, exposure, submission.

He bent over, gripping the far edge of the bench. His bare thighs trembled.

Elbridge’s steps were slow but firm behind him. The rustle of paper. The hiss of the cane unwrapped.

"You will count each stroke, Mr. Harrowby," the old man said.

And then the first one landed—He gasped. For a second, he could not even count. The force was so exact, so calibrated, it seemed the soul must measure its impact in some clockwork register of bone and blood. After the flare of pain came the eerie sense of nothing at all—numbness, and beneath it, lightheadedness, as though reality itself had momentarily been yanked taut, then let go with a twang. The stripe blazed, then cooled. He could feel the throb: his skin tightening along the curve of his haunch, a blossoming heat.

“One,” he said, his voice reedy, choked.

The next landed lower—a fraction, Elbridge’s consistency unrelenting, mathematical. “Two,” gasped Richard, the syllable quivering. His knees were bent, calf muscles fluttering involuntarily with the effort of holding firm, and it was at this moment he became acutely aware of how exposed he truly was. Not only his thighs, but the entirety of his midsection was on display: the hollow of his back contracting with each blow, the subtle undulation of flesh and muscle, and below—his genitals drawn forward, dangling with impotent vulnerability. This was not how this was done at school, it was usually a slight lowering of the pants. He realized, with a sick burn of embarrassment, that even this was not lost on Elbridge, whose gaze, sharp and impassive, surveyed all.

The third stroke landed higher. “Three.” His elbows slid forward on the bench’s polished wood, and he felt the sweat pooling in his armpits, cold now, then hot. It was both agony and clarity, a lucidity he’d not experienced since his own days in chapel, reciting the psalms in Latin, each word a syllable of discipline pecked into his spine. He was being reduced, yes, but also—to his own horror—raised.

“Four.” He grunted, breath hissing out through clamped teeth. His vision blurred. It was impossible to tell if the moisture was sweat or tears. He wanted to cover himself, to stand upright, but if he did, the ritual would shatter and Elbridge—his judge, his witness—would simply ask him to resume, all the more humiliating for the interruption.

He became aware, with the clinical detachment of a scientist observing himself through glass, that his penis had stirred. Not fully, but unmistakably, drawn out by some mixture of pain and memory and shame. This was the part he’d feared most: not the pain, but the body’s ancient treacheries, how it would betray the mind’s intentions in the presence of remembered authority.

“Five.” He mumbled it, head bowed, as the fifth lash cut the air. The cottage’s quiet—clock ticking, fire popping—made the sound of the cane all the more acute.

After the sixth, Richard simply sobbed out the number. “Six.” And then there was a pause—a silence that seemed to last an hour, though it could not have been more than a few seconds.

Elbridge’s hand came to rest, light as a moth, on Richard’s shoulder. He spoke softly: “You recall the protocol. Remain as you are.”

Richard nodded into the wood, fingers white on

By the seventh stroke, tears pricked his eyes. By the ninth, something inside him broke loose—shame, pride, the hard casing of his adult life. He had become entirely slack, a vessel for sensation, relieved of all expectation or privilege. The ritual itself became the only air he could breathe.

He'd imagined anger or disgust, even sadism, animating the old man’s hand, but there was none: Elbridge moved with the neutrality of a craftsman performing a task as old as the implements themselves.

He lost count around fourteen. His mind blotted images: a corridor of stained-glass windows, the echo of choir practice, his mother’s wedding band gleaming on her finger as she cupped his chin and whispered, “Always behave.” Those words passed through him like holy writ, and for a moment he was suspended in the dizziness of total regression—no longer a captain of anything, simply a boy, awaiting his father’s black car.

Eventually, Elbridge stopped. The cane returned to the table with a sound like an exhaled breath. Richard remained folded, pants akimbo, skin raw and ribbed, sobbing softly. It was a strange, newborn sound, incongruous with the deep timbre of his everyday voice.

After the twentieth , Elbridge laid the cane aside.

The old man waited, then spoke: “You may compose yourself.”

Richard straightened, aware of the salinity on his cheeks, the sticky wetness on his belly. He reached for his pants, but Elbridge suggested that he should wash up in the bathroom upstairs “the shower is at your disposal”

A narrow stair, the carpet worn soft by decades of bare feet, led to the upper landing. Richard moved slowly, one step at a time, holding the banister for balance. The ache across his thighs and buttocks was excruciating, and yet he cradled it close—not a wound, but the aftermath of a sacrament.

The bathroom was a cubicle, immaculate as an operating theatre. Milk-glass bottles lined the rack above the sink; a single towel hung perpendicular on its hook; the window opened just enough to let in the scent of wet leaves and far-off chimneys.

Richard fixed his gaze on the mirror and fought the urge to look anywhere but directly at his reflection. He caught the red florid bands across his haunches, the shocked blotches. His face was twisted, eyes rimmed red. He’d never looked so fully himself; the mask had dropped away at last.

He undressed and turned on the shower faucet.

The water ran hot, the steam condensing instantly on the freezing tile, thickening the air. Richard stepped in washing the light bleeding off of him

The door had no lock; a soft knock, then intrusion. Elbridge appeared, not dressed but in a collarless robe and slippers, as if he’d anticipated this denouement. The robe was navy, the belt tied in a knot but permitted to sag so that the sparse hair on his chest and the slack abdominal skin were visible. There was nothing sexual in it—at least not in the ordinary sense—but the casualness of the old man’s carriage awakened in Richard an almost unbearable jolt of recognition.

"You’ll need help with that," Elbridge said, pointing toward the livid welts.

Richard grasped for words, but the discipline still hung as a commandment: silence until spoken to. Instead he nodded, which was apparently enough and exited the shower.

Elbridge opened a cabinet, withdrew a small blue tub of antiseptic cream, and motioned Richard to the edge of the tub. He dabbed two fingers in the cream, then gently touched it to the meat of Richard’s buttock. The cold was exquisite, a white-hot star in the midst of bruised night. Every muscle between his shoulders and knees tried to tense at once, but Elbridge patted him with surprising tenderness, as a father might a child’s skinned knee. No words passed. Just the rhythm of administration—cold, then warmth, then the drag of fingertips against skin.

It should have felt humiliating, but to his shock Richard simply felt different. A man having a wound cleaned by another.

He straightened, wanting to say thank you, but what emerged was a hoarse “I’m sorry.”

Elbridge met his eyes in the mirror. “For what?”

“I don’t know,” Richard said. “Needing this. Not outgrowing it. Finding you.”

“Life is recursive, Mr. Harrowby,” Elbridge intoned, his voice low and steady as he screwed the lid tight, the metal threads clicking together with deliberate precision. He held his hands under the spout, the water running cool and clear over his fingers, sending droplets that caught the fluorescent light in liquid prisms. “We perform the same acts in loops. We rationalize them until we die. Better to confront what you are, don’t you think, than to let it rot you from within?”

He shook the last bead of water from his fingertips like a conductor launching his orchestra, then tugged at the knotted cord of his robe. The linen fell away in folds, sliding to the floor in a muted whisper. Richard felt the chill of the tiled chamber press against his skin as the old man stood revealed: a sagging paunch that draped over narrow hips, thighs thinned to papery ribbons, skin veined like a dry riverbed in midsummer.

There was no revulsion, only a persistent flicker of recognition. He saw in Elbridge’s armpits the same soft hang of skin he’d one day claim, in those tremulous nipples the herald of his own inevitable shrinkage. His gaze drifted over the mottled terrain of aged flesh, and he realized: this, too, was his future—flattened by time, the promise of youth reduced to dust.

“You’ve been through pain,” Elbridge murmured, voice hushed as he stepped closer, the sound of his bare feet on tile crisp in the hush. “Now we temper that with intimacy.” His hands settled on Richard’s upper arms—cool, firm, ceremonial. The flesh there quivered under the unexpected ritual. Richard’s instincts screeched retreat, but his battered muscles, still throbbing from the cane’s kiss, refused to heed the call.

Their bodies, unclothed and unguarded, pressed together. Richard’s breath hitched at the weight of aged warmth mingling with his own. The air tasted of disinfectant and damp stone. He let his eyes wander over the ridges of Elbridge’s shoulders, the subtle swell of his collarbone, each tiny freckle and crease a testament to decades lived. A soft whimper escaped his throat.

“You’re no longer my student,” Elbridge said, his palms sliding down to Richard’s collarbones, the veins there like arthritic roots under thin skin. “You’re a lost soul seeking realignment.” The words carried no condemnation—only clinical observation, perhaps even a benediction. Then, tenderly, he coaxed, “Come here, Richard,” and his lips hovered, pursed like a question.

They kissed with the tentative gentleness of strangers first meeting: a barely audible brush of lips, a dry exploration. Then the pressure deepened—Richard parted, offered himself, and tasted metal and salt, like old blood on new wounds. His hands crept along Elbridge’s spine, found the dip of flannel at the waist, the flesh beneath yielding and warm. When Elbridge’s fingers closed around his welted buttock, pulling him so their groins aligned, Richard shivered at the abruptness of need.

They sank to the cold floor, knees knocking, bodies slick with sweat. The hard tile pressed into Richard’s spine as Elbridge’s lips toured his neck, nibbling at the tender hollow above his collarbone. The bite startled him—not a lover’s claim but a guardian’s warning, sharp enough to sting yet not break the skin. Richard surged forward, mouth seeking the steady drum of Elbridge’s heartbeat under loose flesh, licking and nuzzling as if he might absorb some latent authority.

Elbridge grasped Richard’s cock with the same hand that had inflicted pain; the roughness of his palm against sensitive skin was deliberate, moving in a precise rhythm that marked the passage of time. It was dispassionate, detached, and yet, cruelly kind. Richard moaned, his hips moving in sync with the stroking hand, while the other hand traced the red welts on his back, fingertips gliding over the ridges and valleys.

He knelt before the headmaster in a pose of ancient submission. Elbridge’s own penis lay half-aroused, bearing the scent of talcum powder and old soap. Richard leaned in, took it into his mouth, and closed his eyes against the dim fluorescent light. The taste was faintly sweet, the pulse beneath his tongue slow but persistent. Richard’s jaw ached at the unfamiliar angle, a bitterness spreading under his tongue. Elbridge’s cock was not large, but the skin was loose, furrowed, crowned with an aged, purpled tip—all the more exposed in its state of half-arousal. It reminded Richard, vaguely, of shrimp in aspic, of cold mussels at a Harrowby family breakfast in the countryside. He let that comparison linger and refused to feel ashamed for it—his mind was a whirlwind of trauma, hunger, and the desire to please.

He pressed his lips to the base, feeling the wiry hair tickle his nose, and heard a sound, half-chuckle, half-sob, escape the old man above him. Elbridge’s hand rested on his skull—steadying, never forcing, just a slow and constant pressure, as if to say “Stay with it. Don’t think, only act.”

Richard found a rhythm. His tongue worked the underside, traced the ridges, tasted a brine so faint he could have imagined it. He sensed the old man’s need for pace, not frenzy, so he slowed, letting the head glide along his palate until the skin stretched, rolled, shimmered with saliva. The penis began to harden, filling out. Elbridge decided to change their position shortly after.

Elbridge guided him around until they were chest to chest, cocks pressed together like mirror images seeking equilibrium. Richard’s plea was a tremulous whisper: “Please.” He wanted the moment to last, to hold time suspended before shame returned.

“You’re to finish,” Elbridge said, guiding Richard’s hand to the base of his own member. The instruction was both firm and kind. Richard gripped and stroked, eyes locked on the headmaster’s. The kiss, now confident, pressed against Richard’s mouth. Elbridge’s lips, strong and tasting of sherry, flattened and consumed; the old man’s tongue quickly broke down boundaries, prying them open as Richard gasped and tried to keep up. His hand moved in swift, unconscious jerks, wrist flickering, forearm taut as Elbridge’s own hands gripped his ribcage.

Without breaking the kiss, Elbridge found Richard’s nipples with arthritic precision and pinched. The pain was sharp, a stark contrast to the building pleasure in his loins. Richard yelped into the mouth that consumed him and felt the cock in his hand pulse, then release. He met the touch with growing desperation. They were pressed so close now that bone and tendon aligned, heat pooled, and any pretense of detachment was gone.

Elbridge’s nails scraped under the swollen circles of Richard’s areolae, twisting, pulling with a force that brought the same raw clarity as the cane had done. Richard bucked, stroking himself harder, his penis flushed with urgent blood, the tip already slick and leaking onto the old man’s belly. He wanted to say “enough,” but his mouth was filled with tongue and need.

Their bodies convulsed together in an ugly, beautiful spasm—Elbridge arching, Richard crying out softly as his orgasm arrived intense and overwhelming, a surge that shot up his spine and pulsed across his raw backside, mixing a slurry of tears, saliva, and semen.

Richard sagged into Elbridge’s arms, limbs limp, the tremor of spent need coursing through him. He expected filth, but felt instead a hollow purity, as though every sin had been burned away. They remained entwined, chins resting on shoulders, until the steady drip of the faucet reminded them of cold stone under bare skin.

Elbridge rose first, joints protesting like old wood creaking. He retrieved a towel—plush and white—from a shelf, and with reverent care wiped Richard’s face, chest, the mosaic of dried droplets. Handing the towel to Richard was their final covenant: the act was done, and each could return from the abyss.

Richard dressed in silence, the world beyond the bathhouse—mortgages, committees, black sedans—creeping back in like unwelcome ghosts. He slung his bag over a shoulder, buttoned his coat with shaking fingers, and paused at the threshold. Elbridge, stark against the glow of the hearth beyond, looked every inch the elder sentry.

“Will I see you again?” Richard’s voice trembled with want he hardly understood.

Elbridge offered a slow, slight smile that pulled at the angles of his eyes but left their depths untouched. “You know the address now.” His words were both an answer and a benediction.

Richard stepped out into the chill. By the time he reached the station, he felt the bruises blooming and a strange lightness in his stride.

That night, as he lay beside his wife in Belgravia, he found he no longer woke startled or sweating. Instead, as her hand drifted to his thigh in sleep, his own hand found hers and pressed it closer, grateful at last for any touch at all.