Trained at the Office (Corporate Correction #10)

Chapter 1

Anne

I didn’t know how to feel. Standing in my tiny apartment that morning, buttoning the modest cream blouse Yolanda had called perfect, I’d tried to push down the tangle of feelings that had knotted themselves somewhere between my stomach and my throat ever since I’d signed the employment contract three days ago.

Selecta. Or, as they usually wrote it, SELECTA.

The megacorp’s name alone carried weight, a gravity I could feel even from outside the gleaming tower downtown.

Everyone knew what Selecta was. Everyone had heard the stories.

My mother, before she’d stopped returning my calls entirely, had said only, “Well, Anne, I suppose you’ll learn,” in that flat voice that meant she’d already decided I was lost.

But my friend Yolanda… bright, laughing Yolanda, whom I’d known since freshman orientation and who had landed in Selecta’s marketing division six months before me… she’d waved it all away over drinks at our favorite wine bar the week before.

“Annie, stop,” she’d said, pressing her manicured fingers over mine. “I know what you’ve read. I know you’ve heard about the… you know… the paddling thing. Everyone’s heard about the paddling thing.”

She’d rolled her dark eyes with theatrical exasperation.

“It’s like saying every Catholic school nun carries a ruler.

Is there a paddle hanging on the wall in some room in human resources?

Sure. Are there stories? Definitely. No one’s ever used one on me—and I can’t say I’m the most diligent girl in the office. ”

She’d taken a long sip of her Pinot Grigio.

“You show up. You answer the phone. You get coffee. You set up meetings. Maybe you write a memo now and then. That’s it.

That’s the whole job. The pay is incredible, the benefits are insane, and the worst thing that happens to you is some executive asks you to collate something and you have to Google what collate means.

” She’d grinned. “Which I did, by the way. Week one.”

I’d laughed. The knot in my tummy had loosened, and I’d told myself Yolanda was right. She’d always been right about practical things.

Now, stepping out of the elevator on the thirty-second floor of Selecta HQ, I tried to hold onto that feeling.

The lobby featured pale marble and soft lighting, with the Selecta logo rendered in brushed steel in giant letters behind the curved reception desk.

Everything smelled faintly of something floral I couldn’t name.

The air itself felt expensive, filtered and temperature-controlled to a precise coolness that made my skin prickle under my blouse.

A woman at the reception desk looked up as I approached. She looked perhaps thirty, with dark hair pulled into a sleek chignon and a smile that seemed calibrated to be welcoming without being warm.

“Anne Chamberlain?” she said before I could speak.

“Yes. I’m… it’s my first day. I was told to report to—”

“You’ve been assigned to Penelope Gallagher.” The receptionist was already standing, smoothing her fitted charcoal skirt. “She’s expecting you. I’ll walk you back.”

I followed her through a set of frosted glass doors and down a corridor that seemed to stretch endlessly, the carpet so thick my low heels made no sound at all.

Offices flanked us on both sides, their doors mostly closed, and through the ones that were open I caught glimpses of sleek desks, multiple monitors, women in tailored clothing typing or speaking into headsets.

Everything looked immaculate. Everything was quiet, but the quiet seemed to hum with… well, with power. I swallowed hard.

We stopped before an office at the far end of the corridor. The nameplate on the door read Penelope Gallagher, Director of New Modesty Program Integration in clean, formal-looking lettering, like in an old-fashioned newspaper.

The receptionist knocked twice and opened the door without waiting for a response.

The woman behind the desk rose immediately, and I understood at once why Yolanda had told me, almost as an afterthought, “Oh, and your boss is going to make you feel like you’ve been dressing wrong your entire life. Don’t take it personally.”

Penelope Gallagher was the kind of woman who seemed born to wear a charcoal suit.

She stood tall—taller than me, and I was five-seven—with chestnut hair swept back from a face that was beautiful without being pretty.

She wore a blouse of ivory silk, open one button further than mine, and a single strand of pearls rested against her collarbone.

She moved around the desk with the controlled grace of someone who had an awareness of every inch of space her body occupied.

“Anne,” she said, and her voice sounded genuinely warm, with a richness that made my name come across, oddly, like something particularly worth saying.

She took both my hands in hers and held them for a moment, studying me with gray eyes that seemed to miss nothing.

“I’m so glad you’re here. We’ve needed someone in this role for weeks, and when I saw your application, I told HR not to let you slip away. ”

I felt the blush start at my collarbone and climb. “Thank you, Ms. Gallagher. I’m really grateful for the opportunity.”

“Penelope,” she corrected gently. “Or Penny, if you’re feeling brave.” A smile, quick and conspiratorial, as if we were already sharing a joke. “Let me show you your desk.”

My workstation lay just outside her office. It had a clean, modern desk with a slim monitor, a phone console, and a small vase of white peonies that I couldn’t imagine had been there before today.

“Get settled,” Penelope said, resting one hand lightly on the back of my chair.

“Log into the system. Your credentials are in the welcome packet in the top drawer. Get the lay of the land.” She glanced at the slim watch on her wrist. “But don’t get too comfortable, because there’s a meeting upstairs in half an hour that I’d like you to attend with me.

Bring your laptop. You’ll be taking notes. ”

“Of course,” I said, trying to sound like someone who attended meetings and took notes all the time, rather than someone whose previous work experience consisted of a summer filing papers at a veterinary clinic.

Penelope smiled again, and something in it—some flicker of appraisal, or perhaps amusement—made the blush return to my cheeks.

“You’re going to do wonderfully,” she said, and disappeared back into her office.

The conference room was on the thirty-fourth floor, two levels up.

It was larger than my apartment. An oval table of dark polished wood dominated the center, surrounded by high-backed leather chairs.

One wall was entirely glass, offering a view of the city skyline that seemed designed to remind everyone in the room of exactly how high up they were, and what that height meant.

Six people were already seated at the table when Penelope and I arrived: four men in dark suits and two women, one of whom was setting up a presentation on the wall-mounted screen.

Penelope took a seat near the head of the table and gestured to the chair beside her.

I sat, opened my laptop, and tried to make myself small.

The presentation title appeared on the screen in clean Selecta branding:

New Modesty Training Intimates: Q3 Performance Review & Product Roadmap

I typed the title into my notes and told myself the meeting was just about underwear. Companies must have meetings about underwear all the time. There were huge lingerie brands that probably had meetings about underwear every day. This was normal.

It took five minutes before I realized that, at least for me and my conventional upbringing, this meeting was not normal.

The first speaker, a man named David Hargrove from the product division, began with a slide showing market penetration data for what he called the ‘Training Intimates line.’ It took me a little while to understand what training intimates actually meant.

David’s brief, flat explanation at first didn’t seem to make any sense.

“As you know, the classic training underwear is designed to provide a structured intimate environment for young women in the New Modesty program.” Heads around the table nodded. This clearly represented very old news for everyone but me.

“As such,” David continued, “it combines the modesty standards required by the girls’ foster families and suitors with a confining fit that encourages them to confront and process their emerging physical needs rather than suppressing them.”

I stopped taking notes. My fingers hovered over the keys. I made myself start again.

The next slide showed the garments. High-waisted, full-coverage panties in white cotton, jarringly old-fashioned in their appearance.

I blinked as I looked more closely at the slide, because it showed an interior construction that was anything but simple.

Diagrams illustrated reinforced seams, a snug gusset designed to press firmly against the wearer.

“Plus,” David continued, “as you may remember, our last innovation in the previous refresh, our awareness panels. The slightly textured fabric here and here, positioned as you can see to create constant, low-level friction against the clitoris and the perineum.”

I had to bite my lip as my forehead creased. My tummy flipped end over end, as far as I could tell, every time I looked at the screen.

“The philosophy behind the line,” David continued, clicking to the next slide, “is that a girl who is kept aware of her body’s responses throughout the day is better positioned to communicate those responses to her suitor or husband, which strengthens the dynamic.

Repression is the enemy of a healthy authority-based relationship.

These garments help her stay in touch with what she’s feeling, even when—especially when—she’s been taught to ignore it. ”

I wrote awareness panels—friction—anti-repression philosophy and then stared at the words, trying to pretend they didn’t mean what they said.

“It’s a good product,” David went on, “but as you know we’re losing market share.”

The woman who had been setting up the presentation when we came in—Dr. Maren Holt, according to the slide she now brought up—picked up the thread smoothly.

“As you’ll see,” she said, “we think we’ve found an answer. We’ve been developing the next generation.”

The new slide read: Perineal Integration System: Sensor-Linked Clitoral Stimulation Module

My face went hot. I could feel the heat radiating from my cheeks, and I kept my eyes fixed on my laptop screen, typing as if the act of transcription could somehow create a clinical distance between me and what was being said.

Dr. Holt spoke with the enthusiasm of an engineer who loved her work.

The new design, she explained, incorporated a micro-sensor array that mapped to the wearer’s anatomy with sub-millimeter accuracy, paired with a vibration module so small it was virtually undetectable from the outside.

The system connected via encrypted Bluetooth to the suitor’s or husband’s phone, giving him ‘pinpoint control over clitoral stimulation, with adjustable intensity, pattern, and duration.’

“The key innovation,” Dr. Holt said, advancing to a diagram that I did not want to look at but could not stop looking at, “is the autonomous mode. We know that suitors and husbands are busy. They have careers, responsibilities. They can’t always be actively managing their girl’s experience.

So the system can be set to run on an algorithm—monitoring her arousal levels in real time through the perineal sensor and delivering stimulation according to parameters the man sets in advance.

He decides how aroused she’s allowed to get.

He decides whether she’s kept at a simmer or brought to the edge.

He decides if and when she comes. And he can do all of this while he’s in a meeting at work, or on a golf course, or asleep. ”

The room nodded. The vice president made a note on his tablet.

“Let me show you what this looks like in practice,” Dr. Holt said, and dimmed the lights.