Chapter 6
Porter
I got the alert as I left Senator Hathaway’s office. The vibration came through my phone in two neat pulses just before I reached the elevator bank.
I glanced down, expecting a staff update or some trivial scheduling nuisance, and instead saw the Selecta Arrangements icon, a cherry red lock and key, at the left side of a banner that read:
High-compatibility associate profile available in your area.
I almost laughed at the incongruousness of getting that alert at that moment.
I had joined Selecta Arrangements two years earlier, during a period in which I’d been working too hard and allowing myself too little company. I’d used the app with extreme selectivity. The system featured a good deal of efficiency, I would give it that. It cut through a great deal of mess.
But it also had a way of making appetites feel administrative, which I disliked. Most of the women it suggested to me were either too practiced in their submission to interest me or so eager to perform innocence that I lost patience before reaching the end of the profile.
The elevator doors opened. I stepped in, alone, and the doors began to close.
Then I touched the notification.
Perhaps it was the lingering impressions from my meeting with Frances Hathaway. Perhaps the residue of our conversation, which had not been especially pleasant even by her standards, had left me frustrated in more ways than one.
I wanted real support for the new generation of assistive tech.
The senator wanted votes and language and plausible morality draped over a subsidy framework that would, if we were honest, chiefly enrich the manufacturers of Hathaway’s state and place the right families more firmly in control of the economy.
I had agreed to help the bill’s billionaire sponsor because the legislation would do useful things and because influence, once accumulated, ought to be exercised. But Hathaway had seemed sharper than usual, and beneath her polish I had sensed irritation of a more personal sort.
So when the app opened and the face on the screen was Alexandra Murphy’s, my first thought was not desire.
It was, Talk about a coincidence. And then, Maybe that’s why Hathaway had a larger stick up her ass than usual.
Red hair. Blue eyes. A profile photograph so conservative it almost read as defiance: blouse buttoned high, expression composed, chin lifted just enough to imply self-command.
The second picture gave more away. Slender figure, formal dress, long pale legs, beauty she had tried to frame as poise.
The third seemed newer and more honest, though probably not Alex had intended honesty.
Ivory lingerie. Face partially obscured by her hair.
Knees parted just enough to suggest either bravery or inexperience. Probably both.
I felt a certain stillness come over me that I knew well: something important, but uncontrolled, had just cropped up in my usually well-structured life.
I had seen Alex once before, though not at close range, and not so that she would have remembered me.
At a reception several weeks back, standing three people away from Hathaway and pretending not to notice the men noticing her.
I remembered thinking she looked too young for the expression she kept trying to wear.
I remembered also thinking that if she lasted a year on the Hill without being eaten alive, it would be because she learned very quickly.
Apparently she hadn’t learned much.
The profile text was careful in a way that told on itself.
Intelligent, feminine, discreet. New to arrangements but not to pleasing demanding men.
I value generosity, clarity, and strong leadership.
I can be shy at first, but I respond deeply to confidence, consistency, and a firm hand.
Looking for a sponsor who appreciates honesty, polish, and a woman who wants to learn.
I read it twice.
The app displayed its usual metrics in the corner—match confidence, preference overlap, geographic compatibility, disciplinary alignment. I ignored most of that. Selecta’s predictive systems were often impressive but also generally tedious.
What interested me was the strain in the language.
Women entirely comfortable with submission did not write like that.
Nor did women merely curious. This read like a bright girl trying to draft her own surrender in terms that would let her preserve her pride while still obtaining what she has begun to understand she needed.
That interested me more than it should have, maybe.
* * *
Alex
I woke up to twenty-three notifications from the Selecta Arrangements app. I stared at the number for several seconds before I unlocked my phone.
Twenty-three.
The app had arranged them in a neat vertical list, each with a blurred profile image, a display name, a sponsor tier, and the first line of the message.
The effect seemed distressingly efficient.
I felt as if I had woken up to discover that sometime in the night my body had been put out for bid and a line had formed.
The first one called himself CapitolTraditionalist and opened with:
I appreciate a proud girl if she knows when not to argue.
The second wanted to know whether I had ‘natural breasts and an unpierced pink mouth.’
The third was somehow worse because he tried to sound civilized.
Your reserve is appealing. I suspect you would look especially beautiful after a well-deserved spanking.
I dropped the phone onto the bedspread, then snatched it back up a second later because disgust apparently did not preclude curiosity. Or desperation. I scrolled farther.
One man asked if I would relocate ‘without fuss.’ One wanted to know my exact weight. One wrote only:
You’ll do.
Another had attached a prewritten list of expectations that included nightly photographs in sleepwear and ‘no ideological hostility to traditional domestic correction.’
I laughed once, in disbelief, and then hated the laugh because it sounded strained. Things stirred inside me as I read the awful messages. I wished those things had remained as deeply repressed as they apparently had been before a senator had told me to take my clothes off.
The sponsor tiers sat beside their names in little metallic labels.
Economy.
Moderate.
Premium.
Luxury.
Green, bronze, silver, gold.
I found I had started checking those before I read the messages themselves, which might have been the ugliest thing of all. I remembered the figures almost involuntarily.
Economy: one thousand a month.
Moderate: two thousand.
Premium: three thousand.
Luxury: five thousand and up.
Numbers that would once have seemed like abstractions and now translated instantly into rent, debt, groceries, the possibility of continuing to breathe.
Then I saw a picture that made the room go colder.
Under the name Jay G.
The profile picture showed only a jaw and a tie knot, no more revealing than half the men on the app. But the message said:
I think we’d suit each other. You already know I prefer ambition to innocence.
I felt heat and revulsion break over me together.
Only one man in Washington would have written that way to me. He had expected me to hear the private smirk underneath the words, I felt absolutely sure.
I clicked into the profile with a kind of horrified compulsion.
Economy sponsor. Of course he was. Senator Jason Gowry, with all his money and appetite and swagger, had listed himself as economy.
The cheapness of it somehow disgusted me more than if he had priced himself high.
It made the whole thing feel dirtier, pettier, meaner.
He wanted women to come cheap because he thought they should.
I backed out at once, my face hot.
For a moment I considered deleting the app on the spot. Then I remembered the stack of bills on my counter, the balance in my checking account, the humiliating arithmetic of my life, and I kept scrolling.
Message nineteen was from Porter B.
I knew before I opened it that I might be in trouble: my stomach turned over in a way that suggested my masturbating my pussy raw to a mental image of him training me as his fuck toy didn’t represent a one-time thing that I could just push back into the depths of memory.
His note was brief.
I’m interested. Before you reply, review my member profile closely. If you still want to meet, let me know.
That was all.
No smiling cruelty. No pseudo-gallant filth.
No immediate demand for measurements or nude photos.
The restraint of it affected me more than any of the vulgar messages had.
I sat with my thumb hovering over his name for several seconds, then opened the full profile again as if I had not already memorized too much of it.
Luxury sponsor.
I read the rest despite the heat that had already filled my face, because he had told me to, and because some part of me had already taken the fact of that instruction too much to heart.
Established, discreet, demanding.
I felt that same hot, humiliating awareness gather low in me at the familiar words.
I prefer an associate who is intelligent, feminine, and honest about her need for structure.
I am generous with a woman who pleases me and consistent with one who requires correction.
Defiance, dishonesty, and carelessness will be disciplined firmly.
I do not bluff, negotiate consequences after the fact, or repeat myself.
I swallowed hard.
There were more specifics beneath that. Dress standards. Availability expectations. Prompt communication. Sexual exclusivity. Travel. Discipline at the sponsor’s discretion within agreed terms. The private note remained there too, cool and impossible to mistake.
Anal training, discipline, and intercourse will be an important part of your life, if you accept a sponsorship offer from me. I believe a submissive young woman learns her most important lessons that way.
I shut my eyes.
Luxury. Five thousand and up.