Chapter 8 #3
“You disobeyed a simple instruction,” he said. “You chose a consequence instead. That’s the first thing you need to understand about me, Alex. I mean what I say.”
Another tiny movement of his finger. I closed my eyes.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Yes, what?”
My mind felt ragged around the edges. “Yes… sir.”
He made a low sound I felt more than heard, approval without softness.
“Better.”
His hand left my back and slid around to the front of me, between my body and the sink.
For one stunned second I thought he meant to touch me between my legs and nearly came from the anticipation alone.
But he only took hold of my jaw, lifting my face enough that I had to look at myself in the mirror: flushed cheeks, parted lips, wild eyes, hair disordered, skirt up, panties down, a man in an expensive suit standing behind me with one finger in my ass to correct my disobedience.
The sight was almost too much.
“This is what accepting my sponsorship looks like,” he said. “Not contracts and polite euphemisms. Sexual obedience. Sexual, disciplinary consequences. Truth.”
I could hardly breathe.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you accept it?”
Another tiny, devastating pulse of movement from the finger inside me accompanied the question. My body clenched around the intrusion and the answer came out of me before pride could catch it.
“Yes.”
He held me there another few seconds, perhaps to make sure I meant it, perhaps simply because he knew exactly what it would do to me. Then he withdrew his finger slowly.
The emptiness that followed made me shudder.
I heard the soft rustle of a towel, then felt him wipe me with efficient thoroughness. That nearly undid me as much as the punishment itself. The matter-of-factness of it. The implication that he had done this before, knew exactly how to manage a girl after making her take something so intimate.
When he pulled my panties back up, the damp lace settling again against my overheated skin felt obscene. He lowered my skirt and smoothed it down over my bottom with one firm pass of his hand.
“Stand up.”
I obeyed at once. My knees were shaky enough that I had to brace myself on the sink for a second.
He turned me to face him.
I could not meet his eyes right away. I was too aware of everything—of the lingering unfamiliar ache behind me, of the slick wetness between my thighs, of the fact that I had just accepted a sponsorship while bent over a café sink with his finger in my ass.
His fingers touched my chin and lifted it.
“You’re right to lower your eyes in your sponsor’s presence, but now I want you look at me when I speak to you.”
I did.
His dark eyes searched my face with unsettling steadiness.
“You’re flushed. Shaking. Very aroused. But you’re not frightened in the way a girl is frightened when she’s made a true mistake coming into a room with a man.
You’re frightened because you know you wanted this before you let yourself admit it. ”
The accuracy of that struck so deep that tears pricked my eyes at once.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I whispered.
“Nothing is wrong with you.” His voice remained calm, but there was something different in it now, not gentler exactly, but less clinical. “Something is unstructured. That’s not the same thing.”
My throat tightened.
He dropped his hand from my chin. “Fix yourself.”
For a second I just stared, too dazed to understand. Then I saw his glance flick briefly to my blouse and hair, and the ordinary practicality of the instruction steadied me enough that I turned to the mirror and tried to put myself back together.
My fingers shook as I smoothed my hair and blouse. My face remained hopelessly pink. There was no repairing that.
Behind me, he washed his hands with the citrus soap, dried them on one of the folded towels, and looked entirely composed.
That infuriated me enough to restore a little of my brain.
“So that’s it?” I said, still facing the mirror because I could not yet quite bear to turn around. “You finger my ass in a restaurant bathroom and now I’m… sponsored?”
“In essence, yes.”
I turned then, my eyes going wide again despite everything. “You make it sound administrative.”
“It is administrative,” he said. “And sexual. And corrective. None of those categories exclude the others.”
I watched him take his phone from his breast pocket. He tapped, then tapped again.
My phone vibrated in my little purse. I felt my eyes go wide.
“Go ahead,” Porter told me.
I swallowed hard as I opened the purse and took my phone out to see a notification from the Selecta Arrangements app.
Sponsorship offer from Porter B! Tap to review.
In something like shock I tapped, and saw the offer of $10,000 per month, with subsidized housing.
Accept offer in one button. Decline offer in another.
I tapped. Porter’s phone buzzed. I watched him glance down, then back up at me.
“Now take off your clothes,” he commanded. “I want to see what I’ve just acquired right away. Then we’ll go back to my apartment and I’ll finish punishing you.”