Chapter 10
Alex
I obeyed.
I pulled on my blouse with clumsy fingers.
My skirt. Each movement seemed to make the pressure in my bladder more distinct.
I could hardly think straight. My body felt divided against itself in too many ways to count—aching and wet and unfinished and now painfully full.
By the time I stepped into my shoes, I felt as if the room had become slightly unreal around the edges.
He unlocked the bathroom door and looked back at me once.
“Come.”
I followed him out.
The café seemed impossibly normal. A spoon clinked against porcelain somewhere.
Someone laughed softly near the window. A woman in a camel coat stood waiting for her order.
I walked behind him through all of it with my face hot, my muscles clenched, and the terrible awareness that under my careful clothes my panties were soaked with my need and I had not been allowed to relieve myself.
Outside, the cooler air struck my skin and almost made me gasp.
I almost expected Porter to take my arm, as if to march me to his apartment where he could teach me the lesson I really needed, but he didn’t.
He only set an unhurried pace along the sidewalk, and I kept up beside him because I was too rattled to do anything else.
Every step jarred me. My need to pee ebbed and flowed with the movement. I tried to walk normally and failed. I could feel myself becoming more and more conscious of my own body in the lowest, most humiliating way.
After half a block, I said, too quickly and too pleadingly, “How far?”
“About four minutes now.”
My eyes widened. “And then what?”
He glanced at me, not unkindly, but with that same terrible steadiness. “First, I’ll decide whether you’ve earned the toilet.”
The words made me stop walking for half a second. That, in turn, made the problem worse. To my horror, I started shifting from foot to foot, unable to stop myself.
He stopped too, turned, and looked at me on the crowded sidewalk as if there were nothing unusual in our conversation.
“You can still leave,” he said.
There it was again, the fact I kept trying to bury. I could leave. I could turn around right now and go back to my apartment and keep my pride, or what remained of it.
But beneath that clear possibility lay another truth, just as clear now and much uglier: I didn’t want to leave badly enough.
I found that knowledge highly distressing. I wanted to hate him for making me face it. I despised myself though, instead, for standing there on a public street, desperate to pee and half mad with arousal, and not walking away.
But, I told myself, I couldn’t really leave, could I? His apartment obviously had the closest toilet. I bit my lip, my forehead creasing hard. I shifted my weight again, exactly like a little girl who needed the potty.
Then, to my abject humiliation, the pressure down there became too much. I felt myself let go, just a little.
“Oh, no,” I whimpered.
Porter’s eyes moved downward. Terrified, I followed his gaze to where, between my feet, the sidewalk had developed a tiny pool of moisture.
My eyes rose to meet his again. The expression I saw in his face, of evaluation, mixed with sympathy, mixed with unmistakable masculine hunger, brought a warmth to my chest that I could never have untangled in a million years.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re almost there. When we get to my place we’ll deal with you properly.”
I nearly wailed at the effect those words, in that voice, had on my body. Porter had turned to walk quickly onward, and I couldn’t do anything but follow, because walking seemed to be the only thing that would distract me from the shameful pressure between my thighs.
The building had one of those old Washington facades that hid money behind restraint.
We had passed through the lobby and into a private elevator before I had really taken it in.
I stood beside him with my thighs clenched and my whole body vibrating with the effort not to lose control completely.
The elevator seemed to move too slowly and too smoothly.
I fixed my eyes on the numbers and tried not to squirm.
“Please,” I said, very quietly, because there was no dignity left in me to support any other tone. “Please, I really can’t—”
“I know,” he said.
That was all. Not comfort. Just knowledge.
The doors opened onto a space so beautiful that under any other circumstances I would have stopped dead and stared.
Dark wood. Long windows full of late afternoon light.
Rugs that looked too expensive to step on.
Everything controlled, sumptuous, masculine in a way that made me understand at once that nothing in it looked that way by accident.
I barely saw any of it, though. Porter’s hand came to my elbow, not roughly, just directing, and he guided me down a hall and into a bathroom that looked larger than my bedroom.
Marble. Brass. A soaking tub. A glass shower big enough for three people.
Soft lighting that ought to have made the room soothing and instead made it feel staged for my humiliation.
“There,” he said, indicating the toilet.
I gave a little choked sound and all but ran for it. My fingers were on my skirt already, my knees bending.
“Stop.”
I froze.
It was extraordinary how completely I froze. One word, in that tone, and my body locked in place despite the desperate ache in it.
I half turned, wild-eyed. “I can’t.”
“If you sit on that toilet,” he said evenly, “I’ll cane your bottom until you don’t even want to look at it in the mirror.”
For one second I just stared at him. The room seemed to tilt around me. Then the meaning hit in full. Not if I made a scene. Not if I refused some larger instruction. If I sat down to pee. He was making even this part of his insane system.
My eyes filled at once. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I wailed.
“No,” he said. “But you’re going to do as you’re told anyway.”
The pressure inside me had become agony. I was crying now in earnest, shaking and furious and so aroused that the fact of it made me want to die. I looked at the toilet. I looked at him. I knew with hideous clarity that he meant it.
“Porter—”
“Sir.”
I made a miserable sound. “Sir, please.”
He came a little closer. “Stand where you are.”
I did. I hated that I did it, but I had no choice. I didn’t know, at that moment, why I had no choice, but it felt true, so for me it was true.
“Hands at your sides.”
Another sob caught in my throat. I let my hands fall.
“That’s right,” he said, and his voice changed just enough to ruin me further, approval threading through the command. “Now let go. You’re going to have your accident like a good girl.”
I had never in my life felt so reduced, so exposed, so known in the worst possible way. My body fought me for one frantic second more, and then I gave up.
Warmth rushed down my thighs.
I cried out, not loudly, but with the sort of broken note that comes from a person hearing her own shame made audible. The sound of my pee splashing on the marble floor seemed impossibly loud. I watched in horror, unable to look away, as the yellow pool formed around my feet.
And all the while my body answered with heat. I could feel wetness between my legs of another kind too, my panties already damp and now made much more so, soaking with my shame, the whole thing so confusingly physical and immediate that I could hardly think.
“That’s it,” he said softly. “Very good.”
I was weeping helplessly by then. “Oh, God.”
“No,” he said again, and this time there was unmistakable satisfaction in it. “You held it for me. Then you obeyed. I’m proud of you.”
I could never have imagined a man saying those words to me while I stood crying over a puddle of my own urine on a marble floor. No one should have. The fact that they made my chest constrict and my pussy clench hurt the most.
Then I couldn’t stop. My bladder emptied in a hot relentless stream while I stood there bared despite my clothing in every way that mattered, skirt on, tears on my face, a man watching me with calm masculine approval of my mortification as if I had just learned something important.
When it finally ended, I was still trembling. I looked down at the floor and then at him, horrified beyond speech.
He stepped closer and brushed one knuckle lightly under one wet eye. “There. You did it. You’re learning to be the kind of good girl who pees on the floor when she needs to be taught a lesson.”
I let out a little desperate laugh through tears. “Your reward system is so fucked up.”
His mouth moved, just slightly. “Yes.”
“You did this.” I almost babbled now, overwhelmed enough that the words came without strategy. “It’s your fault. You dragged me here and wouldn’t let me go and now you’re… you’re praising me, for…” I gestured uselessly downward. “For peeing on your floor like a toddler.”
“My floor can be cleaned,” he said. “What matters is that your body is beginning to understand that resisting what it needs only makes things harder.”
“That’s not logical.”
“It’s my logic,” he said. “And you’re going to have to get used to it, because it happens also to be the logic of your body’s needs.”
I stared at him with tears still drying on my face, hating how the words affected me, reaching inside where I couldn’t seem to rid myself of their meaning.
Then he said, very matter-of-factly, “Take off your clothes.”
I blinked. “What?”
“You’re going to clean this up naked.”
My lips parted and I just stared at him for a long moment. To my dismay, a smile crept onto his face. The smile said that, yes, he knew exactly what I needed, as dark and hot as that thing might be.
“Or I’ll whip you,” he said.
I laughed once, a tiny, wrecked sound, then reached for my blouse with fingers that hardly worked.
He watched while I undressed. He didn’t hurry me, and he didn’t help.
He simply stood there in his perfect suit while I unbuttoned and unzipped and peeled away the clothes I had so carefully chosen, the nice lingerie beneath them, everything.
By the time I stood bare before him, my skin felt over-aware of every inch of air in the room.
His gaze moved over me slowly, possessively. “Better.”
I wrapped my arms around myself without thinking.
“Don’t cover up.”
I heard it in his tone, this time, though he hadn’t spoken the words: or I’ll have to use the cane. I dropped my arms.
He gave a single nod, then turned and left the bathroom. I stood there naked and shivering over the puddle I had made, staring after him in disbelief, until he returned a moment later with a bucket and a flat mop.
He set them down near the sink. “Clean it thoroughly. You can put your clothes in the hamper over there. I’ve got clothes you can wear out when I’m through with you.”
Oh, no. The way my heart raced at this new revelation of this man’s intentions had more of need to it than of fear or shame. I tried desperately to find some kind of composure. I looked at the mop, then at him.
“You’re serious.”
“Yes.”
I almost asked whether he intended to supervise. Instead I bit my lip.
He seemed to understand the unasked question anyway. “When you’re finished, leave the bucket and mop here. Then come find me in my office.”
My stomach tightened. “And then?”
“Then,” he said, “you’ll get the spanking you’ve earned.”
He left me with that.
For a long moment I didn’t move. Then I picked up my clothes and put them in the hamper. Then I filled the bucket. I mopped up my own puddle naked in a millionaire’s bathroom while my skin flushed and cooled and flushed again.
Every so often the fact of what I was doing would hit me again, and I would have to stop and close my eyes.
I’m naked.
I peed on his floor.
He’s going to spank me when I’m done.
That last thought stayed with me most persistently of all.
It threaded through each stroke of the mop, through each wring of the pad into the bucket, through each breath I tried to steady.
He hadn’t touched my ass cheeks in punishment, and already I felt his hand there, somehow, in anticipation.
I remembered his threat of the cane. I remembered his hand in the café bathroom.
His probing, degrading finger in the tiny hole.
I remembered the way my body had yielded and betrayed me over and over.
By the time the floor shone again I felt as though my nerves had been brought almost to the point of singing.