Chapter 28
Alex
When sleep finally found me, I got little rest. I dreamed almost at once, and the dream had the stark vividness of something my body had been waiting all day to stage for me.
I stood in the hideaway office in the Capitol building: the place where my life had taken its humiliating left turn, thanks to Gowry’s hard cock and his horrid belt. Dark wood. Leather. Flags in one corner. A bank of windows looking out over gray winter light.
The asshole senator himself stood near his desk with his hands loosely clasped behind his back, broad and implacable, watching me with the arrogant, appraising gaze I remembered much too well. Porter stood beside me with a cane in his hand.
I wore nothing at all.
My hair fell over my shoulders, my scalp tingled with shame, and both men could see how wet I was because my need dripped down my thigh. Porter’s hand closed on the back of my neck and guided me forward with complete certainty.
“Bend over the senator’s desk,” he said.
In the dream I obeyed at once.
The immediate way my body complied, as if all the struggle had been driven out of me and only obedience remained, terrified me, even in the dream.
I felt the polished wood under my palms. I heard the tiny sounds my body made against the hard surface as I leaned over.
I heard my own breathing. Then I felt Porter’s fingers on my ass, lifting slightly, probing, tugging.
Gowry came closer. I could see his reflection in the dark shine of the desk. He looked interested, in an amused sort of way.
Porter said, in that calm voice that always seemed able to make indecency sound administrative, “It’s a tight little anus. I fuck it every day.”
“Ah,” Gowry replied. “Good to know.”
“Alex has been naughty, though. She played with her cunt and her ass when I was away. I thought it might interest you to see how I correct her.”
I heard the cane tap once against my sponsor’s palm.
My whole body tightened. In the dream I could feel everything with impossible clarity: the cool air on my bare bottom, the strain in my thighs from standing still, the awful pulse between my legs, the knowledge of Gowry’s eyes on me.
I wanted to beg Porter not to do it in front of him.
I wanted to beg him to get it over with. I wanted to beg Gowry to watch closely.
The first stroke landed and the pain ripped through me so sharply that I screamed and grabbed at the desk.
It was worse in the dream than in any waking anticipation: thin, white-hot, exact.
Porter made me count. Gowry listened. On the third stroke I had started to sob.
On the fifth my legs were shaking. On the sixth I looked up by accident and met Gowry’s eyes in the reflection, and the sight of his calm interest sent such a violent wave of humiliation through me that my pussy clenched.
Porter saw it, of course. Dream-Porter always saw everything.
“You see, Senator,” he said behind me, “how beautifully she responds to the right kind of discipline.”
I cried harder. Gowry came nearer still. He had somehow arrived on the other side of the desk, now, and he put one finger under my chin and lifted my face while I was bent over the desk with my bottom striped red for both of them to see.
“She does,” he said.
That was all. Two words. Deep, unhurried, perfectly certain. And then the dream leaped in the way dreams do, brutal in its logic and seamless in its obscenity. Porter straightened me, turned me, kissed me hard enough to take my breath away, and then put me on my knees at Gowry’s feet.
“For the bill,” I heard myself whisper.
Gowry’s hand came into my hair.
I woke with a gasp, tangled in the sheets, my heart pounding. The hideaway in the Capitol still seemed so vivid to me that for a second I didn’t know where I was.
Then the apartment returned around me: the muted light, the luxurious quiet, the soft comfort of the place. My body, however, remained in the dream.
I shut my eyes again immediately, because the first thing I understood was that I was aroused.
Deeply, helplessly, mortifyingly aroused.
My nipples felt tight. My thighs wanted to close.
Between my legs there was a thick, hot ache that had a direct relationship to the lingering image of Porter caning me while Gowry watched…
of Porter sharing my body with Gowry afterward, as a bribe, or perhaps merely as a courteous gesture.
“No,” I whispered, because some vestige of decency wanted to object.
But lying there, breath by breath, I discovered that the objection had no force behind it at all. Worse than that, the thing I tried to resist had somehow grown beyond fantasy. It had taken on a shape in my mind that felt almost practical.
If Gowry wanted power, appetite, spectacle, concession—if he wanted something impossible in policy terms and negotiable only in the uglier currencies men like him always recognized—then perhaps this was what he should be given.
Me. Me, specifically as I was. Claimed by Porter.
Disciplined by Porter. Offered by Porter.
Some shred of rationality in my mind made a valiant attempt at feeling sickened by the idea.
Instead I lay in the comfortable bed my sponsor had paid for, and felt the wet heat gather between my thighs. I knew, with a clarity that mortified me even as it excited me, that I wanted it that way.
It might work. That mattered. The bill mattered. The veterans Porter had talked about mattered. The disabled people who would be helped mattered. I clung to that, because it gave my desire a moral frame and I needed one desperately.
Beneath that frame, though, there lay the simpler and more dangerous truth: I wanted Porter to cane me in front of Gowry. I wanted Gowry to see what Porter had made of me. I wanted the shame and the display and the political ugliness of it. I wanted to be useful that way—and I wanted to be used.
By the time my phone rang, I had been lying there for perhaps ten minutes in a fever of thought and sensation, too ashamed and terrified to touch myself and too agitated to get up.
Porter’s name on the screen made my stomach flip.
I answered. “Sir?”
“I’ve gone straight from the airport to K Street,” he said. His voice sounded composed, a little tired perhaps, but very much himself. “I’ll need to see Gowry this afternoon.”
The words came out of me before I could arrange them into anything more dignified. “I think you should cane me in front of him.”
Silence.
My face burned instantly. I sat up in bed, clutching the sheet to my breasts though there was no one there to see.
“I know that sounds insane, but I… I woke up thinking about it and I think…” I swallowed hard.
“I think you should. And if… if… you… I mean… if he wants… if he wants more than that, if he’d support the bill, then you should… um… offer my… my…”
Another tiny pause, as I struggled to find a noun that wouldn’t sound like a cliché… or like I was a… a…
I let out a little whining noise through my nose.
But I am his little whore, aren’t I? He said so, and I didn’t leave, did I?
When Porter spoke, his tone had changed just enough to make my pulse jump. “You’ve been thinking hard this morning.”
“I dreamed it,” I whispered. “And when I woke up I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe it would work. Maybe that’s the thing with him. Maybe he wants to feel that he’s taking something from you.” My breath caught. “From us.”
“Us,” he repeated softly.
I shut my eyes.
Then he said, with sudden, businesslike precision, “Put on the red lingerie set. All of it, including the garter belt and the stockings. And the panties. Wear your overcoat over it and nothing else. I’ll send a car for you at four.”
My pulse thudded in my throat. “Nothing else?”
“Nothing else,” he said. “And Alex?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If we do this, you’ll do exactly as you’re told.”
The words sent a dark shiver through me. “Yes, sir.”
He ended the call.
For a few seconds I sat motionless on the bed staring at the phone in my hand, as if the device itself might explain what had just happened. Then I moved.
The rest of the day passed, somehow. My work shift at the café took me from ten to three.
Usually at work these days I spent the whole time thinking about my underwear-less state.
I would wonder if I should end the arrangement and quit while I was ahead—or if I should just quit my job instead.
The allowance from Porter was so generous, and really serving him in bed and not being allowed underwear seemed like a small price to pay, even if my pussy and anus were usually sore from his frequent demands, and the threat of discipline felt ever-present.
Today, though, I hardly noticed that I didn’t have any panties on under my skirt, because I was thinking all the time about the red lingerie I would don later. The café was busy enough that I didn’t have time to let any fantasies about what would happen after that unfold.
When I got home from work I showered, then blew my hair dry, barely paying attention to the process even as it happened.
Then I dressed, as Porter had specified, with fingers that shook more and more as the red pieces went on one by one.
The bra first. Then the garter belt with its dangling suspenders. Then the stockings.
Then, after one distracted false start, I remembered the lesson I had learned the night Porter had deflowered my bottom.
I fastened the suspenders, then pulled the thong on over them, so that a man—I swallowed hard as I wondered what man it might be, this evening—could take my panties down without the inconvenience of having to unfasten anything.
The memory of that night brought such a hot pulse of shame through me that I had to steady myself with a hand on the dresser for a second.
At last I put on the coat.
It was a good coat, pink, and tasteful in the way nearly everything connected to Porter seemed to be.
It buttoned high enough that no one would know at a glance what was underneath.
But I could feel every inch of what was not underneath.
No dress. No blouse. No skirt. No ordinary clothes insulating me from the world.
Just lingerie and wool and the knowledge of my own near-nakedness.
At 3:47 my phone chimed.
Your car has arrived.
My mouth went dry.
I took the elevator down with my face carefully arranged into what I hoped resembled composure. The ride seemed unbearable. I felt as if anyone who stepped in—though thankfully no one did—would be able to smell indecency on me.
When the doors opened into the lobby, the polished marble and brass made everything feel more public. More theatrical. I walked past the desk with measured steps, certain that the concierge must somehow know that under my coat I was dressed for men’s pleasure.
Outside, the black car waited.
The driver got out and opened the rear door for me with perfect professional neutrality.
That neutrality embarrassed me almost more than if he had smirked.
I slid inside carefully, conscious of my bare thighs against leather as the coat shifted slightly, and immediately tugged the heavy fabric down around me as if that could restore some dignity. My heart hammered all the way downtown.
By the time we stopped outside Porter’s office on K Street, I had worked myself into such a state of tension that when the rear door opened again and he got in beside me, I jumped a little.
He looked devastatingly self-possessed. Dark suit, precisely knotted yellow tie, his briefcase in his hand.
A little travel fatigue at the edges of his eyes, perhaps, but worn in a way that only made him seem more dangerous.
He took one look at me, took in the coat, my flush, the wide anxious eyes I could not quite hide, and something darkly approving moved in his face.
“The Capitol,” he told the driver.
Then he set the briefcase on his knees, clicked it open, and turned it slightly so I could see inside.
A cane lay there.
For one second the sight made the world narrow.
It seemed shorter, and even thicker than the one I had found in his home office.
It looked polished and stiff and terrible in its simplicity.
Seeing it nestled among files and a tablet and the ordinary instruments of his political life made it all more shocking, not less.
As if discipline belonged naturally among his tools.
I heard my breath catch in my throat as much as I felt it.
“This is for little sluts who play with their cunts and their assholes without permission,” he said quietly. “Whether it’s in front of Gowry or not, you’re going to be whipped with it this evening.”