Chapter 29
Alex
In the blink of an eye I traveled from DC to that distant galaxy from which I could see myself, in the town car next to Porter, looking at the cane and hearing his terrible words.
I watched the tears of panic spring to my eyes and the shudder of terror shake my body under the coat.
When I felt those things, it seemed like the body that felt them belonged to that far away Alex who was me, but also not.
The Alex who had no choice.
“Oh, God,” she—I—whispered.
Porter closed the briefcase with a soft click that seemed, absurdly, louder than my little cry. He did not touch me at once. He just looked at me, and the steadiness of his gaze somehow made the panic more acute, because it told me he wanted me to feel it.
The car moved smoothly through the late afternoon traffic.
Through the tinted window I caught broken glimpses of Washington sliding by in gray-gold pieces: men in overcoats, the hard stone facades of government buildings.
It all looked powerful but also terribly ordinary.
That seemed like one of the worst parts, or maybe my brain tried to tell me that, to put something like a rational framework around it.
My life, that logical voice said, had become deranged in private while the city remained mightily, and serenely, itself.
“Look at me,” Porter said.
I turned my head. My eyes felt hot and bright.
I breathed too quickly, and I knew he could see that.
I knew he could see the tremor in my lower lip, the effort it cost me not to start pleading before we had even arrived.
Beneath the pink wool of the coat my nipples had tightened in the red lace.
Between my legs, to my deep humiliation, there was already a damp, frightened throb.
His eyes darkened, somehow. I knew it didn’t really have anything to do with the color of his irises, but the way his face changed made his gaze seem hungrier, more aggressive, and my body associated those things with darkness… the color of the abyss inside me.
The realization came to me with a strange, dizzying clarity: my fear affected him.
In the crude, simple sense that I knew his cock had hardened, but also in another way.
It reached him. Moved him. My terror and my body’s shameful response to it had become part of the scene he was creating, and he wanted all of it.
The knowledge sent a hot shiver through me so contradictory that for one second I almost forgot to be afraid.
“You understand,” he said quietly, “that if we go forward now, you do not improvise. You obey.”
“Yes, sir,” I whispered.
He watched me another second. Then his hand came up and cupped my jaw.
I thought he meant to steady me. Perhaps he did. But the next instant he pulled me to him and kissed me.
It was not a careful kiss. It was not one of the composed, measured things he sometimes did when he wanted to remind me who I belonged to.
It felt as if something in him had given way under the pressure of appetite and purpose and whatever else lay beneath those, and his mouth came down on mine with such heat that my whole body jolted.
I made a helpless sound against his lips.
He kissed me as if he meant to take the air from my lungs and replace it with his dominance.
One hand stayed firm on my face; the other slid around my waist, drawing me across the leather seat toward him, so that the coat opened a little and cold air touched the tops of my stockings.
I felt his control in every inch of the movement, and also something less easily named.
Hunger, yes. Possession, yes. But something more overwhelming than either.
Love? Or maybe what passed for it in a man who showed devotion by arranging punishments and public humiliations for the young woman he kept for bottom fucking.
The thought nearly undid me.
His tongue parted my lips and I yielded at once.
There was no resisting that kiss. My hands, which had clenched uselessly in my lap, came up and caught at his sleeve and then his shoulder.
I knew I ought to sit still and be proper and submissive.
Instead I kissed him back with a desperation that shocked me.
The cane. Gowry. The Capitol. The hideaway.
All of it whirled around in my head like a blizzard while his mouth made me feel there was only this.
When he finally let me breathe, I shook in an entirely different way.
He rested his forehead against mine for one suspended second. His voice, when it came, was lower than before. “Good girl.”
The words went straight through me. I could hardly think.
My body had become all sensation—fear not gone but transformed, mingled with arousal so intense that I felt almost feverish.
I knew my face must be flushed bright red.
I knew my mouth had gone soft from kissing him.
I knew that under the coat I was dressed for inspection, for exposure, for disgrace.
And still some wild, treacherous part of me felt proud.
The car turned. A few moments later it slowed, then stopped.
Everything after that happened with a speed that left me little room for reflections. Porter got out first, then helped me from the car with one firm hand under my elbow.
The entrance to the Capitol through which we passed was discreet, tucked far away from the grander approach. A man in a dark suit nodded once and opened a heavy door without a word. The silence, the deference, the back-channel quality of it all made my pulse race even harder.
We moved down a corridor that smelled faintly of polished wood and old stone, then into a private elevator. Porter pressed a button with his thumb while I stood beside him, trying to hold myself together inside my coat.
The elevator rose very quickly. The doors opened on a corridor I had seen many times; both Gowry’s and Hathaway’s hideaways were on it.
I could see the stairs I had come up with Gowry, when he had told me to strip, then laid bare my unacknowledged, utterly mortifying sexual responses to devastating effect…
and then I had gone down the stairs in abject disgrace and humiliation after Hathaway had walked in and fired me.
My knees nearly failed me when Porter lifted his hand and knocked on Gowry’s door.
The sound seemed to travel down the quiet corridor and then back into my body.
For one second I thought, absurdly, that I might actually faint there against the polished stone floor, in my pink coat and red lace, before any of it had begun.
Then Porter was opening the door, ushering me in with one hand warm and inexorable at my back.
Gowry sat in a leather armchair by the windows, a tumbler of amber whiskey in one hand.
The hideaway looked exactly as I remembered and somehow worse for being so unchanged.
Dark wood, thick carpet, the broad desk where I had once bent in terror and confusion for him to whip me and fuck me. He looked up, and his eyebrows rose.
“Well,” he said. His gaze moved over me, then to Porter, then back again. “I wasn’t expecting Miss Murphy.” His mouth curved. “I can’t say I’m disappointed, though.”
“Thank you for seeing me on short notice, Senator,” Porter said with calm formality, as if he had not just delivered a young woman in lingerie to a private senatorial office. “I think you may be intrigued when I explain why she’s here.”
My throat tightened.
Porter shut the door behind us. The click sounded final. Then he moved behind me. I shuddered as his hands came around to my front and reached for the buttons of my coat.
I flinched before I could stop myself.
I heard his voice in my ear. Not angry. Not soft either. Simply decisive. “Stand still.”
“Yes, sir,” I whispered.
He unbuttoned the coat, then drew it from my shoulders.
The wool slid down my arms and away, and cold air moved over the red lace, over my nearly bare hips, over the tops of my stockings.
I wanted to grab for the coat, to pull it back, to tell him I had changed my mind about all of this and would like very much to go home and never hear the word cane again.
Instead I stood there while he hung the coat up on a stand in the corner.
Something in me recoiled then. Not enough to resist, not enough to do anything useful or brave, but enough to feel reluctance bloom, sharp and miserable, in my chest. This had been my idea: I knew that.
Yet knowing it didn’t make the reality any less shocking.
I was here, in front of the man who had first dominated me in this building, displayed by the man who had since taught me just how thoroughly I could be dominated… needed to be dominated.
Porter spoke before I could gather myself.
“You may remember,” he said to Gowry, “that the last time you saw Alex, she showed potential, but not polish.”
Heat rushed to my face at once.
Gowry took a slow sip of whiskey, eyes on me over the rim of the glass. “I had noticed room for improvement.”
Porter gave the faintest smile. “Since then I’ve undertaken her training.”
I wished, with real desperation, for the floor to open under me.
He went on in that measured voice of his, the one that could make any obscenity sound like the careful summary of a business strategy.
He told Gowry about my rules. About being denied panties.
About skirts only, to make me available.
About supervising my toileting, and making me pee on the floor as a lesson, then about making me look at him while I peed.
About how quickly I had learned that a sponsor’s preferences extended to every detail of a girl’s body and habits.
I stared at some point just beyond Gowry’s shoulder and tried not to swoon.
Porter didn’t stop there. He told Gowry that he had had my cunt waxed smooth because he liked to see what belonged to him clearly.
He said it in the same tone a different man might have used to explain a sub-clause of a bill.
He described how pretty I looked afterwards, how much more obviously available for fucking.
How wet I became under correction. How gratefully I took his cock in my mouth now, and in my pussy, and in my ass.
How my body had learned to answer discipline with submission, and submission with arousal.
He even said—while I burned alive in plain sight—that I looked exquisite with a rigid penis up my whipped bottom.
I made a tiny sound at that, not quite a protest and not quite a sob.
Gowry set down his glass.
By then I could see what I had so foolishly hoped to see.
The senator’s face hadn’t changed much, but his stillness had.
His gaze moved over my body with increasing concentration, lingering openly now at my breasts in the red bra, at the tiny panel of lace over my sex, at the line of my thighs.
It was impossible not to understand what I was doing to him. Or what Porter was doing through me.
“The transformation sounds substantial,” Gowry said.
“It is,” Porter replied. “Go over to the senator, Alex.”
I moved because he had spoken. Because there was no world in which I did not move. My legs felt unsteady as I crossed the carpet.
“Closer,” Porter said.
I stopped beside Gowry’s chair.
He looked up at me from where he sat, not hurriedly, not apologetically. His eyes took in my breasts first. Then the narrowness of my waist, the red straps, the tops of the stockings. Then toward the center, his eyes intent. I felt his gaze on the lace over my pussy almost like a touch.
“Turn,” Porter said.
I turned.
“Move your hair aside so that he can see those little tits properly.”
With shaking fingers, I gathered my hair over one shoulder.
Gowry’s hand came out then, not quite touching at first, simply indicating what he wanted to see better. My nipple tightened even harder under the lace when his fingers finally brushed the cup of the bra, tracing the shape without moving the fabric. He looked down between my legs again.
“Turn,” Porter said again, and I obeyed, and felt the full shame of presenting my bottom in the tiny thong, the red lace drawn tightly enough that the shape beneath it was suggested more than hidden.
“Very pretty,” Gowry murmured.
I wanted to vanish.
Instead I stood there and let the two men look at what had become of me.
After a moment Gowry said, with a composure that made the words worse, “May I take her panties down?”