Chapter 9
Anne
I turned my back to Master Paul, though I knew it must look absurd, given that I would apparently have to stay naked as Darlene lit me. My fingers fumbled at the buttons of my blouse with the clumsy desperation of someone trying to undress in a burning building.
The tears hadn’t stopped—they ran silently down my cheeks now, no longer accompanied by sobs but persistent, a steady leak I couldn’t shut off.
I got the blouse open and shrugged it off my shoulders, letting it fall to the studio floor behind me.
My bra was white, plain, functional—the kind you buy in a three-pack at a department store—and I reached back with shaking hands to unhook it.
The bra came loose and I caught it against my chest with my left hand, for one last, futile second of coverage before letting it drop.
My right hand drifted, involuntarily, to my bottom.
The skin there still blazed—I could feel the heat radiating through the fabric of my skirt—and my fingers pressed against the curve of one cheek in that instinctive, self-soothing gesture that a spanked girl apparently can’t suppress.
I rubbed in small circles, wincing, trying to ease the deep, throbbing ache that Master Paul’s hand had left behind.
“Oh,” Melissa said from somewhere behind me. Her voice had changed—no longer sharp with irritation but bright, almost electric, the way it had sounded in the conference room when she’d unveiled the Surrender Access Panty. “Oh, that’s perfect. Darlene, are you seeing this?”
“I see it.” Darlene’s voice, clipped and businesslike.
“It’s gorgeous, right?” Melissa continued, circling me like I was a sculpture she wanted to evaluate from every angle.
“That right there… that gesture, the way she reached back without even thinking about it, the way her face looks while she does it… that’s the entire campaign in a single image.
That’s the Her Secret Garden girl. She’s been disciplined, she’s feeling it, and she can’t help touching herself where it hurts.
It’s vulnerable and intimate and slightly ashamed and completely authentic.
You cannot direct that. You cannot fake that.
Once we get her into lace, magic is going to happen.
It’s exactly what I told Stuart: the sensors and the vibration modules have their place—but there’s no substitute for the real thing, when an expert dominant brings it out. ”
I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard. I pulled my hand from my backside slowly, trying not to make it seem like I was jerking it away. I unzipped my skirt while Melissa continued talking, because stopping felt much worse than continuing.
The skirt pooled at my feet and I stepped out of it, still rubbing my bottom with one hand, and now I stood in nothing but my already pulled-down polka-dot panties—the ones Master Paul had tugged to mid-thigh before spanking me.
They sat crookedly there, nothing more than a humiliating twist of fabric.
I stooped and pushed them all the way down my thighs, and I stepped out of them and stood there, naked, in the middle of a film studio on the twenty-first floor of Selecta headquarters.
It seemed like my mind had decided to pretend it just wasn’t happening, because I suddenly noticed that now I had put both my hands behind me to rub my spanked bottom.
I couldn’t help it, or at least my body, given free rein, definitely couldn’t. The throbbing wouldn’t stop, and the gesture was the only comfort available to me in a world that seemed to have stripped away every other kind.
And then—to my absolute, bone-deep dismay—I felt it.
Warmth. Treacherous, damning warmth that had nothing directly to do with the heat in my punished cheeks and everything to do with the place between my legs.
It crept in like a tide, slow and inexorable, pooling low in my belly and spreading downward until I could feel the slickness gathering at my center, my body reacting to my nakedness, to my vulnerability, to the echo of Master Paul’s palm and the sound of his voice saying good girl.
My pussy responded with an arousal so inappropriate, so mortifying, that I wanted the floor to open beneath my feet and swallow me whole.
I pulled my hands away and pressed my thighs together.
I still had the strange idea that it could help preserve my modesty, it seemed, but I found again that the pressure made the problem worse, just the way it had in the conference room, the way it always did.
My body had learned its own terrible lesson about what squeezing my thighs actually accomplished, and the lesson was: nothing good.
Nothing that reduced the wanting. Only things that made it more specific, more urgent, more impossible to deny.
“Light her,” Darlene said to someone I couldn’t see, and suddenly the studio around me shifted. Banks of soft white light angled toward me from three directions, bathing my naked body in a glow that felt almost warm on my skin.
Darlene appeared in my peripheral vision, crouching low with a light meter, moving around me with the detached efficiency of someone measuring a room for furniture.
She held the meter near my hip, my breast, my collarbone, each time checking the reading and making minute adjustments to the nearest light panel.
“Turn toward me,” she said, and I did, and the lights hit the front of my body—my breasts, my stomach, the triangle of blonde hair between my legs—and I closed my eyes because looking at Darlene’s face while she looked at me there was more than I could bear.
“Skin takes the light beautifully,” Darlene said, apparently to Melissa.
“Very fair. She’ll photograph warm. The blush pattern is a gift—see how it runs from the clavicle down through the sternum?
In the right lingerie, with the right emotional state, that flush line is going to sell the entire narrative.
Anne, honey, rub your bottom again for me?
And put your other arm across your chest, like you don’t want your suitor to see your nipples. Perfect, thanks.”
I stood there, naked and lit like a specimen, rubbing my burning bottom with my right hand while my left arm crossed uselessly over my breasts, and I felt the wetness between my thighs with a clarity that made me want to scream.
Every second I stood here, exposed under these lights, being discussed in the third person by women who saw me as visual material rather than a human being, my body betrayed me more thoroughly.
I could feel myself swelling, could feel the slippery heat increasing, and I knew—I knew—that if anyone looked closely enough, if the light hit me at the right angle, they would see it.
The evidence. The glistening proof that Anne Chamberlain, who had said no, thank you twice in Penelope’s office and I can’t three times in this studio, was standing here dripping wet.
“You know what,” Master Paul said, and his voice came from somewhere to my left.
I opened my eyes and found him leaning against the edge of the kitchen set’s butcher-block island, arms crossed, studying me with that deep, assessing gaze that seemed to see through every defensive layer I’d ever constructed.
“I think there’s a narrative arc here that we’re not taking advantage of. ”
Melissa looked up from her tablet. “Go on.”
“Her pussy,” Paul said, nodding toward me—toward the place between my legs, as casually as if he were pointing out a design flaw in a piece of furniture.
“She came in unshaved. That’s an oversight in terms of prep, sure, but in terms of story, it’s a gift.
If we shoot her first with the hair—in the baby doll, let’s say, in the bedroom set—and then I discover it during the scene and make the decision that it needs to go so she can wear the Surrender panties properly, we can make baring her pussy an integral part of the story.
It’s not something that happened off screen before the campaign’s story began.
It happens to her, on camera, as part of her submission. ”
My stomach dropped. I opened my mouth but no sound came out, because the words baring her pussy had short-circuited something essential in my ability to form language.
Melissa’s eyes widened slightly. Then they narrowed, and the expression that crossed her face was one I recognized from the conference room on the thirty-sixth floor—that anticipatory relish, that look of a card player who’d just been dealt an ace she hadn’t expected.
“That’s brilliant,” she said. “That’s—yes.
That changes the whole first act of the campaign.
We were going to open with the lingerie reveal, but if we open with the baby doll and the discovery and the correction—God, that’s so much better.
That’s the whole thesis of HSG in a single sequence.
She’s not ready. He makes her ready. She submits to being made ready, and finds that she needed it more than she could ever have admitted. ”
She tapped furiously on her tablet, her coffee abandoned on a nearby equipment case, her dark hair falling forward as she bent over the screen.
“Okay. Okay, I’m rearranging the schedule.
We push the Surrender Line hero shots to this afternoon.
The morning block becomes the baby doll-to-shaving sequence.
Darlene, can you light the bedroom and the bathroom by—what time is it—can you have both sets lit by ten? ”
“Ten-fifteen,” Darlene said, already moving toward her equipment. “I’ll need to recalibrate the bathroom. The tile reflects differently than I’d planned for.”
“Fine. Ten-fifteen.” Melissa looked up from her tablet and fixed me with those sharp brown eyes, and for a moment—just a moment—something flickered in her expression that might have been sympathy. Or might have been excitement wearing sympathy’s mask. “Anne. You’re doing great. Don’t move.”
I didn’t move. I stood in the pool of white light, naked and burning and wet, and waited for whatever came next.
What came next was a young woman—an assistant I hadn’t noticed before, with a headset and a clipboard and the brisk, unfazed demeanor of someone who had seen far stranger things on this studio floor—who appeared at my side holding a garment on a padded hanger.
“You can put this on,” she said, and held it out to me. “I’m Amy.”
It was a baby doll nightgown. Not the champagne silk from Melissa’s presentation—this one was pink.
A soft, blushing pink that deepened to rose at the gathered empire waist, with a bodice of delicate lace that would cover my breasts without concealing them and a skirt of sheer chiffon that fell in a whisper-light cascade to what I estimated would be just barely past my hips.
It was beautiful. It was the kind of thing I might have seen in a shop window and touched with my fingertips and then walked away from, because girls like me didn’t wear things like that. Girls like me wore polka-dot cotton panties and modest blouses and kept their armor on.
I took it from the hanger with shaking hands.
The fabric weighed almost nothing; it pooled in my palms in a delicate pile that made me think of cotton candy.
I gathered it and pulled it over my head, and as it settled over my body—the lace cupping my breasts, the chiffon floating against my thighs, the thin spaghetti straps resting on my shoulders—something happened that I wasn’t prepared for.
I felt like a different person.
Not a better person or a worse person. A different one. The girl who had walked into this studio in her cream blouse and navy skirt and sensible underwear had been Anne Chamberlain, administrative assistant, note-taker, good girl in the way that meant invisible and compliant and safely unsexy.
The girl standing here now, in a pink baby doll that showed the shadow of her nipples through lace and the curve of her bottom through chiffon and—God help me—the triangle of hair between her legs through fabric so sheer it might as well have been candlelight…
this girl was someone else. Someone I’d caught glimpses of in Penelope’s office, bent over the desk.
Someone I’d felt stirring in the conference room, squeezing her thighs not so that the naughty feeling would go away, but so it would grow.
That girl, that other Anne, was the young woman who looked over to where she knew Master Paul must be, and saw that he had taken his clothes off.
Saw that Master Paul’s penis, semi-erect as if at the sight of me in the baby doll nightgown, was absolutely enormous.
Had to bite her lip to keep herself from crying out at the sight of that long, rigid cock.