Chapter 21
Anne
I wanted to die.
In that moment, standing half-naked in a curtained wardrobe area while a girl my own age looked at my aroused pussy, I experienced a shame so total that death seemed like a reasonable and even attractive alternative to continuing to exist in this body that refused, absolutely refused, to stop betraying me.
“Oh,” Amy said softly. Then, with a gentleness that made my eyes sting, “Hey. It’s okay.”
I couldn’t look at her. I stared at the floor, the training panties clutched against my stomach, my free arm crossed over my breasts in a posture of defensive modesty that accomplished nothing because the thing I most needed to hide was below my waist and already thoroughly seen.
“Anne.” Amy’s voice was quiet, matter-of-fact, and entirely without judgment.
“Honestly? This happens. Like, all the time. With the girls who work with the Institute trainers especially. I’ve been on wardrobe for six months and I have never once had a girl come back from his set dry.
Not once. You have nothing to be embarrassed about. ”
A sound escaped me, half laugh, half sob.
“Here,” Amy said, and I heard her move to the vanity table and tear open a packet. She pressed something into my free hand: a cleansing wipe, cool and damp, scented faintly with something clinical. “Clean up a little if you want. Take your time. I’ll turn back around.”
She turned. I wiped between my thighs with quivering hands, knowing it was futile, knowing that the moment I stepped onto that set and looked at Master Paul the wetness would return with the inevitability of a tide.
But the gesture felt necessary—a small act of self-maintenance in a life that was rapidly slipping beyond my ability to maintain.
I stepped into my training panties.
They slid up my legs with a whisper of cotton that felt different from any underwear I’d ever worn.
The fabric was even softer than it looked, but it fit with a sleekness that seemed almost architectural.
The waistband sat high on my hips, not in the low-rise style I was accustomed to but at my natural waist, and the leg openings sat mid-thigh, covering me completely, the gusset settling against my center with a snug, encompassing pressure that left no gap, no slack, no space between the cotton and my skin.
They were the most modest panties I had ever worn. More modest than the polka dots. More modest than anything in my drawer at home. They covered everything—my entire bottom, my hips, the soft lower curve of my belly—in plain, unadorned white cotton that communicated nothing except propriety.
And yet they felt devastating.
I stood in front of the mirror and stared at my reflection and could not reconcile what I saw with what I felt.
The girl in the mirror looked like she belonged in a Sunday school classroom.
White cotton panties pulled up almost to her belly button.
A white training bra that flattened rather than shaped, its halter straps crossing behind my neck with a utilitarian simplicity that erased any hint of seduction.
Blonde hair in a ponytail. Green eyes wide with something that didn’t match the underwear at all.
The underwear looked modest. These… intimates (as the marketing materials called them) were the most modest ones I’d ever worn. And I couldn’t stop shaking.
I couldn’t reconcile the sheer, screaming contradiction between what the mirror showed me and what my body felt. The girl in the reflection looked like she’d been dressed by a protective mother for her first day at a faith-based summer camp. Beneath the white cotton, though, my skin burned.
My nipples pressed against the training bra’s flat, unyielding fabric, and every breath made the cotton shift against them in a way that sent tiny, maddening sparks down through my belly.
The panties’ gusset sat flush against my center with a completeness that meant I felt the fabric with every micro-movement and the feeling wasn’t neutral.
If this was what the basic line felt like, I thought with a hard swallow, I felt immense empathy for the girls who had to wear the Awareness line. And yet… I had to bite my lip as I thought, a moment later, about how much I wanted to feel that, too.
I knew what would happen to a girl in those intimates, just as it would happen to me, on that set.
And, when it came to the kind of need the underwear made me feel…
and what that need would lead to, if I submitted the way my master had begun to train me to do…
the more of it the better, as shameful as it seemed.
He would make me confess. He would make me stand in front of him in these plain white panties and tell him what I’d done with my hands in the dark. Then he would punish me. Then he would shave me bare.
The knowledge of all of it—the full sequence of my coming humiliation—transformed the modest cotton against my skin into something that felt even more obscene than the pink baby doll had felt yesterday.
The baby doll had been designed to look sexy.
These panties were designed to look innocent, and my body’s response to them was anything but.
Amy handed me the jeans and I slid into them.
Mid-rise, slightly loose, the kind of jeans a girl wears when she’s not trying to impress anyone.
Amy dropped a plain white T-shirt over my head and tucked it in at my waist. In the mirror, the outfit looked so ordinary, so unremarkable, that it made me look like I had nothing important to do.
Which was, I realized, exactly the point.
A girl waiting at home for her suitor to return from a business trip. A girl who had something to hide.
“You look great,” Amy said, and I almost laughed, because I looked like nothing. I looked like a girl in jeans and a T-shirt and plain white underwear, and I had never in my life felt more naked.
She led me back through the curtains and onto the bedroom set.
The bed had been remade with fresh white sheets.
Darlene was adjusting a light stand near the doorway of the set’s mock hallway, and Melissa stood by the monitors, her tablet in hand, her expression sharp with anticipation. Master Paul was nowhere in sight.
“He’s changing,” Melissa said, reading my searching gaze.
“He’ll come through the hallway door when we start rolling.
You’ll be sitting on the bed. You’ve been waiting for him.
” She looked me over, her eyes traveling from my ponytail to my sneakers with the rapid, assessing scan of a woman who thought in images.
“Perfect. The jeans are perfect. Defensive. Ordinary. She knows she’s in trouble and she’s tried to armor herself in normalcy. ”
Melissa stepped closer and lowered her voice. “Anne. This is going to be intense. Paul told me the shape of it. Are you okay?”
I nodded. My throat felt too tight to speak.
“Good. Sit on the edge of the bed. Hands in your lap. You’ve been waiting for him to come home and you’re nervous. That’s all you have to play. The rest will happen.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. My hands found each other in my lap and held on, and the gesture felt familiar—I’d been doing it for two days now, desperately grabbing onto myself as if my hands could anchor me against a current that kept pulling me further from shore.
My heart had started to pound. A deep, heavy slamming against the inside of my ribs that I could feel in my temples, my fingertips, and the hollow of my throat.
Each beat seemed to push more blood between my legs, feeding the swollen, aching need that had taken up permanent residence there.
The training panties’ gusset pressed against me with every heartbeat, keeping me terribly aware second by second of exactly how aroused I was.
“Rolling,” Darlene said quietly.
I heard footsteps in the mock hallway. The confident, measured stride of a man who owned the space he moved through. The bedroom door opened, and Master Paul walked in.
He wore a charcoal suit. The jacket was unbuttoned, the tie loosened, the top button of his white shirt undone—the dishevelment of a man who had just come from a long day of travel and important meetings.
He carried a leather briefcase that he set on the dresser with a deliberate, unhurried motion, and then he turned to face me.
His eyes found mine across the set. Brown and piercing and seeing everything.
“Hi,” I said. My voice came out small.
Master Paul didn’t answer immediately. He stood by the dresser, hands in his pockets, and he looked at me the way he’d looked at me yesterday when he’d inspected me in the baby doll.
His face wore a slow, thorough attention that made me feel like he was reading a message written on my skin.
His gaze moved from my face to my posture to my hands clasped white-knuckled in my lap to the way my knees were pressed together, and I watched something shift in his expression.
A tightening around the jaw. A darkening of the eyes.
“Stand up,” he said.
I stood. My legs felt unreliable beneath me.
“Come here.”
I crossed the distance between the bed and the dresser on trembling legs.
I stopped in front of him, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to meet his eyes, close enough that I could smell cedar and warm skin and the faint, masculine scent of his cologne.
My heart was beating so hard I was certain he could hear it.
Master Paul looked down at me for a long, terrible moment. Then he spoke, and his voice was quiet and even and carried the particular weight of a man who already knew the answer to the question he was about to ask.
“Anne. Did you touch yourself last night while I was away?”
The floor tilted. The room seemed to contract around me until there was nothing in it except his face and his voice. My lips parted. A sound came out: not a word, just a breath, a tiny exhalation that carried the ghost of a protest.
His eyebrows rose fractionally. Waiting.
“I…” The word caught in my throat like a fishhook. My eyes dropped to his tie. To his collar. To the triangle of chest visible beneath the loosened button. Anywhere but his eyes, because meeting his eyes while I said this would kill me.
“Look at me,” he said.
I looked at him. The tears had already started—I could feel them building behind my eyes, hot and pressurized, and I blinked against them with the futile determination of someone trying to hold back a tide with their hands.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, sir.”
The words hung in the air between us.
“Yes, sir, what?” His voice didn’t rise. It didn’t harden. It stayed exactly where it was—low, controlled, and patient. The patience seemed worse than anger would have, because anger would have let me hide behind indignation. Patience made me stand in the open with nowhere to go.
“Yes, I… I touched myself.” My voice cracked on the last word.
A tear spilled over and tracked down my cheek.
“I played with my…” I swallowed. The word felt enormous in my mouth, too big to pass through my lips, but he was waiting and his eyes were holding mine and I couldn’t look away. “I played with my pussy.”
The confession left me hollow. I stood there, emptied out, my face burning, tears sliding down both cheeks now, my hands hanging at my sides because I’d forgotten what to do with them.
Master Paul’s expression didn’t change. He studied me for another long moment. I watched him take in my tears, my blush, and my fear. Then he spoke with a quietness that seemed to fill the entire room.
“That pussy,” he said, “is mine now.”
My stomach dropped through the floor.
“You seem to have forgotten that, Anne. While I was away, working, providing for your future, building a life for us—you forgot who your little cunt belongs to.” He paused.
The pause lasted three heartbeats. I counted them against the inside of my ribs.
“So let me remind you. That cunt is not yours to play with whenever you feel like it. It belongs to me. To your suitor. To the man who’s going to marry you and take you to his bed and make you his wife.
And a girl who plays with her suitor’s property without permission…
” He reached up and took hold of his tie.
He pulled it loose from his collar in a single, slow motion and draped it over the dresser. “…needs to be corrected.”
His hands went to his belt.
The sound it made—the metallic clink of the buckle, the whisper of leather sliding through the loops of his trousers—was the same sound I’d heard in my fantasy last night.
Exactly the same. The same clink, the same hiss, the same slow deliberateness that communicated a man’s controlled intention to discipline a girl who had earned what was coming to her.
My fantasy had been so precise, so vivid, that the reality of it now felt like déjà vu, or like prophecy fulfilled.
He doubled the belt over in his hand. The leather was dark brown, supple, well-worn. It hung from his fist with a weight that seemed to pull the temperature of the room down by several degrees.
“I’m going to give you the belt, Anne,” he said.
“Because you need to learn that when I tell you not to touch yourself, I mean it. And after I’ve given you the belt…
” He paused again, and this time the pause carried something darker, something that made my breath catch and my inner walls clench around the emptiness inside me.
“After that, I’m going to shave you, like I told you I would.
Down there. I’m going to take every last bit of hair off that disobedient little cunt, so that every time you reach between your legs—every time you feel how bare and smooth you are—you remember who you belong to. You remember that your cunt is mine.”
A sound escaped me. Small, broken, animal. My hands had found each other again, clasped against my belly, and my fingers were white.
“Turn around,” Master Paul said. “Face the bed. Hands on the mattress.”
I turned. My body obeyed before my mind could form an objection, and I found myself bending forward, my palms pressing flat against the white sheets, my arms quivering. Behind me, I heard him move closer. His hand found the waistband of my jeans.
“These come down,” he said.