Chapter 2
Alex
For a second no one moved. The overhead light caught on the glassy dark of her eyes and on the severe line of her mouth.
She took in everything at once. I knew she did: my nakedness, bent over Gowry’s desk; the red marks striping my ass; the senator behind me with his hand still braced on my hip; my smeared face.
If she felt surprise, it lasted no more than an instant before she replaced it with something flatter and more dangerous.
I remained braced over the desk, my hands flat on the polished wood, my hair hanging in my face, my knees trembling so badly I thought I might slide right down to the carpet.
Gowry stayed behind me, one hand on my hip, his cock still inside my soaking pussy.
The air in the office felt obscene, hot and close and full of the sound I had just been making and the unmistakable scent of my mortifying need.
I watched Senator Hathaway look around at her leisure, her face manifesting a sort of detached curiosity.
My folded blouse and skirt. My underwear near one of the visitor chairs.
Gowry’s belt, over the edge of the desk as if it belonged there.
Me, naked and red and humiliated past speech.
Him, immaculate except for the fact that he was fucking me.
Her expression didn’t change very much as she contemplated it all. That was somehow the worst part.
Gowry withdrew with a lazy, unhurried motion that made me gasp and clutch at the desk. “Frances,” he said, as if she had interrupted a budget meeting.
“Jason.” Her voice sounded cool enough to frost glass.
I snatched one hand off the desk and reached stupidly for my hair, as though my hair was the relevant thing, as though if I could pull it back and tie it, I might become less naked.
I could feel wetness on my thighs. I could feel the sting across my ass where he had whipped me.
I could feel every beat of my pulse between my legs, traitorous and hot. I wanted the floor to open under me.
“Get your clothes on, Alexandra,” Hathaway said.
Not Alex. Alexandra. That made it worse too.
I pushed myself upright too fast and nearly stumbled. Gowry caught my arm before I could fall, his fingers hard and proprietary, and I jerked away from him hard enough that he smiled.
“She’s useful,” he said to Hathaway, as if I weren’t there. “Ambitious. Trainable enough, with work.”
My throat tightened so strongly in embarrassment I thought I might actually faint from lack of air.
I bent and grabbed for my bra with shaking fingers, then my panties, then my skirt and blouse.
My body would not obey me properly. I got one foot tangled, swore under my breath, and heard Gowry chuckle.
Hathaway stepped inside and shut the door behind her. The click of the latch sounded final.
I managed to shrug my blouse on and fasten a few buttons, all of them in wrong buttonholes.
My bra remained in my hand. My underwear I could not bear to put on, not in front of them, not with the wetness still there, so I balled it into my fist like evidence.
My knees hurt. My mouth hurt. I could still taste him.
“I’m sorry,” I said, because there was nothing else to say.
Hathaway looked at me for a long second. “Are you?”
That hit hard. I felt my nose working, on its own, trying to hold back my tears.
“I didn’t—” I began, and then stopped, because whatever came next would be either a lie or pathetic.
Gowry had already put himself to rights. He looked perfectly composed, one hand adjusting a cuff. “She came upstairs willingly,” he said in an offhanded way.
“I assumed as much,” Hathaway said.
Part of my mind thought I should have found some comfort in the idea that she thought me capable of making my own potentially terrible decisions about my body. Instead it made me feel more naked than I already was.
“I was trying to talk to him,” I said. My voice came out thin and breathless. “For you. For the appropriations piece, and because you said that he—” I stopped again. Excuses sounded especially vile in that room.
“For me,” Hathaway repeated.
I looked at her then, really looked, because there was no point in hiding. Her face had that polished stillness it got when she was furious enough not to show it. I had seen staffers reduced to tears by that expression alone. I had admired it. I had wanted to learn how to do it.
Now I was the one standing in front of it with no underwear on.
Gowry moved to the sideboard and poured himself water. “Your girl wanted to be noticed.”
My whole body locked.
I wasn’t her girl. I wasn’t anybody’s girl. But I had come to her first as a student intern and then as a legislative aide. Useful. Promising. A young woman who could be brought along if she understood how power worked.
I had apparently decided to get a practical demonstration.
“She isn’t my girl,” Hathaway said. “She’s probably not even my aide anymore.”
Something in my stomach seemed to drop through the floor.
“Ah,” Gowry said, his face taking on a look of mock pity so disgusting I almost lost my composure and burst into tears. “Too bad.”
Senator Hathaway ignored him. “Alexandra, did he force you?”
The question hung there. My skin prickled.
If I said yes, it would almost certainly become a different scene, larger and uglier and impossible to contain.
It might also save my job. If I said no, I would have to own every step that had brought me here: the flirting, the drink, the elevator, taking off my clothes when he told me to, kneeling when he told me to, opening my mouth, bending over his desk even while tears blurred everything. I would also, it seemed, be unemployed.
I heard myself say, “No.”
Hathaway nodded once, as if some ledger had balanced. “Then you made a spectacularly bad decision.”
My eyes stung. “Yes, Senator.”
Gowry leaned one hip against the sideboard and drank his water. “She can recover from it. If she’s sensible.”
I hated him then in a clean, brilliant way that was almost relief. It cut through the shame for a second. “You don’t get to tell me what sensible is.”
The silence after that felt dangerous.
Hathaway’s gaze sharpened. Gowry smiled slowly.
“That’s the spirit,” he said.
I realized too late that I had given him exactly what he wanted: not meekness, not tears, but resistance. Something to press on. Something he wanted to shape.
Hathaway seemed to realize it too. “Enough,” she said, and this time both of us obeyed.
She walked toward me, stopping close enough that I caught the faint scent of her perfume under the sharper notes of the office, sex and leather and my own humiliation. She lowered her voice.
“Can you stand up straight?”
I did, though it hurt and I knew she saw the flinch.
“Can you compose yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Then do it.”
I made my hands stop shaking by force, then reached to fasten my blouse. I smoothed my hair back behind my shoulders. I felt like a child pretending to be an adult after some catastrophic mistake, but by the end of it I could at least look less wrecked than I felt.
Hathaway turned to Gowry. “Whatever leverage you think you’ve gained, I can assure you it doesn’t exist. Alexandra here may not work for me after tonight, but that doesn’t mean you can continue to prey upon her.”
Gowry set his glass down. “You don’t own everyone who works for you, Frances.”
“No. But I do notice when one of my former staffers leaves a reception with a senator who enjoys proving points.”
He laughed softly. “You always did object most to methods that weren’t yours.”
I didn’t understand all of that, not really, but I understood enough to wish very badly that I didn’t exist in the room while they said it.
Hathaway looked at me again. “Did anyone see you come up here?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“Joe…” I glanced over at Gowry. “One of his staffers… I think he knew the senator invited me up.”
Her mouth tightened. “Of course he did.”
Gowry did not bother denying it. “Joe’s good.”
“Good at compromising vulnerable young women who are too beautiful for their own good,” Hathaway said.
That almost made me laugh despite the horrible patronizing tone. It would have turned into sobbing if it had gotten out, so I bit the inside of my cheek hard.
Hathaway seemed to make a decision. “You’ll leave separately. Alexandra, you’ll go first. I’ll have someone bring your coat to the lobby.”
“I can manage my own coat,” I said automatically.
Her eyes flicked to my bare legs, the marks I was sure were visible on my thighs, the fact that my panties were still clenched in my hand like a handkerchief. “Clearly.”
I went scarlet and looked away.
Gowry picked up his belt at last and threaded it slowly through the loops of his trousers, never taking his eyes off me. The sound made my stomach tighten. “You can send her back to me if you’re interested in doing business. It doesn’t have to involve leverage.”
Hathaway’s reply came flat and immediate. “No.”
The word struck me with such force I nearly staggered. Relief, humiliation, disappointment so sharp it made me sick that I even could feel it—all of it twisted together.
He saw that too. “Interesting. Well, Alex, if you’re out of a job after this, you should think about signing up for Selecta Arrangements. If I see you there, we might have some fun.”
Selecta Arrangements. All young female staffers knew about the app where men like Gowry could make ‘arrangements’ with younger women they wanted to fuck in exchange for an ‘allowance.’
I wanted to tell him to go to hell. I wanted to tell Hathaway to stop looking at me as though she felt certain I would indeed sign up for Selecta Arrangements so that I could keep getting brutally whipped and fucked by Jason Gowry.
I wanted it to be fifteen minutes earlier in the evening, before I’d said yes to anything, before I’d discovered that part of me could obey with horrifying ease.
Instead I said nothing.
Hathaway opened the door. “Go.”
I moved toward it, then stopped because I couldn’t make myself pass her without saying something. “Senator—”
“If this is an apology, save it until you’re capable of one that isn’t mostly for yourself.”
That stung because it was true. I closed my mouth.
As I stepped into the outer office, she caught my arm lightly, just for a second. I looked up at her.
Her voice dropped lower. “If he touched you in any way you did not agree to, you tell me. If you are confused about what you agreed to, you tell me that too. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
It was not kindness, exactly. It was too sharp and unsentimental for that. But it was something steadier, and because I was so frayed it nearly undid me.
“He… he…” I stammered. I stood on the knife’s edge. “No,” I went on, “he didn’t. I’m not confused. I… it was consensual.”
Her eyes went hard.
“Then you’re fired,” she told me.
I made it to the stairs before I started crying again.
By the time I got outside the Capitol, though, I had my face under control. Not because I felt better. Because I knew now, with a clarity I hated, that I had just fucked up my life beyond belief, and if I were going to move forward from this point I would have to figure out how it had happened.
And worst of all, beneath the shame and the fear and the sick twisting awareness of how badly I had played this, there was still a pulse low in my body when I thought of his hand on my back, the command in his voice, and the instant, terrible quiet in me when I obeyed.
I walked all the way back to my apartment in Adams-Morgan feeling terribly marked.
By the lingering soreness in my backside.
By my shameful lack of panties. Things hidden by my skirt, and yet I felt as if everyone who glanced at me could tell what I had done, and had done to me, in a senator’s office…
and just how steep a fall from grace I had just taken.