Chapter 7
Alex
For a second I had the dizzy, detached sensation of watching a stranger.
A young woman in ivory lace, thighs faintly tensed, cheeks pink, trying not to touch herself again because she had already made herself too sore.
A woman about to go sit in a café with a man who had informed her, in perfect calm, that if he chose he might ‘sponsor’ her, both of them knowing what ‘sponsor’ meant.
Fucking. When he chose, how he chose… including…
That strange spectator feeling… the sensation that it wasn’t me in my body… made me clutch the edge of the dresser.
I should have changed then. I knew I should.
Put on plain cotton underwear, message him some excuse, reclaim some scrap of ordinary dignity.
Or… I would change my underwear but I would go to the café, and I would push back against Porter B.
I would play hard to get and make him give me five thousand dollars a month just for the pleasure of my company.
And maybe a blowjob once in a while. And he definitely wouldn’t get to see my underwear today, whether it happened to be plain cotton or anything else.
Instead of changing, though, I got dressed carefully over the lingerie, choosing a skirt and blouse that were neat enough to seem intentional, but not so severe that I looked as if I were headed to a committee hearing.
Every movement reminded me what lay underneath.
The bra straps on my shoulders. The lace at my hips. The knowledge that I had obeyed.
By one-thirty I had redone my makeup and changed earrings three times.
By two I was so wound up that I left early because I could not bear another minute in the apartment.
On the walk to the Metro, every step made me aware of the panties in a way that felt absurdly intimate.
I kept imagining him asking what I had worn.
I kept imagining having to answer truthfully.
Worse, I kept imagining him not asking at all and somehow still knowing.
The train ride felt unreal. Across from me, a woman in scrubs read something on her phone and yawned.
A man in a suit nodded off with his briefcase between his knees.
Ordinary life went on all around me while under my skirt I wore the nicest underwear I owned because a stranger on an app had told me to.
Not a stranger, exactly, I corrected myself, and then hated that too. I knew his voice from a profile, his rules from a list, his wealth from a little metallic badge on a screen. But… that wasn’t knowing him, obviously.
Still, when I came up out of the Dupont Metro station and started toward the café, my pulse began to race.
It was one of those places that seemed designed to transport you to Europe. Dark wood, brass, expensive pastries under glass, little marble tables close enough together to encourage quietness. I had a look, and kept walking, then stopped half a block away and checked the time on my phone. 2:47.
Too early.
I stood there anyway, pretending to examine the menu in the window of a different café while my heart pounded.
I wondered if he was already inside, watching.
The thought made my nipples tighten abruptly under the bra.
I looked around, suddenly self-conscious about the way I stood, the way I held my bag, the possibility that every man in a good coat might be him.
At 2:55 I could not justify waiting outside any longer, so I went back to Café Fleur and went in.
The bell over the door gave a discreet little chime that still felt to me like an announcement.
The warmth hit first, then the smell of coffee and butter and sugar.
I took in the room in one sweep that I hoped looked casual: couples, two women with laptops, an older man alone with a newspaper, a pair of young staffer-looking types in shirtsleeves, their suit jackets over the backs of their chairs.
Then I saw him.
He sat at a table near the back, where he could see both the door and most of the room without being in the middle of it.
For half a second I stopped walking.
The photograph on the app had been accurate in a functionally useless way. Yes, the jaw, the mouth, the dark suit, the silver at the temple. It had omitted the effect.
In person Porter B. was tall, but lean rather than bulky, not imposing in the crude way some men were.
He sat with such complete self-possession that the space around him seemed to arrange itself accordingly.
His suit was charcoal, his shirt white, his tie dark blue.
He looked wealthy without looking decorated.
His gaze was on me already, and I knew at once that he had recognized me, though I couldn’t have said exactly how I understood that. Perhaps he had narrowed his eyes, but so very slightly that only my unconscious mind perceived it.
I made myself continue toward him, very aware of my legs, my face, the sound of my heels on the floor. My pulse had shifted into an embarrassing, hard rhythm. It made me feel as if some animal part of me had begun throwing itself against my ribs.
When I reached the table, he stood.
That unsettled me too, because it felt so courteous, though somehow the courtesy did not dilute his effortless authority at all. If anything it made it seem heavier.
“Alexandra,” he said.
His voice was lower than I had imagined, even and controlled. No rush in it. No false warmth either.
“Porter,” I said, and then immediately quailed at having used his first name so quickly, as though we were already on terms.
His eyes rested on my face for a second longer than politeness strictly required.
Appraisingly. I had the vivid, humiliating sense that he had taken in the flush high on my cheeks, the care I had put into my makeup, the fact that I had tried very hard not to look like a woman wearing nice lingerie under her clothes because he had told her to.
I also had the fleeting impression that he had almost just told me not to use his first name, but rather to call him Mr. B or something even more dismaying—sir or master. My tummy’s reaction to the latter brought a transitory crease to my brow.
Porter gestured to the chair opposite his. “Sit.”
Not please sit. Just sit.
I told myself that I was only sitting because that was what people did at tables in cafés. My body didn’t seem interested in such distinctions. I sat at once.
He resumed his seat after I had taken mine. Another tiny thing. Another tiny, somehow infuriating, thing I noticed.
A server appeared as if summoned by Porter’s posture alone. Porter looked at me. “Coffee?”
“Yes,” I said. “Black is fine.”
He glanced at the server. “Bring her coffee. And water.”
The server nodded and went away.
I should have objected to the water, maybe. Or to the way he had ordered for me without checking whether I wanted something else, like a pastry. Instead I sat there with my hands folded carefully in my lap. I tried not to think about how quickly my body had responded to his tone.
“You’re early,” he said, his mouth curving slightly upward, but his eyes tracking my reactions so closely I felt the heat in my cheeks ebb and flow—mostly flow.
“So are you,” I tried.
“I prefer not to keep people waiting.”
Up close his eyes were darker than I had expected.
His face was not soft anywhere. Not severe in a cruel way exactly, but disciplined.
He looked like a man who had spent a long time making sure he was not ruled by impulse.
The fact that he was sitting in a Selecta Arrangements meet-up with me made that restraint feel much more charged, not less: his decision to buy a younger woman for his bed seemed to rest on a bedrock of closely reasoned points.
He let the silence stretch just long enough to make me aware of it. Then he said, “You’ve had a difficult week, I’m guessing.”
The understatement of it, along with the strange intimacy, made me let out a short, incredulous breath. I wondered suddenly if he knew more about me than I had revealed in my SA profile.
“You could say that,” I finally replied.
“I could,” he said. “But I’d rather be precise.”
The server set down coffee and water. Porter thanked him without looking away from me. Once we were alone again, he said, in the same even tone, “You worked for Senator Hathaway until a couple of weeks ago. You were dismissed after Senator Gowry fucked you in his hideaway.”
For a second I genuinely forgot how to breathe.
The room did not change, and yet everything in it seemed suddenly remote. Cups clinked somewhere. Someone laughed softly near the window. I sat frozen with my fingers tightening around nothing in my lap, staring at him.
My face went hot so fast it hurt.
“How,” I said, and then had to stop because my throat felt too tight. “How do you know that?”
He did not answer immediately. “Washington is a small city when it comes to certain kinds of information.”
Humiliation hit me in a hard wave, sharper because I had let myself imagine, stupidly, that whatever had happened in Gowry’s office still belonged in some contained private chamber of shame, rather than circulating among men with influence and women with reasons to look away.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
Porter regarded me for one beat, two. Then he nodded as if I had told him something useful.
“All right,” he said. “Then I’ll make this simpler.”
Nothing about him suggested that simplification would have anything to do with mercy. I felt it at once: I wasn’t going to like whatever he would do next.
“I am willing to sponsor you,” he went on. “For ten thousand a month, plus a nice apartment in Selecta’s subsidized housing scheme.”
I stared.
Ten thousand. Plus housing.
The number had enough force to cut through even my shame for an instant.
Ten thousand a month. My debts… breathing room…
savings… the possibility of stepping out of panic and into something like stability.
The figure opened in my mind like a door and then, just as quickly, I understood that with Porter there would be something hard and exact on the other side of it.
He set his coffee cup down with quiet precision.
“But only,” he said, “if you stop pretending that what happened with Gowry is irrelevant to your future. You will tell me the truth of it. All of it. And if I take you on, you will submit to proper training as a sexual servant.”
My jaw had slackened fully by the time he reached the phrase that flipped my heart end over end: sexual servant. Every syllable seemed to strike a different exposed place in me.
“I—” I swallowed. “That’s a very strange way to talk to someone you’ve just met.”
“It’s a very unusual app that brought us together this way.”
I had no answer to that.
His gaze dropped, just briefly, to my blouse, my throat, my face again. “You wore the lingerie.”
I felt my thighs tense under the tablecloth.
“You told me to.”
“Yes.” His mouth moved very slightly. “And you obeyed.”
I recoiled at the immediate pulse of heat those words caused. I shrank back far enough that I had to look down at my coffee for a second, though I did not touch it.
“I haven’t agreed to anything,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Not yet.”
The calmness of that somehow made me more unsettled than if he had pressed. He seemed entirely untroubled by the possibility that I might refuse him. Or else, a much worse possibility, too confident in something about me to show it.
I lifted my chin. “You said you wanted me to review your profile carefully before replying. I did. That doesn’t mean I’m prepared to discuss…
that.” I could not make myself say Gowry’s name again.
“Especially not with a man who opens a first meeting by telling me he’s already heard about the most humiliating thing that’s ever happened to me. ”
“Second most humiliating,” he said.
I looked at him in shocked silence.
His eyes held mine. “The first was the thing itself, I’m certain. Taking your clothes off for Jason Gowry? Probably more degrading than getting fired for it. Close, though.”
My mouth opened. Closed.
Anger rose, blessedly clear for a second. “You are unbelievably arrogant.”
“Yes,” he said. “And you’re deflecting.”