Chapter 9
Porter
I expected her to refuse.
In fact, when I gave the order, I did so with a very clear sense that I had placed in front of her a line she might decide she could not cross.
I thought she would draw herself up, gather what remained of her pride around her, and tell me to go to hell.
She would have lost ten thousand dollars a month, the apartment, the structure she so clearly needed, and me.
But she definitely might do it anyway, because I could already see that Alexandra Murphy was proud enough to cut off her own hand if the alternative felt too much like kneeling.
That expectation should have made me moderate myself, maybe; start with less of a challenge to her self-image. It had the opposite effect on me, though.
Standing in that little bathroom with her flushed and breathing too quickly, with her skirt just smoothed back into place after my finger had gone into the sweetest, tightest little ass I had touched in a very long time, I felt a pull toward her that had already exceeded common appetite.
I wanted her in ways that had become inconveniently personal much too fast. I wanted not merely to fuck her, though I certainly wanted that, but to secure her.
To make sure she understood before she could retreat into some defensive fiction that what had happened with Gowry had not been an aberration and what had happened here was not either.
She needed domination too deeply to be allowed the luxury of misunderstanding it.
That realization had a dangerous edge to it, because it carried with it another truth I disliked for its power over me: I had already started to fall for her.
So I pushed.
She stared at me as if I had suggested she step off a ledge.
“No,” she said at once, and then more softly, “please.”
The plea went through me with disturbing force.
Her eyes had widened, and the flush already high in her cheeks spread further.
She was not being coy, obviously; she didn’t have enough experience with her submissive sexual orientation to use it that way.
Alex felt genuine distress, because this line—taking off her clothes in a café restroom—mattered to her.
Good, some hard part of me thought. Teachable moment.
I stepped closer, until there was no pretense of neutral space between us. “If you want my sponsorship, you will do as I say.”
Her throat moved. “I’ve already accepted it.”
“You accepted a consequence. Now you’ll show me whether you mean to keep accepting what follows.”
“Please don’t make me.” The words came out breathless. I had the strange impression that they, the words, had shocked Alex simply by coming out of her mouth. As if the very idea that she might have to beg not to strip in front of me, here, had shaken the foundations of her identity. “Not here?”
I watched her carefully as she said it. I wanted to see what mixture of emotions her plea came from—revulsion or shame. With Alex, so much depended on the distinction. Revulsion I would not press through. Shame I absolutely would.
What I saw in her was shame, pride, arousal, fear of exposure, and the desperate wish to preserve some internal story in which she remained fundamentally unlike a girl who stripped on command for a rich man in a bathroom.
Unfortunately for that story, she was indeed that kind of girl. More important, she was mine, if she chose to be.
“Alex,” I said, “if you’re going to belong to me, I need to know whether you can obey me, when I want to enjoy you as I choose.
Because a woman who needs what you need will often lie to herself right up until the point she ruins something important.
And because I won’t invest myself in you while allowing you to pretend this is gentler than it is: you will learn to submit even when submission feels shameful to you.
Indeed, I will demand things like this because they embarrass you. ”
Her lips parted. I saw the tears gather before they fell.
Then her chin lifted a fraction despite the tears, and I saw the intelligence in her again, the clever, defensive creature who would absolutely use ambiguity later as a place to hide if I gave it to her now.
“I can’t,” she whispered.
“Yes, you can.”
“No.” She drew in a shaky breath. “I’m serious. I can’t do that.”
I let a beat pass.
“Then you can put your clothes straight and leave,” I said. “I’ll cancel the sponsorship.”
* * *
Alex
“I… I…” I started, but I had no idea what I could possibly say next.
Finally, a question came to me, and I asked it before I could chicken out.
“Will you tell me,” I said, hating how unsteady my voice sounded, “that if I do it now—if I strip to my lingerie—you won’t just… punish me afterward anyway?”
His eyes held mine for a moment that felt much too long.
“No,” he said.
The answer hit me like a slap.
“You’ve already earned a spanking for making me repeat myself.” His tone stayed calm, almost conversational, which somehow made the words worse. “Having my finger in your bottom was just the first taste of your consequence for that. If you obey me now, however, you can avoid a whipping.”
I stared at him. My breath had gone thin and high in my chest.
“A whipping,” I repeated, in a whisper.
“Yes.”
Something hot and terrible moved through me. Fear first, clean and immediate. Then, braided up in it, that sickening pulse of fascination that had begun to make me distrust every response my body produced.
“With what?” I asked before I could stop myself. “Your belt?”
One dark eyebrow lifted slightly, as if he found the question revealing.
“Sometimes I’ll use my belt,” he said. “But it’s not my first choice. And not what I’ll use if you disobey now.”
I should have left it there. Instead I heard myself ask, “Then what… what will you… use?”
“A cane.”
The word seemed to open some abyss under me.
I had seen canes. Not in life, exactly, but enough in stray stories and images and the vague cultural atmosphere around men like him and the systems that served them.
A belt belonged to ordinary male anger in my mind, ugly but familiar—and distressingly arousing.
A cane belonged to something colder. More deliberate. More absolute.
“No,” I whispered.
His expression didn’t change. “Then obey.”
That should have been the moment I walked out.
I knew that. In some hard, lucid corner of my mind, I knew it perfectly. The door was there. My clothes were on. He wasn’t holding me down. I could leave this pretty little bathroom, push back through the café, go up into the ordinary city, and never see him again.
But the thought of the cane had gone through me with such force that I felt myself reaching, almost automatically, for the buttons of my blouse.
I have no choice, I told myself.
A quieter voice answered at once, from somewhere still sane: Of course you have a choice. You’re making one.
I silenced it.
I have no choice. He’ll whip me. With a cane. I couldn’t bear it. I have no choice.
My fingers moved badly at first. I nearly missed a button.
I could feel him watching, and that made my face burn all the hotter.
I slipped the blouse off my shoulders and folded it before I could stop myself from doing something so absurdly mannered.
The gesture made me want to die. It also seemed perfectly in character for me, which made it worse.
My skirt came next.
I have no choice.
I stood in the ivory bra-and-panty lingerie he had ordered me to wear, exposed enough that I wanted to cover myself and too far gone to do it.
His gaze traveled over me in one slow pass that made every inch of my skin feel newly awake.
“There,” he said quietly. “Better.”
I felt a deep furrow develop on my brow.
He came toward me then, and I took a backward half-step before I could stop myself. He didn’t comment on it. He only took my wrist and turned me with effortless certainty.
“Bend over the toilet.”
My heart lurched. “Porter—”
His hand closed around the back of my neck, not rough, just decisive. “Now. And you just earned extra spanking. You will call me sir.”
I obeyed.
The porcelain was cool under my palms. I heard the rustle of my own breathing in the small room. Then I felt his hand slide over the curve of my bottom, over the thin fabric of my panties, and a helpless shiver went through me.
“Spread your legs.”
I hesitated perhaps half a second. His hand rested, waiting.
I moved my feet apart.
“Wider.”
I did.
The position felt instantly pornographic. Bent over a toilet in my lingerie, thighs parted, waiting for him. I could feel wetness already between my legs, humiliatingly undeniable. I heard him shift behind me, close enough that I could sense his heat without his touching me.
Then his palm cupped me through the damp silk at the front of my panties.
I jerked.
He made a low sound near my ear. “Yes. I know.”
My forehead touched the wall above the toilet. I bit my lip hard.
His fingers stroked me through the soaked fabric with expert, maddening pressure, enough to make my knees weaken at once. “Such a wet girl,” he murmured. “And still pretending she’s here because she has no choice.”
I closed my eyes.
“You’re going to get that spanking,” he said softly. “On your lovely bare bottom. And then I’m going to put my finger back in your ass. And then, very likely, I’m going to fuck you.”
The words made my whole body tighten around nothing.
“No,” I whispered, though there was no force in it at all.
His hand moved more firmly. The silk dragged over my clit in a way that made me gasp. “No?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Every nerve seemed to have narrowed to the place his hand worked between my thighs.
“Because from where I’m standing,” he said into my ear, “you seem very interested in being fucked.”
His middle finger found me through the panties, pressed, circled. I made a sound before I could stop it, a humiliating little cry, and at once his free hand covered my mouth from behind.
“Quiet.”
I nodded against his palm.
He kept touching me, slowly, inexorably, as if he had all the time in the world.
I could feel wetness spreading through the gusset of my panties, then beyond it, soaking the silk, making each stroke slicker and more unbearable.
My body had no dignity left in it. I shook.
I pushed back involuntarily into his hand. I tried not to and failed.
“That’s it,” he murmured. “Feel what happens to you when a man takes charge.”
I might have sobbed if his hand hadn’t still covered my mouth. My thoughts had become fragments. Shame. Heat. Fear. Need. His words. The pressure of his body at my back. The awful fact that he was right about my responses even when I wanted him wrong.
His fingers worked me higher and higher through the wet fabric until my thighs were trembling violently and the room had begun to take on that unreal brightness that comes just before climax. I could feel it building in me in swift, ruthless waves.
Then suddenly it stopped.
He took his hand away from between my legs. Then from my mouth.
Air hit my lips coldly. I made a broken little sound of protest before I could catch it.
“Stand up,” he said.
I did, though my knees shook so badly I nearly stumbled.
He stepped back and looked at me with complete composure while I fought to breathe.
“Put your clothes back on.”
For a second I just stared at him, too dazed to understand.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
The ache between my legs felt almost painful now, sharp with interruption.
Worse, with the loss of that overwhelming focus, another need rushed brutally into prominence.
My bladder, which I had apparently ignored through some miracle of arousal and panic, made itself known all at once with a desperate urgency that nearly folded me in half.
“Oh,” I whispered, then louder, “I need to pee.”
He looked entirely unmoved. “Yes.”
I stared at him.
“Please,” I said. “Just… just go outside for a minute.”
“No.”
The word hit me like cold water.
I laughed once, a tiny unbelieving sound. “Porter… um, sir… I’m serious.”
“So am I.” He nodded toward my clothes. “Get dressed. You’ll pee at my apartment.”
I blinked at him. “What?”
“It’s five minutes away. You can hold it.”
The humiliating thing was that I wasn’t entirely sure I could. Or rather, I could, obviously, because women did, but the need had gone from abstract to acute so fast that panic rose with it.
“Please.” My voice came out breathless and thin. “I really have to go.”
“And I’m telling you that you do not have permission yet.”
My mouth parted. Everything inside me seemed to tilt.
Permission.
That word, applied to peeing, should have broken whatever spell remained. It should have made the whole thing so absurd, so insulting, that I snatched up my things and told him to go to hell.
Instead I stood there in my damp panties, still trembling from being denied an orgasm, my bladder throbbing, my thoughts fraying at the edges, and felt another shiver of helpless arousal at the fact that he meant even this.
“Dress,” he said again.