Chapter 3
Anne
I did not laugh. I typed energy efficiency up—household compliance and stared at the words until they stopped looking like English.
Paddle sales, I learned at a Thursday afternoon product review, were steady.
Not growing, not declining—steady, in the way that suggested the market had reached a saturation point where every household that wanted an official Selecta discipline paddle already had one.
The product team seemed untroubled by this.
“Paddles are a gateway,” said a woman named Lorraine from consumer insights.
“They get us in the door—into the kitchen, really. Community surveys tell us that seventy percent of paddle households have the paddle hanging in the kitchen where she can see it every day. But the growth categories are where it gets interesting.”
The growth category that was getting the most attention, it turned out, was anal training supplies.
I remember the exact moment I first heard the phrase anal training supplies spoken aloud in a professional setting, because my fingers actually stopped moving on the keyboard.
A man named Philip from the product analytics team brought up a slide showing a steep upward curve—anal plug sales, rising quarter over quarter with no sign of plateauing.
“We’re seeing thirty-two percent growth in the anal training category across NMA communities,” Philip said, clicking to the next slide.
“And here’s where it gets really interesting.
” A scatter plot appeared, dense with data points, showing a correlation line that climbed unmistakably from lower left to upper right.
“We’ve identified a strong positive correlation between anal training supply sales and household energy-efficiency scores. ”
He paused, letting the slide speak for itself, and then continued with the air of someone presenting a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.
“Our theory—and we’re still gathering data, so I want to flag this as preliminary—is that the correlation reflects a broader pattern of wifely obedience.
A wife who is undergoing regular anal training is, by definition, submitting to her husband’s authority in the most intimate and demanding way possible.
That level of submission doesn’t stay in the bedroom.
It permeates the household dynamic. When her husband tells her to turn off the air conditioning at nine p.m. or to limit her shower to five minutes, she does it.
Not only because she cares about the electric bill, but because she’s been trained to obey. ”
Several heads nodded. Someone made a note. Penelope, beside me, uncapped her pen and wrote something in the margin of her printed agenda with a neat, unhurried hand.
I typed anal training sales—energy correlation—obedience theory and felt something inside me crack, just slightly, like a hairline fracture in porcelain.
Not because I was shocked—I was past shock by then, or thought I was—but because the logic was so clean, so tidy, so presented-without-apology that it left no room for the outrage I kept expecting to feel.
These people weren’t villains twirling mustaches.
They were analysts reading data. They were professionals doing their jobs.
And the data said that women whose husbands put things inside their bottoms to teach them obedience were also women who turned off the lights when their husbands told them to.
I didn’t know what to do with that. So I typed it into my notes and moved on.
Eight weeks and two days after my first day at Selecta, I followed Penelope into a conference room on the thirty-sixth floor—two floors higher than our usual meeting rooms, which I’d learned by then carried significance.
Higher floors meant higher stakes. The thirty-sixth floor had thicker carpet, heavier doors, and artwork on the walls that looked like it belonged in a museum rather than an office building.
The room was smaller than the one where I’d watched Karen press her thighs together on screen. An intimate round table rather than the usual oval, set with crystal water glasses and a small arrangement of white orchids at the center. Only four chairs.
Two of them were already occupied.
I noticed the man first. He was impossible not to notice.
Tall even while seated, with the broad-shouldered build of someone who had been athletic in college and had maintained it with the discipline of someone who maintained everything.
His blond hair was styled with precision, and his eyes—sky blue, startlingly vivid—moved to Penelope and then to me with an appraising calm that made me feel, instantly and irrationally, like I’d been weighed and measured before I’d taken a single step into the room.
He wore a dark suit so perfectly fitted it might have been sewn onto him that morning, and his watch caught the light with the quiet gleam of jewelry that cost more than my annual rent.
“Penny,” he said, and his voice was deep and smooth and carried the easy authority of a man who had never once had to raise it. “Good, you’re here. And this must be your new girl.”
“Stuart, this is Anne Chamberlain,” Penelope said, resting her hand briefly on my shoulder as she guided me to my chair. “Anne, Stuart Harrington. Executive Vice President of Strategic Development at NMB.”
“Hello,” I said, and my voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. NMB. The worst meetings were about NMB. New Modesty Blue: Selecta’s own curated porn channel, its ‘stories’ drawn from the lives of young couples in New Modesty town.
Stuart’s mouth curved into something that was technically a smile. “Welcome to Selecta, Anne.”
The woman beside him leaned forward and extended her hand across the table before I’d even fully sat down.
She too was tall—I could tell even with her seated—with dark hair that fell past her shoulders and sharp, intelligent brown eyes that held none of Stuart’s calculated appraisal.
Where he radiated control, she radiated energy, the barely contained kind that suggested she was always three steps ahead of whatever conversation she was in and impatient for everyone else to catch up.
“Melissa Mitropoulos,” she said. Her handshake was firm, almost aggressive. “I’m the head of HSG.”
Stuart laughed. “Melissa is the creator of HSG, she means to say.”
I looked over at Penelope, mystified but frightened to ask. To my relief, my boss smiled.
“Her Secret Garden,” she explained. “It’s the fastest growing stream on NMB. Geared toward repressed young women with submissive tendencies.”
I tried not to react, but I couldn’t help the hard swallow or the crease in my brow. Surely I’d imagined that Penelope had left an ellipsis at the end of her sentence, one that contained the two words like you.
Thankfully Melissa picked up the flow of the discussion smoothly, so I could look back across the table at her without showing how uncomfortable I had started to feel. What she said, though, didn’t help much.
“You’re going to hear some things in this meeting that will probably make your eyes go wide, so I apologize in advance. Or maybe I don’t. Depends on how it goes.”
She flashed a grin that was equal parts charm and challenge, and I found myself liking her immediately, which confused me, because I also found her terrifying.
“Melissa has a proposal,” Penelope said, settling into her chair with the composed grace I’d come to recognize as her default state.
She opened a slim leather portfolio and uncapped her pen.
“Stuart and I are here to evaluate it. You’re here to take notes and look pretty.
” She glanced at me sideways, and I couldn’t tell if she was joking.
“The second part you’ve already got covered. ”
I opened my laptop. My cheeks had gotten very warm.
Melissa stood, even though the room was small enough that standing seemed unnecessary, and clicked a remote.
The screen on the wall lit up with a single image: a woman’s torso, probably computer-generated to judge from its perfection, photographed from collarbone to mid-thigh, wearing a bra-and-panty set that stopped my breath in a way I immediately resented.
It was black. Not the plain, functional black of everyday underwear, but a deep, liquid black that seemed to absorb light.
The bra was structured but sheer, with delicate lace panels that revealed more than they concealed—the shadow of nipples visible through the fabric like something glimpsed through fog.
The panties sat much lower on the hips than the training intimates I’d seen in the previous presentations, cut to suggest rather than cover, with a lace waistband that dipped in a provocative V below the navel.
But it wasn’t just beautiful. There was something about the construction—the way the fabric hugged the body, the strategic placement of seams, the subtle reinforcement at the gusset—that told me, with the product literacy I’d unwillingly developed over eight weeks of meetings, that this was not ordinary lingerie.
“What you’re looking at,” Melissa said, her voice carrying the confident clarity of someone who had rehearsed this but didn’t need to, “is one of the prototypes for what I’m calling the Surrender Line.”
She clicked to the next slide. A new torso appeared on the screen—the same flawless computer-generated body, but this time wearing a baby doll nightgown that made the black bra-and-panty set look almost conservative by comparison.