Chapter 8
Anne
The tears came. I couldn’t stop them. They spilled over my lower lashes and ran down my cheeks in hot, silent streams, and I hated them, hated the weakness they represented, hated the way they proved everything he’d just said.
I swiped at them furiously with the back of my hand, still clutching the call sheet, and the paper crumpled against my cheek.
“I’m fine,” I said, which seemed like the most absurd thing I’d ever said in my life.
Paul didn’t contradict me. He simply reached into his pocket and produced a clean, folded handkerchief—actual cloth, white cotton, monogrammed with a small PM in the corner—and held it out to me.
The gesture was so unexpectedly old-fashioned, so incongruously gentlemanly in the context of everything else, that I almost laughed.
Instead I took the handkerchief and pressed it against my eyes. The cotton smelled of cedar, like him, and the intimacy of that, of holding something that had been in his pocket against my face, made my stomach flip in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
“Better?” he asked after a moment.
I nodded, even though I wasn’t better. I felt like a catastrophe.
I was a twenty-year-old girl standing in a pornography studio holding a strange man’s handkerchief, with tear tracks on her cheeks and a damp spot forming in her sensible cotton underwear because the strange man’s voice had done something to her nervous system that she couldn’t explain and couldn’t reverse.
“Good,” he said. “Now. Melissa is going to come over in a minute and explain the first setup. She’s going to ask you to undress so she and Darlene—that’s the videographer, the woman with the silver hair—can evaluate the best approach to photographing your body.”
My stomach plummeted. “Undress?”
“All the way,” he said, and his tone was matter-of-fact, neither cruel nor apologetic. “They need to see you. How the light falls on your skin. Where the camera will want to go. It’s clinical, Anne. Think of it like a doctor’s appointment.”
I had never been to a doctor’s appointment that involved a man with brown eyes that made my knees feel liquid, but I didn’t say that.
“I don’t—” I started.
“I know,” he said. “But you’re going to do it anyway. Because you said yes to this job. And because somewhere underneath the fear, you know that this is exactly where you need to be.”
Before I could respond—before I could muster the protest that was forming on my lips like a reflex, automatic and unconvincing even to me—a voice called out from across the studio.
“Anne! Perfect, you’re here.”
Melissa Mitropoulos crossed the studio floor with a long-legged stride.
She wore all black—slim trousers, a silk blouse, boots with a heel that added unnecessary inches to her already commanding height—and her dark hair swung behind her like a curtain.
She carried a tablet in one hand and a takeaway coffee in the other, and she radiated the focused energy of someone who had been awake since five a.m. and considered that a late start.
“Good, good, you’ve met Master Paul. Excellent.
” She barely glanced at my tear-streaked face, or if she did, she chose not to acknowledge it, which I couldn’t decide was merciful or terrifying.
“So here’s where we are. Before we do anything else—before wardrobe, before lighting, before we even talk about shot composition—I need you to take your clothes off. ”
She said it the way someone might say I need you to sign this form. Brisk. Administrative.
“All of them,” she added, as if clarifying a minor point. “Darlene and I need to see your body. We need to understand how light interacts with your skin, where the shadows fall, what angles work best. If you need to, you can think of it as a fitting, just without the clothes.”
I looked at her. I looked at Paul. I looked at the studio behind them—the sets, the lights, the technicians moving around with professional indifference, the woman with the silver hair still crouched beside her camera. I looked back at Melissa.
“I can’t,” I said.
The words came out before I could stop them, and I knew—I knew, even as they left my mouth—that they were the wrong words.
Not wrong because they were untrue. Wrong because I understood, with a clarity that had been sharpening since the moment I’d signed Penelope’s contract, that saying I can’t in this building was not a conclusion. Really, it represented an invitation.
Melissa’s eyebrows rose. She took a sip of her coffee. “Anne.”
“I just… I… um… I need a minute? Maybe… if there’s a private room, or a screen, or… I could change behind something and then—”
“There’s no screen,” Melissa said. Her tone hadn’t changed.
She still sounded brisk, still administrative, but underneath it I could hear the faintest edge, like a blade being drawn slowly from a sheath.
“This is a studio. We work in the open because we need to see how the light behaves in real space. A private room doesn’t help Darlene calibrate her equipment. ”
“I understand that, but I’m not comfortable—”
“Anne.” This time it was Paul’s voice. Master Paul’s voice, and the single word seemed to land heavily on my protest. Quiet. Heavy. Final. “You were told what would be required of you. You agreed to be here. Melissa needs to see your body. Darlene needs to see your body. This isn’t a negotiation.”
“I know, but—”
“There’s no but.” His voice hadn’t risen. If anything, it had dropped, settling into a lower register that I felt in the soles of my feet. “You can undress yourself, or I can help you understand why that’s the better option. Those are the choices available to you right now.”
To my horror, I knew exactly what he meant by help you understand.
The knowledge sat in my stomach like a swallowed stone, heavy and undeniable.
I’d read the contract. I’d felt the paddle.
I felt like I knew the architecture of compliance that Selecta had built, every corridor and doorway of it, and I knew that the corridor I was standing in right now led to exactly one place.
And still—still—I couldn’t make my fingers move to the buttons of my blouse.
Some stubborn, terrified part of me had dug in its heels, the part that had been raised to believe that a girl kept her clothes on in public, that modesty was armor, that a girl’s body was private.
That part of me looked at the open studio, the technicians, the camera, and the cool, appraising eyes of Melissa Mitropoulos, and simply refused.
“I can’t,” I whispered again. “Please. I’m sorry. I just can’t.”
The silence that followed lasted perhaps three seconds. It felt like a year.
“All right,” Master Paul said. And then he moved.
He didn’t lunge. He didn’t grab. He simply stepped forward with that same measured, unhurried grace I’d noticed when he first crossed the studio toward me, and his hand closed around my upper arm.
His grip wasn’t rough, let alone painful; it had a firmness that communicated, without any ambiguity whatsoever, that I was no longer in control of what happened next.
He walked to the nearest set—the living room, with its worn leather sofa and braided rug—and guided me with him.
My feet moved because his hand on my arm gave them no alternative.
The call sheet fell from my fingers and fluttered to the studio floor behind us.
I heard myself make a small, frightened sound—a kind of oh—that was swallowed by the vastness of the space.
Master Paul sat down on the leather sofa. The cushion creaked under his weight. And then, with a motion so fluid it must have been practiced a thousand times, he pulled me forward and down, tipping me off balance so that I tumbled across his lap.
I landed hard, my stomach pressed against his thighs, my hands scrabbling at the sofa cushion on the far side.
The position felt shockingly physical—the heat of his body beneath me, the solid mass of his thighs under my midsection, the way gravity pulled me forward so that my head hung lower than my hips and my bottom rose behind me like a hill.
My skirt had ridden up in the tumble, bunching around my upper thighs, and I felt the air of the studio touch the bare skin above my stocking tops.
“No,” I gasped. “No, please, not here… everyone can see…”
“That’s rather the point,” Master Paul said calmly. His left hand settled on the small of my back, exactly where Penelope’s had, pressing me down into his lap with a weight that felt immovable. His right hand found the hem of my skirt and flipped it up, folding it neatly over my waist.
I was wearing the polka-dot panties again.
The blue-and-white ones. I’d put them on that morning out of some pathetic, superstitious impulse—as if wearing the same underwear I’d worn the day Penelope paddled me might somehow inoculate me against further humiliation, the way surviving a disease was supposed to protect you from catching it again.
It didn’t work that way. Nothing worked that way, not at Selecta.
Master Paul’s fingers hooked into the waistband of my panties and tugged them down.
He pulled them down just to mid-thigh, the elastic stretching and then settling against my skin in that specific, horrible way that I now recognized as the feeling of being bared.
The cool air touched my naked bottom, and I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my face into the leather cushion and felt the tears start again, hot and immediate.
“Ten,” Master Paul said. “If you agree to undress after ten, we stop at ten. If you don’t, we continue until you do. Understood?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. My throat had closed around a sob.
His hand came down.
The sound it made was different from the paddle.
Where Penelope’s paddle had cracked—sharp, artificial, the sound of manufactured discipline—Master Paul’s open palm produced a deeper, flatter report, a meaty smack that seemed to resonate through my entire body.
The pain was different too. Not the blazing, surface-level burn of plastic on skin, but something that went deeper, that drove into the muscle of my bottom with a force that rocked me forward on his lap and expelled the air from my lungs in a sharp, involuntary cry.
“One,” he said.
The second spank landed on the other cheek, and I yelped—a high, undignified sound that bounced off the studio walls and came back to me like an accusation. My hands fisted in the sofa cushion. My legs kicked, once, before his left hand pressed harder on my back, pinning me.
“No kicking or I double your punishment,” he growled. “You need to learn to learn your lessons obediently. Two.”
By the fourth spank, I was crying openly.
By the sixth, I was sobbing. Each impact of his palm drove a fresh burst of heat into skin that was already burned, and the cumulative effect built into something inescapable, a bonfire that consumed my entire awareness.
I couldn’t think about the studio, the technicians, the camera, the silver-haired woman, or any of it—I could only think about the hand, the heat, the rhythm of pain that seemed to reshape my resistance stroke by relentless stroke.
“Seven,” Master Paul said, and his voice hadn’t changed at all. Still calm. Still measured. As if he were counting reps at a gym rather than spanking a half-naked girl across his knee in front of a production crew.
I heard voices. Somewhere behind me, off to the side, women were talking. The words drifted to me through the fog of pain and tears:
“That pussy should have been waxed before she came in.” That was Melissa, her tone sharp with professional irritation. “Didn’t anyone send her prep instructions?”
“Apparently not.” A voice I didn’t recognize—clipped, direct, faintly amused. The silver-haired woman, I guessed. Darlene. “It’s not the end of the world, but it’s annoying. We won’t get as much done today as we wanted. We can probably get her to the aesthetician this afternoon, though.”
They were talking about my pubic hair. They were standing somewhere behind me, watching Master Paul spank my bare bottom, and they were discussing my pubic hair with the detached professionalism of interior designers debating paint swatches.
The humiliation hit me like a separate blow, distinct from the physical pain but just as devastating, and I buried my face deeper into the cushion and wailed.
“Eight,” Paul said, and his palm cracked down again, hard enough to make my whole body jerk.
“Please,” I choked. “Please, I’ll do it, I’ll take my clothes off, please stop…”
“Will you?”
He spanked me again.
“Oh… oh, God… it hurts so much. Yes! Yes, I’ll do it, I promise, please…”
“Good girl,” he said, and the warmth in those two words—the approval, the gentleness that lived alongside the iron—undid something inside me that I hadn’t known was knotted.
I lay across his lap, sobbing and shaking, my bare bottom throbbing with a heat that radiated down my thighs and up my spine, and the words good girl settled over me like a blanket laid across a shivering body.
For a moment I thought he wouldn’t give me the final spank he had promised.
I had just enough time to feel a fleeting moment of an utterly inappropriate emotion: disappointment.
When I felt him press down again with his left hand to keep me in place, and shift his weight slightly as his right hand rose, the sob I let out had in it a conflict I didn’t want to think about.
Then his hand connected, and I shrieked at the agony, bucking over his huge thigh, clenching and unclenching my punished cheeks, not caring how immodest and even lewd I must look as I learned my humiliating lesson.
“Ten,” Master Paul said.
He helped me up. His hands were careful now, guiding me off his lap and onto my feet with a steadiness that compensated for my complete lack of it. My legs shook. My skirt fell back into place, and I reached back instinctively to pull up my panties, but Paul caught my wrist.
“Leave them,” he said. “You’re about to take them off anyway. Go ahead and strip for me.”