Chapter 15
Anne
I kept my mouth open. I kept my eyes on him. I knelt there, ruined and burning with a need so intense it felt like it might consume me entirely, and I watched his face as his orgasm gathered—the tightening of his jaw, the darkening of his eyes, the single, sharp intake of breath through his nose.
Master Paul… my fictional suitor… my… my… oh, God, my master… he came.
On me… on my face… on my chest… all over…
The first rope of it hit my chin and splashed down onto the lace bodice of the baby doll, a thick, white streak that stood out against the blushing pink fabric like a brand.
The second landed across my collarbones, hot and startling, and dripped down into the gathered lace where it cupped my breasts.
The third—and there was so much of it, more than I’d imagined a man could produce—fell across the chiffon at my stomach, soaking into the sheer fabric so that it clung to my skin beneath in a way that made the nightgown look like something that had been worn through a rainstorm of pure, animal desire.
Master Paul’s breath came in heavy, controlled, growling exhales. His hand slowed on his shaft, squeezing the last drops from the tip, and he guided the head of his cock to my lower lip—pressing it there, smearing the residue across my mouth with a possessive, unhurried motion that made me whimper.
“Lick it clean,” he said quietly.
My tongue emerged, as if it were a separate creature under the spell of its master’s command.
I licked the head of his cock—tasting him, tasting the salt and musk and the strange, intimate bitterness of his release—and I cleaned him the way I somehow knew he wanted me to, with small, careful, reverent strokes of my tongue while tears continued to track silently down my devastated face.
“Fuck,” Darlene breathed, and the word carried genuine awe. “Melissa, come look at the monitor. The cum on the nightgown—the way it’s soaking through the lace—you can see her nipples through it now. It’s like the nightgown is dissolving. So good.”
I knelt there, Master Paul’s softening but still frighteningly big cock resting against my cheek, his hand cradling the back of my head now with a tenderness that seemed impossible given what had just happened, and I felt the warm weight of his release soaking through the baby doll against my skin.
The lace clung to my breasts, translucent and probably ruined.
The chiffon at my stomach had become a second skin, sheer and stained and hiding nothing.
I should have felt destroyed. I should have felt used, degraded, reduced to something less than human by what had just been done to me and—more damningly—by what I had so willingly done, and allowed.
Instead, kneeling there in my ruined pink nightgown with a man’s seed cooling on my skin and the taste of him still coating my tongue, I felt a strange, terrible calm settle over me.
It felt like what I’d always imagined it might feel like after an earthquake: an eerie stillness when the ground has stopped moving but you can still feel the tremor in your bones.
I always supposed that you would know, with the kind of certainty that lives beneath language, that the landscape had been permanently rearranged.
Master Paul stepped back. He retied his robe, knotting the sash at his waist in a single, practiced motion.
I watched him with a deep crease in my brow as he crossed the set toward where Melissa and Darlene had huddled near the monitor bank.
I watched the broad line of his shoulders, the easy, predatory grace of his stride, and I stayed exactly where I was.
On my knees. In my ruined nightgown. With the taste of him in my mouth and the evidence of what I’d done and suffered cooling against my skin.
I could hear them talking. Their voices carried across the studio in fragments: Melissa’s rapid, energized cadence punctuated by Darlene’s clipped observations and Master Paul’s low, measured responses.
I caught phrases. Fine first session… that was Master Paul.
Better than projected: Melissa. Need to let her recover a bit. Master Paul again.
I knelt there and listened to three people discuss me the way farmers discuss a promising crop.
The terrible calm held. Beneath it, in the deep, dark waters where the real Anne apparently lived—the Anne who had moaned at the word cunt and come alive under a man’s hand and sucked a cock with the desperate devotion of a girl who had been starving for something she couldn’t name—beneath all of that, something had definitely begun to roil, though every time I tried to look down there, to illuminate those irrational depths with my tiny flashlight of reason, I found myself looking away, thinking of clouds, or streets, or laundry.
Master Paul came back. He crouched in front of me, his knees creaking faintly, and his face was close to mine—close enough that I could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the individual threads of silver in his dark hair.
His expression had changed. The predatory hunger had receded, replaced by something that looked, improbably, like tenderness.
Or at least the version of tenderness that a man like Master Paul was capable of: controlled, deliberate, offered on his terms.
“You did great,” he said. His voice was quiet, pitched for my ears alone. “Better than great. For your first time, that was very special, Anne.”
The tears came back, yet again, leaking from the corners of my eyes.
“We’re going to give you the rest of the day and save the bathroom scene for tomorrow,” he said.
“Go back upstairs. Rest. Drink water. Eat something. Don’t think too hard about what happened here—your body needs time to process it, and your mind will catch up when it’s ready.
” He paused. “We’ll shoot the shaving scene tomorrow morning.
Nine o’clock. I want you here rested and calm. ”
He reached out and wiped a tear from my cheek with his thumb—the gesture so unexpectedly gentle, so incongruent with the man who had just fucked my mouth and called it a cunt and ejaculated all over my nightgown, that a fresh sob broke loose from my chest.
“Can I… can I get cleaned up?” I asked, and my voice sounded like it belonged to someone very young and very far away.
“There’s a shower in the dressing room,” he said. “The assistant will show you.”
He stood, and the tenderness closed like a door quietly shutting and he had become Master Paul again, turning away to rejoin Melissa and Darlene, leaving me kneeling on the braided rug in a puddle of ruined pink chiffon.
I showered for twenty minutes. The water was hot and the pressure was good.
I stood under the spray with my forehead pressed against the tile and let it wash the physical evidence of the morning off my body, while the non-physical evidence—the taste memory, the jaw ache, the phantom sensation of his hand in my hair, the deep and bewildering throb between my legs that the shower’s heat only intensified—remained stubbornly, persistently present.
I dressed in my cream blouse and navy skirt.
I buttoned the collar. I retied my ponytail.
I looked at myself in the dressing room mirror and saw a girl who appeared, on the surface, almost exactly like the girl who had walked into the studio that morning: conservative, composed, buttoned-up.
The only visible difference was a slight puffiness around my eyes from the crying and a redness to my lips that I couldn’t quite account for until I remembered—with a full-body flush that started at my hairline and ended at my toes—what my lips had spent the last half hour doing.
I took the elevator back up to the thirty-sixth floor.
The doors opened onto the familiar landscape of Penelope’s department with its open-plan workstations, muted carpet, and glass-walled offices along the perimeter.
I walked to my desk and sat down and opened my laptop and stared at the screen without seeing anything on it.
At two-fifteen, my desk phone rang.
“Anne.” Penelope’s voice, warm and brisk. “Come to my office, please. I want to hear how the shoot went.”
My stomach dropped through the floor.
I stood. I smoothed my skirt. I walked the thirty feet from my desk to Penelope’s corner office on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else, and I knocked on the door frame even though the door was open, because manners were the only thing I had left.
“Come in,” Penelope said. “Close the door.”
I closed the door. The click of the latch engaging sounded, in the quiet of her office, like the cocking of a gun.
Penelope sat behind her desk in a dove-gray suit—trousers, fitted jacket, a silk shell beneath in a shade of cream that matched my blouse.
Her chestnut hair was smooth and immaculate.
Her pearls rested against her collarbone.
She looked exactly the way she always looked: polished, composed, beautiful in that particular way of women who have learned to make competence itself a form of allure.
“Sit,” she said, nodding toward the chair across from her desk.
I sat. My hands found each other in my lap and held on.
“So,” Penelope said, leaning back in her chair and crossing her legs with a whisper of expensive fabric. “Tell me everything. How was your first session with Master Paul?”
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I closed it.
I looked at my hands. I looked at the window behind Penelope’s desk, where the city skyline glittered in the afternoon light.
I looked back at Penelope, and her gray-green eyes were watching me with an attention that reminded me, with a pang, of Master Paul’s—that same quality of seeing through surfaces to the thing beneath.
“It was…” I started, and my voice cracked on the second word. I swallowed. “He… we did a… a scene?”
“What kind of scene?” Penelope asked, her eyebrows rising slightly. “Did you get to wear any of those gorgeous new pieces of Melissa’s?”
“A… a nightgown…” I answered faintly. “Pink…”
“The baby doll,” Penelope said, nodding and smiling. “I love that one. Did you…”
Her mouth quirked up in evident amusement.
“Well… did you put up a fuss, about getting undressed?”
Oh, God. I swallowed hard.
“I…” I started. “I…”
Penelope laughed, and the heat rushed to my face.
“You did, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I whispered, staring at my lap. “I said I couldn’t. I said I couldn’t undress in front of everyone, and he…”
“He what?” Penelope’s voice had dropped half a register, and when I glanced up, something had changed in her face—a flush along her cheekbones, a brightness in her eyes that I recognized with a lurch of my stomach because I’d seen it before.
In this office. The last time she’d gotten me to talk about things that made me want to disappear.
“He spanked me,” I said. The words came out small and flat. “On the living room set. Over his knee. In front of everyone.”
“Over his knee,” Penelope repeated. She uncrossed her legs. The motion was slow, deliberate, and I watched—unable to look away—as her hands moved to the waistband of her dove-gray trousers. Her fingers found the clasp and unfastened it. The zipper followed. “Tell me more. How did he position you?”
“Penelope, I… please…”
“Tell me.” The warmth in her voice had thinned, revealing the steel beneath it. It made me think again, with a fresh surge of heat to my face, of the day she’d bent me over this very desk.
She lifted her hips slightly and pushed the trousers down her thighs, letting them pool around her ankles where she sat. Beneath them she wore more of the elegant lingerie I had to my distress begun, confusingly, to associate with the New Modesty.
The head of New Modesty integration wore deep burgundy silk panties, cut high on the hip, with a narrow panel of lace at the front through which I could see a dark, neatly trimmed triangle of hair.
The sight of it sent a complicated jolt through me—shame, arousal, and something that felt horribly like envy, though I couldn’t have said what I envied.
The hair itself? The right to keep it? The authority it signified?
Penelope’s hand slipped beneath the waistband of the burgundy silk.
“He pulled me across his lap,” I said, my voice barely audible.
My eyes were fixed on the motion of her hand beneath the fabric—the slow, circular movement of her fingertips against herself, visible as a shifting topography beneath the silk.
“Face down. My stomach on his thighs. He’s so…
he’s very large, and I just… I couldn’t get any purchase. I couldn’t stop it.”
“Mmm.” The sound Penelope made was low and liquid, and her eyelids had gone heavy.
She leaned back further in her chair, her head tilting against the headrest, her lips parting slightly.
Her hand moved with a rhythm that was unhurried but purposeful; my boss was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted from herself. “Did he bare your bottom?”
“Yes.” The word was barely a breath. “He pulled my panties down. To mid-thigh. In front of everyone. Melissa and Darlene and the technicians—they could all see.”
“What kind of panties?”
“My… the… the polka-dot ones.”
Penelope’s eyes opened. She looked at me with an expression that combined amusement and hunger in proportions I couldn’t parse.
“The same ones I paddled you in,” she said. “Oh, Anne. You sweet thing.”
Her hand moved faster beneath the silk. I could hear it now—a faint, wet sound that brought a flush so violent it felt like a sunburn.
“How many?” Penelope asked.
“Ten. He said ten, and if I agreed to undress after ten, he’d stop.”
“And his hand,” Penelope said, her voice thickening. “Not a paddle. His bare hand.”
“Yes. It was… it was different from the paddle. Deeper. It went into the muscle. It—”
“Come here.” Penelope’s voice had gone rough at the edges, stripped of its professional polish. Her free hand gestured—a beckoning motion, fingers curling toward her palm. “Come here and kneel. In front of me.”