Chapter 19
Paul
The moment I laid eyes on Anne in the studio the next day, I knew what she’d done in bed the previous night.
It wasn’t anything as crude as a telltale sign like dark circles under her eyes.
She’d dressed and made herself up with exactly the same meticulous, defensive care she had the previous day: a blouse, pink this time, buttoned to the collar and a fresh navy skirt.
She’d gathered her blonde hair into its neat ponytail.
She looked, to anyone without my particular training, like a girl who’d slept soundly and arrived prepared.
But I’d spent twenty-three years reading the bodies of young women who’d been told not to touch themselves and had touched themselves anyway. I could read the signs as easily as a newspaper.
Her walk told me everything. Yesterday she’d walked in the slightly tentative way of a girl entering unfamiliar territory.
This morning’s stride carried a different weight.
Her hips moved with a fraction more fluidity, a looseness in the hips that comes from a female body that has recently discovered what the regions between those hips can do.
Anne Chamberlain had become aware of herself between her legs in a way she hadn’t been twenty-four hours ago.
I could see it in the micro-adjustments she made with each step.
She tightened her thighs in a barely perceptible way.
Her weight shifted slightly forward onto the balls of her feet as if her center of gravity had migrated south overnight.
Her eyes looked different, too. This morning they held something deeper than they had yesterday.
I could see a sort of heaviness behind the green irises that spoke of hours spent in the dark with her own thoughts and her own hands.
I even thought I could detect the urgent education that a real first orgasm can give a girl.
She also couldn’t quite meet my gaze. That provided the most telling sign of all.
Yesterday’s avoidance had been general—the shyness of a modest girl in an immodest situation.
This morning’s avoidance seemed specific.
She’d look at my chin, my shoulder, the open collar of my shirt, anywhere but directly into my eyes, and each time her gaze skated past mine I could see the faintest bloom of color along her cheekbones.
“Good morning, Anne,” I said, keeping my voice warm and even. Professional. The voice of a trainer greeting his trainee, nothing more. I opened my arms. “Come here.”
I gave hugs as much as a diagnostic tool as a way to comfort a girl.
It was one of the oldest techniques in my repertoire and I’d taught it to junior trainers at the Institute for years.
You embrace the girl. You hold her against your body with appropriate firmness—not sexual, not aggressive, but encompassing.
Enveloping. You press her chest to yours and settle your hands against her upper back and you hold her for three seconds longer than a casual greeting warrants, and in those three seconds her body tells you everything.
Anne stepped into the hug with an involuntary, full-body softening that began at her shoulders and rippled downward through her ribcage, her waist, her hips.
Her arms came up around my torso with a hesitancy that lasted approximately one second before her hands flattened against my back and pressed, pulling herself closer.
Her forehead found the hollow below my collarbone and settled there, and I felt the small, shuddering exhale she released against my shirt; the breath of a girl whose body had spent the night in a state of heightened arousal and was now in the presence of the man who’d caused it.
I held her. My hands rested on her upper back, wide and steady, and I let the silence do its work.
Against my chest I could feel her heart rate—elevated, rapid, the hummingbird pulse of acute nervousness.
Her breathing became shallow and slightly irregular.
And lower, where her hips pressed against my thighs through the layers of her skirt and my trousers, I could literally feel the heat.
Not just warmth. Heat. The particular, radiating warmth of a girl whose body had begun to prepare itself the moment she’d walked through the studio door and seen me standing there—or perhaps earlier, in the elevator, or in the lobby, or on the train, the anticipation building with each step that brought her closer to the man who’d fucked her mouth yesterday and whom she’d disobeyed last night.
Her arousal was already engaged, already running, the engine turning over with an efficiency that told me her body had learned something fundamental in the dark of her apartment and had not forgotten it overnight.
Three seconds became five. I felt her breathing change—the shallow pants deepening into something slower, heavier, and I felt the almost imperceptible shift of her weight as her hips tilted forward by a fraction of a degree, pressing more firmly against me.
She did it absolutely unconsciously. Her body sought contact with the source of its fixation the way a plant turns toward light, and the motion told me, with the certainty of a confession, that Anne Chamberlain had not only touched herself last night and climaxed, but also that she had come hard.
Probably more than once. And definitely while thinking about me.
I released her. Gently, but with a deliberateness that communicated intention.
I kept my hands on her shoulders for a moment, looking down at her upturned face.
I saw flushed cheeks, the slightly swollen lower lip she’d been biting, the green eyes that finally, briefly, met mine before darting away as if scalded.
In that instant of eye contact I let her see that I knew.
Anne’s lips parted. The color in her cheeks deepened from pink to a vivid, scalding rose that spread down her neck and disappeared beneath the buttoned collar of her blouse. Her eyes went wide, and I felt the change in her body through my hands on her shoulders.
A tremor ran through her, fine and continuous, and her weight shifted again—that involuntary forward tilt, her hips pressing toward me even as her upper body tried to lean away, the war between shame and need playing out in the architecture of her posture.
She had just gotten very wet, very suddenly. I felt certain of it.
I leaned closer. Close enough that my lips were near her ear, close enough that no one else in the studio could hear. Close enough that she could feel the warmth of my breath against the shell of her ear, and I watched the goosebumps rise along the side of her neck like a tide coming in.
“I think we have something to talk about,” I said quietly.
* * *
Anne
I clenched so hard, down there, that I literally thought I might come just at the sound of his voice making it clear that somehow he knew.
My master knew what I had done with my naughty little cunt.
The clench felt so violent, so total, that my vision actually blurred.
Every muscle from my navel to my knees seemed to contract in a single, overwhelming spasm.
I felt the wetness that had been building since the elevator—since the lobby, since the train, since I’d woken at six a.m. with the phantom sensation of his hand in my hair and the taste of him still ghosting across my tongue—surge between the folds of my pussy with a force that soaked through my underwear in an instant.
My knees buckled. I swayed forward against him, and his hands on my shoulders were the only thing that kept me upright.
Standing here, fully dressed, at nine o’clock in the morning, with nothing touching me between my legs except my own modest underwear, I was going to come from nothing more than the low vibration of Master Paul’s voice against my ear and the knowledge, the absolute certainty, that he knew I had disobeyed him and played with my pussy.
My inner walls clenched again. A whimper escaped through my teeth. I felt my hips perform that involuntary forward tilt, pressing toward him, seeking him, and I bit my lower lip so hard I tasted copper.
I didn’t come. But it was terrifyingly close.
The orgasm hovered at the edge of my awareness like a wave that had crested but not yet broken, and I stood in its shadow, shivering, balanced on a knife’s edge between the exquisite relief of letting it take me and the equally exquisite agony of holding it at bay.
Master Paul’s hands remained on my shoulders. Steady. Patient. Waiting.
The fear arrived then. A cold thread of terror wove itself through the hot tangle of my arousal.
He would punish me. He’d said I wasn’t allowed to come, and I had come five times, and now he knew, and whatever happened next would only represent a consequence I had richly earned.
The belt. His hand. The paddle. Something worse that I couldn’t even imagine because I had only forty-eight hours of experience with real, firm-handed discipline.
But the fear didn’t dampen the arousal. It fed it like gasoline on a fire, with a sudden, roaring intensification that made my thighs press together and my breath catch.
My mind filled with images of exactly what Master Paul might do to a girl who couldn’t keep her fingers off her wanton cunt for a single night.
And then—somewhere in the chaos of my nervous system, somewhere in the narrow space between terror and need—a thought formed. It arrived with a clarity that surprised me, as if the part of my brain responsible for self-preservation had finally found a frequency the rest of me could hear.
“Master Paul,” I whispered. My voice came out small and shaky and half-strangled, but it came out.
I was looking at his chest, at the open collar of his shirt where I could see the dark hair and the strong column of his throat, because I still couldn’t meet his eyes.
“Could we… I mean… do you think maybe we could…”
I swallowed. My mouth had gone dry despite the rest of me being catastrophically wet.
“Could we talk about it as part of a scene?” I asked.
The words tumbled out in a rush, clumsy and breathless, and the moment they left my mouth I felt simultaneously horrified at my own audacity and flooded with a relief so profound it made my knees weak.
Because what I’d just asked for seemed like a chance to explore the punishment within the framework of the narrative Melissa wanted to build.
If I made my disobedience part of the story, maybe it would mean I could understand it better.
I was scared. I was so scared that my hands trembled against his chest where they’d come to rest during the hug. But I also wanted it with a ferocity that frightened me more than the fear itself. The wanting it… that had given me the courage to speak.
I forced myself to look up. To meet his eyes. It cost me everything I had, and the blush that accompanied the effort felt like it might actually set my hair on fire.
What I saw in Master Paul’s face made something open—bloom, even—in my chest.
I saw appreciation, rather than the clinical approval of a trainer whose subject had made a useful suggestion. It seemed like real appreciation, too. It seemed warm and deep and suffused with something that looked, from my vantage point of approximately five feet three inches, like respect.
The brown eyes of the man I couldn’t help calling my new master held mine.
In them I could see the acknowledgment of what my offer had cost me, the recognition that I had just taken the raw material of my shame and my disobedience and offered it up as something we could use. Something we could build with.
His mouth curved: not quite a smile, but the ghost of one, the suggestion of warmth at the corners of his lips that transformed his stern face into something that made my heart stutter.
“That,” he said quietly, “is a very good idea, Anne.”
I could hear a warmth in his voice that differed from yesterday’s professional warmth.
This seemed personal, as if he had just watched a girl take a step toward something difficult and who understood, with the particular empathy of someone who’d guided hundreds of girls through exactly this kind of threshold, what that step had required.
I felt my eyes sting. Not with the tears of humiliation or of feeling overwhelmed that had become so depressingly familiar over the past twenty-four hours, but with something else.
It felt like gratitude. Master Paul hadn’t gotten angry.
Or if he was angry… if the dominant part of him that had growled the word cunt while he fucked my mouth was furious at my disobedience…
he had channeled that anger into something constructive.
Something that would serve both the scene and whatever strange, terrifying education my body and mind were undergoing.