Page 11 of Trained at the Office
The sound I made as she entered me started low in my chest and climbed through my throat and out of my mouth in a sustained, breaking note—not pain, though there was a stretching, a fullness that bordered on too much, but something beyond pain, beyond pleasure, beyond any sensation I had language for. She filled me. She filled the emptiness that had been aching inside me since the conference room, since the white lace panties on the screen, since the first meeting where I’d pressed my knees together and pretended I wasn’t wet.
“Oh,” I said. Just that. Justoh. A syllable that contained everything.
Penelope began to move. Her hips drew back slowly, the phallus sliding partway out of me, and then pressed forward again—deeper this time, the curved tip finding a spot inside me that made white light bloom behind my eyes. Her rhythm felt unhurried at first, each thrust deliberate and complete, and I could hear—beneath my own ragged breathing, beneath the wet sounds of our bodies meeting—her breath, quickening again, the way it had during the paddling. The internal attachment was working inside her too. Each time she thrust into me, she was driving it into herself, and the sounds she made—small, controlled, but increasingly urgent—told me that whatever wall of composure she’d built was beginning to crack.
Her hands found my hips. She gripped them hard—harder than I’d expected, her fingers pressing into the soft flesh, digging in with an intensity that felt like honest need. The thrusts came faster. The desk rocked beneath me, its legs scraping faintly against the carpet, and I pushed back against her—meeting each stroke with my hips, taking her deeper, wanting her deeper, wanting to be so full of her that there was no room left insideme for shame or confusion or the memory of Kevin’s anxious, inadequate hands.
The wave of pleasure came back. Not gradually this time; it surged, rising from the base of my spine with a speed and force that left no room for thought. Penelope’s hips drove forward and the curved tip struck that place inside me again and her pelvis ground against my burning, paddled bottom. The pain and the pleasure fused into a single, blinding sensation that was both and neither and more than both, and I came.
The orgasm tore through me. My back arched so sharply I thought my spine might snap. My mouth opened in a scream that I couldn’t hear because the blood was roaring in my ears, and every muscle in my body clenched at once—my fingers on the desk, my thighs around hers, the deep internal muscles that gripped the phallus inside me in rhythmic, helpless contractions that went on and on and on, wave after wave after wave, each one pulling me under and releasing me only long enough to gasp before the next one hit.
Behind me, Penelope made a sound like nothing I’d heard from her: a sharp, broken cry, startlingly vulnerable, so different from her measured voice in meetings or her calm instructions. Her hips stuttered against me, losing their rhythm, and her fingers dug into my hips hard enough to bruise as her own orgasm overtook her. I felt her body shake against mine, felt the tremor run through her thighs and into my thighs, felt us connected—joined, locked together in this impossible, terrible, transcendent moment—as we both shattered at once.
CHAPTER 7
Paul
I met Anne Chamberlain a week after she had, apparently, gotten herself paddled and fucked with a strap-on by her boss, in her boss’s office. Reading that in Anne’s assessment file, along with the accompanying biometric analysis, had piqued my interest, certainly. Anne herself, though, would have captivated me anyway; I could tell from the moment I laid eyes on her in the NMB studio on the twenty-first floor of Selecta HQ.
She stood near the entrance to the farmhouse kitchen set, clutching a call sheet against her chest the way a schoolgirl might hold a textbook—pressed flat, both arms wrapped around it, as if the thin piece of paper could shield her from whatever was coming. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a low ponytail that exposed the long line of her neck, and she wore a cream blouse buttoned to the collar and a navy skirt that fell just past her knees. Conservative. Deliberate. The outfit of a girl who had spent considerable time that morning choosing her armor for the day.
I’d been standing by the lighting rig near the bedroom set, reviewing the shot list with Darlene Gray, our videographer, when she came in. The studio door opened and Anne appeared in the threshold like a deer at the edge of a clearing—one step in, then a pause, her green eyes sweeping the space with the wide, cataloguing attention of someone taking in far more than she wanted to.
And there was plenty to take in. The studio occupied most of the twenty-first floor’s east wing, a cavernous space that had been subdivided into five distinct sets, four of them meticulous re-creations of rooms you might find in a modest farmhouse somewhere in one of Selecta’s New Modesty communities. The fifth set didn’t have anything in it at the moment; it stood ready to represent the rare scene occurring outside the New Modesty home.
The kitchen had whitewashed cabinets, a butcher-block island, and copper pots hanging from a rack above the stove. The living room had a worn leather sofa, a braided rug, and bookshelves filled with titles I knew Melissa had personally selected—homemaking manuals, devotional guides, the kind of domestic literature that would read as authentic in a wide shot.
The bathroom had white tile, a claw-foot tub, and a mirror positioned at an angle that Darlene had spent forty minutes calibrating for optimal reflection during shoots. And the bedroom—the centerpiece, the set where most of the Surrender Line campaign would be photographed—featured a wrought-iron bed frame, white linen sheets, and curtains that moved in the breeze from a hidden fan, because nothing sold intimacy like the suggestion of an open window in a room where a girl was about to take her clothes off.
Anne’s gaze traveled from set to set, and I watched the color climb her neck. Not a blush, exactly. More like a trace of color, the skin pinkening in patches along her throat and across her collarbones where the cream blouse didn’t quite conceal it. Her lips parted. Her fingers tightened on the call sheet.
She was terrified. That much was obvious to anyone with eyes, and I had better eyes than most. Twelve years in the military, with five of them in psychological operations, plus eleven as an Institute trainer, had given me an education in reading bodies that no university could match. I’d debriefed captured insurgents who’d shown less visible stress than Anne Chamberlain showed walking into a photography studio.
The tension lived in her shoulders, which were hiked a good inch and a half above their natural line. It lived in her jaw, which she had clenched so tightly I could see the muscles bunching beneath the skin. It lived in her hands, in the white-knuckled grip on that call sheet, and in her feet, which had stopped moving entirely, rooting her just inside the doorway as if her body had decided, independent of her conscious mind, that this was as far as it was willing to go.
But I knew something more from my Institute days as a dominant master of repressed girls just like Anne Chamberlain. Anne’s terror came much more from the dark, unknown depths inside her than from the novelty of the circumstances.
I excused myself from Marcus and crossed the studio floor toward her. I took my time. Not because I wanted to intimidate Anne, but because the way a man approaches a frightened, repressed, submissive woman in the first thirty seconds of her training tells her everything she needs to know about the next thirty days. I wanted those seconds to count.
* * *
Anne
I swallowed hard as the enormous, gorgeous man who seemed at least partly in charge of things here came toward me. He moved with a kind of unhurried grace that reminded me of a big predator: a tiger, maybe… aware of himself in space, aware of the effect his size and weight had on the smaller creatures, like me, around it. Each step looked measured. His polished, expensive shoes carried him toward me at a pace that gave me time to look at him, and looking at him was a problem.
He was significantly older than me. He seemed to be in his late forties, I guessed, maybe closer to fifty, though the years sat on him the way they sit on certain men, adding weight and authority rather than diminishing anything. His hair was dark with threads of silver at the temples, cropped close in a way that suggested military service rather than fashion.
His jaw had a square, uncompromising line that I couldn’t help thinking indicated a man who made decisions and lived with them. His eyes, though… they stopped my train of thought. No, derailed it. Brown, deep-set, and possessed of an attention so focused it felt like the touch of someone who didn’t feel much need to be gentle.
He wore dark trousers and a fitted charcoal shirt, open at the collar, sleeves rolled to the forearms to expose his thick wrists and hands that looked like they could break things or build things with equal competence. He was broad across the chest and shoulders, tapering to a trim waist, and he carried himselfwith the absolute stillness of a man who had nothing to prove to anyone in any room he entered.
I suddenly remembered the brief conversation I had had with Yolanda the previous night. She and I had drifted apart, I supposed, over my time at Selecta—mostly because I didn’t think I wanted to tell her about the embarrassing nature of my work for Penelope.
“Annie,” she had said, her voice breathless in the way that it always got when she wanted to dish the dirt, “whathappenedwith yourboss? No one seems to know the real story!”
“Oh,” I had said, my face burning as I paced my tiny apartment, “don’t believe everything you hear.”
But if I didn’t want to admit how humiliating and, well, intimate my job had gotten, the thought of telling Yolanda about the effect the man walking in my direction had on me… that seemed even worse, though I couldn’t have said why.
