Page 13 of Trained at the Office
Paul didn’t contradict me. He simply reached into his pocket and produced a clean, folded handkerchief—actual cloth, white cotton, monogrammed with a smallPMin 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 myface, 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 sayI 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—Iknew, 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 sayingI can’tin 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.MasterPaul’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 nobut.” 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 understandwhy that’s the better option. Those are the choices available to you right now.”
To my horror, I knew exactly what he meant byhelp 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.
