Page 15 of Trained at the Office
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 mycomplete 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.”
CHAPTER 9
Anne
I turned my back to Master Paul, though I knew it must look absurd, given that I would apparently have to stay naked as Darlene lit me. My fingers fumbled at the buttons of my blouse with the clumsy desperation of someone trying to undress in a burning building.
The tears hadn’t stopped—they ran silently down my cheeks now, no longer accompanied by sobs but persistent, a steady leak I couldn’t shut off. I got the blouse open and shrugged it off my shoulders, letting it fall to the studio floor behind me. My bra was white, plain, functional—the kind you buy in a three-pack at a department store—and I reached back with shaking hands to unhook it.
The bra came loose and I caught it against my chest with my left hand, for one last, futile second of coverage before letting it drop. My right hand drifted, involuntarily, to my bottom. The skin there still blazed—I could feel the heat radiating through the fabric of my skirt—and my fingers pressed against the curveof one cheek in that instinctive, self-soothing gesture that a spanked girl apparently can’t suppress. I rubbed in small circles, wincing, trying to ease the deep, throbbing ache that Master Paul’s hand had left behind.
“Oh,” Melissa said from somewhere behind me. Her voice had changed—no longer sharp with irritation but bright, almost electric, the way it had sounded in the conference room when she’d unveiled the Surrender Access Panty. “Oh, that’sperfect. Darlene, are you seeing this?”
“I see it.” Darlene’s voice, clipped and businesslike.
“It’s gorgeous, right?” Melissa continued, circling me like I was a sculpture she wanted to evaluate from every angle. “That right there… that gesture, the way she reached back without even thinking about it, the way her face looks while she does it… that’s the entire campaign in a single image. That’s theHer Secret Gardengirl. She’s been disciplined, she’s feeling it, and she can’t help touching herself where it hurts. It’s vulnerable and intimate and slightly ashamed and completely authentic. You cannot direct that. You cannot fake that. Once we get her into lace, magic is going to happen. It’s exactly what I told Stuart: the sensors and the vibration modules have their place—but there’s no substitute for the real thing, when an expert dominant brings it out.”
I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard. I pulled my hand from my backside slowly, trying not to make it seem like I was jerking it away. I unzipped my skirt while Melissa continued talking, because stopping felt much worse than continuing.
The skirt pooled at my feet and I stepped out of it, still rubbing my bottom with one hand, and now I stood in nothing but my already pulled-down polka-dot panties—the ones Master Paulhad tugged to mid-thigh before spanking me. They sat crookedly there, nothing more than a humiliating twist of fabric.
I stooped and pushed them all the way down my thighs, and I stepped out of them and stood there, naked, in the middle of a film studio on the twenty-first floor of Selecta headquarters. It seemed like my mind had decided to pretend it just wasn’t happening, because I suddenly noticed that now I had putbothmy hands behind me to rub my spanked bottom.
I couldn’t help it, or at least my body, given free rein, definitely couldn’t. The throbbing wouldn’t stop, and the gesture was the only comfort available to me in a world that seemed to have stripped away every other kind.
And then—to my absolute, bone-deep dismay—I felt it. Warmth. Treacherous, damning warmth that had nothing directly to do with the heat in my punished cheeks and everything to do with the place between my legs. It crept in like a tide, slow and inexorable, pooling low in my belly and spreading downward until I could feel the slickness gathering at my center, my body reacting to my nakedness, to my vulnerability, to the echo of Master Paul’s palm and the sound of his voice sayinggood girl.My pussy responded with an arousal so inappropriate, so mortifying, that I wanted the floor to open beneath my feet and swallow me whole.
I pulled my hands away and pressed my thighs together. I still had the strange idea that it could help preserve my modesty, it seemed, but I found again that the pressure made the problem worse, just the way it had in the conference room, the way it always did. My body had learned its own terrible lesson about what squeezing my thighs actually accomplished, and the lesson was: nothing good. Nothing that reduced the wanting. Onlythings that made it more specific, more urgent, more impossible to deny.
“Light her,” Darlene said to someone I couldn’t see, and suddenly the studio around me shifted. Banks of soft white light angled toward me from three directions, bathing my naked body in a glow that felt almost warm on my skin.
Darlene appeared in my peripheral vision, crouching low with a light meter, moving around me with the detached efficiency of someone measuring a room for furniture. She held the meter near my hip, my breast, my collarbone, each time checking the reading and making minute adjustments to the nearest light panel.
“Turn toward me,” she said, and I did, and the lights hit the front of my body—my breasts, my stomach, the triangle of blonde hair between my legs—and I closed my eyes because looking at Darlene’s face while she looked at me there was more than I could bear.
“Skin takes the light beautifully,” Darlene said, apparently to Melissa. “Very fair. She’ll photograph warm. The blush pattern is a gift—see how it runs from the clavicle down through the sternum? In the right lingerie, with the right emotional state, that flush line is going to sell the entire narrative. Anne, honey, rub your bottom again for me? And put your other arm across your chest, like you don’t want your suitor to see your nipples. Perfect, thanks.”
I stood there, naked and lit like a specimen, rubbing my burning bottom with my right hand while my left arm crossed uselessly over my breasts, and I felt the wetness between my thighs with a clarity that made me want to scream. Every second I stood here, exposed under these lights, being discussed in the third personby women who saw me as visual material rather than a human being, my body betrayed me more thoroughly.
I could feel myself swelling, could feel the slippery heat increasing, and I knew—Iknew—that if anyone looked closely enough, if the light hit me at the right angle, they would see it. The evidence. The glistening proof that Anne Chamberlain, who had saidno, thank youtwice in Penelope’s office andI can’tthree times in this studio, was standing here dripping wet.
“You know what,” Master Paul said, and his voice came from somewhere to my left. I opened my eyes and found him leaning against the edge of the kitchen set’s butcher-block island, arms crossed, studying me with that deep, assessing gaze that seemed to see through every defensive layer I’d ever constructed. “I think there’s a narrative arc here that we’re not taking advantage of.”
Melissa looked up from her tablet. “Go on.”
“Her pussy,” Paul said, nodding toward me—toward the place between my legs, as casually as if he were pointing out a design flaw in a piece of furniture. “She came in unshaved. That’s an oversight in terms of prep, sure, but in terms of story, it’s a gift. If we shoot her first with the hair—in the baby doll, let’s say, in the bedroom set—and then I discover it during the scene and make the decision that it needs to go so she can wear the Surrender panties properly, we can make baring her pussy an integral part of the story. It’s not something that happened off screen before the campaign’s story began. It happenstoher,on camera, as part of her submission.”
My stomach dropped. I opened my mouth but no sound came out, because the wordsbaring her pussyhad short-circuited something essential in my ability to form language.
Melissa’s eyes widened slightly. Then they narrowed, and the expression that crossed her face was one I recognized from the conference room on the thirty-sixth floor—that anticipatory relish, that look of a card player who’d just been dealt an ace she hadn’t expected.
“That’s brilliant,” she said. “That’s—yes. That changes the whole first act of the campaign. We were going to open with the lingerie reveal, but if we open with the baby doll and the discovery and thecorrection—God, that’s so much better. That’s the whole thesis ofHSGin a single sequence. She’s not ready. He makes her ready. She submits to being made ready, and finds that she needed it more than she could ever have admitted.”
