Page 61 of Trained at the Office
CHAPTER 35
Paul
“Rolling,” Darlene called from next to Camera 1.
Five seconds. Maybe six. I stood just outside the bedroom set’s threshold and let the stillness hold.
The text from assessment had arrived five minutes ago, while I was putting on the dinner jacket. I’d read it once, put the phone back on the counter, and worked on getting my tie into the exact angle ofdeshabilléthat the scene seemed to call for.
Subject biometrics indicating elevated cortisol and adrenaline. Autonomic profile consistent with defiance precursor. Recommend trainer preparation for resistance protocol.
I hadn’t needed it. I’d known the moment I woke her at my apartment—the way her body had gone fractionally still beneath my arm when I’d told her it was time to get up, that particular quality of stillness that wasn’t sleep and wasn’t peace,but something braced against itself. I’d kissed her temple and she’d turned her face into my chest and pressed herself against me with a desperation that told me everything the Institute’s sensors were only now catching up to.
Because, of course, Anne herself—her mind, anyway—had only just caught up to it.
I’d anticipated it, of course. I had talked the scene through with her the previous night because I wanted the information to work on her in the dark, the way yeast works on dough—slowly, invisibly, until by morning something had risen that hadn’t been there before. A girl who could lie in her master’s arms and hear what was coming for her and simply accept it, simply absorb the details and fall asleep and wake up compliant… that girl would worry me.
But a girl whose biometrics lit up the assessment board at 9:02 in the morning? A girl who stood at the foot of a white bed in a white dressing gown with her hands knotted at the belt and her pulse visible in the hollow of her throat?
That girl had begun to understand herself.
The defiance didn’t come from resistance to me. It wasn’t even, really, resistance to what would happen to her bottom this morning. It was the last reflex of a self that knew it was about to surrender something irrecoverable, and insisted on being met with sufficient force to make the surrender feel like the real thing. Anne didn’t want coaxing through this threshold. She wanted, and deserved, to have the master who loved her take her through it. She needed the rebellion to find an answer in language strong enough to convince her body of the reality of her transformation.
I knew all that. I’d expected it. What I hadn’t expected—what I couldn’t have prepared for, what no amount of experience had furnished me with a protocol to manage—was what I felt when Darlene saidrollingand I looked at Anne standing at the foot of the bed.
She had her back to me. She was staring at the bolster the way a person stares at something they’ve been told not to touch. Her hands had twisted where they gripped the dressing gown’s belt, and her shoulders were set in a line so rigid the corset from yesterday’s scene would have been redundant. The white cotton fell to mid-thigh and the backs of her bare legs below the hem were close together, pressed at the knee, as if she’d decided that keeping her legs closed was a small act of resistance still available to her.
She was terrified. Genuinely, thoroughly terrified. I could see it in the set of her spine and the angle of her head and the absolute, superhuman stillness of a body that was fighting with everything it had to simply remain standing in the place it had been told to stand.
And still she stood there.
It went through me like electricity. She hadn’t walked off the set, or pulled the curtain of the changing area shut and refused to come out. She had put on the white panties with the cutout and she had belted the dressing gown over them. She had stepped onto the white set and gone to the foot of the bed. She had looked at the bolster when I told her to, with the knowledge of what the panties and the bolster were for evident in the sheer stiffness of her stance.
And I was in love with her.
With this girl who understood, at some level that ran deeper than conscious thought, that the fear and the need were the same thing, and who was brave enough—God, so much braver than she knew—to let both of them be true simultaneously.
I stepped through the doorway.
* * *
Anne
The door of the set’s mock entryway opened and closed. His footsteps crossed the floor behind me—measured, unhurried, the sound I would know anywhere.
“I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” he said, from somewhere behind my left shoulder.
The scene had begun.
“No,” I said. My voice came out smaller than I intended. “Not long, sir.”
He came to stand at my side, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his body through the dressing gown. He looked at the bed, at the bolster, with the expression of a man surveying something he has arranged with care.
“Are you wearing what I gave you?” He didn’t look at me. His eyes stayed on the bed.
The lace-framed oval pressed its satin border against my skin. I could feel it. I would always be able to feel it.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Sir.”
