Page 12 of Trained at the Office
My heart had started to race. I could feel it in my throat, in my wrists, in a place behind my sternum that felt like I had a small bird trapped there.
“Anne,” he said when he reached me, and the sound of my name in his voice—deep, resonant, with a warmth that seemed at odds with the sheer physical authority he projected—made something flutter low in my stomach. “I’m Paul Mason. I’ll be working with you on the campaign.”
He extended his hand. I had to peel one arm away from the call sheet to take it, and when his fingers closed around mine—warm, dry, engulfing—I felt the size difference between us. My hand disappeared inside his. He held it for what seemed to me exactly the right amount of time. It felt long enough tobe personal, but not long enough to be threatening. Then he released it with a slight, almost imperceptible squeeze.
“It’s… it’s nice to meet you, Mr. Mason,” I said, and my voice came out thin and reedy and nothing like the voice of a woman who was ready to do whatever was about to happen in this studio.
“Paul,” he corrected. Then, after a beat, “Actually, we should get started on the right foot. You’ll call me Master Paul.” He said it with a faint smile that might have been humor, but his eyes didn’t smile. His eyes watched me the way a doctor watches a patient—cataloguing symptoms, reading signs, arriving at a diagnosis before the patient has even finished describing what hurts.
Master Paul. The title seemed to enter my mind, and then somehow my body, like a physical thing, sending signals outward through my body that I felt in places I didn’t want to feel them. I knew what that title meant. I’d learned enough in my employment at Selecta to know that Institute trainers—men and women certified through Selecta’s behavioral training program—used the honorificMasterorMistressas a marker of their authority over the young women assigned to their ‘care.’ I’d read about it in meeting briefs. I’d typed notes about it. I’d filed it away in the same mental compartment where I kept all the other impossible things I’d learned since walking through Selecta’s gleaming doors.
But I hadn’t expected to encounter one. And definitely not here, today. The call sheet—which I’d read six times on the elevator ride down to the twenty-first floor, my eyes skipping over the words as if speed-reading might make them less real—had said nothing about an Institute trainer. It had listed wardrobe, lighting setups, set locations, and a brief note abouttalentdirectionthat I’d assumed meant a photographer telling me where to stand.
“I didn’t…” I started, and stopped. I could feel the crease forming between my eyebrows, the one my mother used to smooth away with her thumb when I was a teenager, telling me that frowning would give me wrinkles. “I didn’t know there would be a… that you were…”
“A man?” he supplied, with that same faint smile. “Or a trainer?”
“Either,” I whispered.
He studied me for a moment. That focused, unhurried gaze moved over my face—my eyes, my mouth, the blush I could feel climbing from my collarbone to my jaw—and then down, briefly, to my white-knuckled grip on the call sheet. He didn’t leer. He didn’t let his eyes linger anywhere they shouldn’t have. But the assessment was thorough, and I had the unshakable sense that he had already seen things about me that I hadn’t shown anyone, things I hadn’t even shown myself.
“Melissa asked me to participate,” he said. “She thinks the material will be best served by a dynamic that’s authentic. Not posed. Not directed in the traditional sense.Her Secret Gardenis about real responses, Anne. Real submission. You can’t get that from a photographer saying ‘turn left, tilt your chin, look vulnerable.’ You get it from a dynamic that creates the conditions for those responses to emerge naturally.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but nothing came out. The wordsreal submissionechoed in my skull. I thought of Penelope’s office. The desk. The paddle. The strap-on. The orgasm that had torn through me like a natural disaster while my boss held my hips and drove into me. Was that real submission? It had feltreal. It had felt like the most real thing that had ever happened to me, and in the week since, I’d lain awake every night replaying it with a mixture of horror and longing that left me tangled in my sheets, my hand between my legs, my face burning in the dark.
“I’m not…” I tried again. “I’ve never done anything like this. I’m just… They said it would be a photo shoot. Melissa and Penelope said I’d try on some lingerie and they’d take pictures. She didn’t say anything about…”
“About me,” he finished. His voice was gentle, but I could sense it was the gentleness of a man who understood exactly how frightened I was and had decided not to pretend otherwise. “I know. And I know that makes this harder. But I want you to hear something, Anne, and I want you to hear it clearly.”
He took a half step closer. He didn’t quite move into my personal space, but he came close enough that I could smell him. Cedar. Something warm and slightly spiced beneath it. Clean skin.
“Nothing is going to happen in this studio that you don’t need,” he said.
He waited, as if to let his words sink in.Need… notwant.
“What you want right now is to run. I can see it. Your body is screaming it—your shoulders, your jaw, the way you’re holding that call sheet like a life preserver. You want to turn around and walk out and go back to your desk and pretend none of this is happening.”
The accuracy of his statement made my eyes sting. I blinked rapidly, refusing to cry.Not here. Not in front of him.
Not in front of the people I could see moving around the sets behind him: technicians adjusting lights, someone carrying agarment bag, a woman with cropped silver hair crouched beside a camera on a tripod, peering through the viewfinder with clinical concentration.
“But what you need,” Paul continued, and his voice dropped, just slightly, into a register that seemed to bypass my ears entirely and arrive somewhere in the center of my chest, “is to stay. To trust the process. To let someone who knows what he’s doing guide you through the thing that’s been building inside you since long before you walked into Selecta.”
I stared at him. My lips had parted. My breath came in shallow little sips that I couldn’t deepen no matter how hard I tried. The call sheet wavered in my hands.
“How do you…” My voice cracked. “How do you know what’s building inside me?”
Something shifted in his expression. Not softening—he didn’t seem like a man who softened—but something opened, briefly, like a door left ajar.
“Because I’ve spent my career working with girls exactly like you,” he said simply. “Girls who feel too much and don’t know what to do with it. Girls who’ve been told their whole lives that wanting to submit is weakness, or sickness, or something to be ashamed of. Girls who walk into rooms like this one shaking and fighting and telling themselves they don’t want what their bodies are begging for.” He paused. “I’ve never been wrong about one yet.”
CHAPTER 8
Anne
The tears came. I couldn’t stop them. They spilled over my lower lashes and ran down my cheeks in hot, silent streams, and I hated them, hated the weakness they represented, hated the way they proved everything he’d just said. I swiped at them furiously with the back of my hand, still clutching the call sheet, and the paper crumpled against my cheek.
“I’m fine,” I said, which seemed like the most absurd thing I’d ever said in my life.
