Page 3 of Trained at the Office
Can I please touch myself, sir? I really need to.
A pause. Three dots appeared on her phone as on the other side of the split screen Marcus typed a message.
On the left side, Karen stared at her phone with an expression that made something twist uncomfortably low in my stomach. Her eyes held… need, plain and open, the kind of need I had been raised to believe a girl had to fight against—not ask to assuage. Definitely not ask amanif should could… could…give intoit.
Karen’s forehead creased deeper. She squeezed her thighs again, harder this time, and her breath came out in a small, audible huff.
“You’ll notice,” Dr. Holt said, her tone as measured as if she were describing rainfall patterns as she gestured to the right side of the screen, where Marcus had pulled up another display, “that Marcus can see her biometric data in real time on his app. Heart rate elevated. Core temperature up. The arousal index—that’s our proprietary metric based on the perineal sensor readings—is at eighty-seven percent. He knows exactly how needy she is. He doesn’t have to guess. He doesn’t have to rely on her telling him, though as you can see, she’s telling him anyway.”
A few people around the table chuckled. I did not chuckle. I put downbiometric data—arousal index—87%and my fingers felt clumsy and too warm on the keys.
Marcus’s reply appeared on the screen.
Good girl for asking. You may touch yourself. Panties stay on. You have ten minutes.
The girl’s face changed. Relief flooded her features, followed immediately by something else—a gratitude so naked it made me look away for a moment. She set the phone down on the bedspread beside her and leaned back on one hand, and her other hand slid down over the white cotton of the training panties, pressing against the gusset with her fingertips. Her eyes fluttered closed. A small sound escaped her lips—not quite a moan, more like an exhale that had been held too long.
“The system recognizes that manual stimulation has been authorized,” Dr. Holt continued. “It shifts modes automatically, adjusting the vibration module to complement rather than compete with her own touch. The algorithm works with her now, amplifying what she’s doing rather than maintaining the edgestate. Marcus can watch her arousal index climb in real time and intervene if he chooses—reduce stimulation, increase it, revoke permission entirely. He’s in complete control even from across the city.”
I was mortified. That was the only word that fit. Not uncomfortable, not awkward, not even cringing—mortified. The heat in my cheeks had spread down my neck and across my chest, and I was sure that anyone who glanced at me would see it, read it, and know exactly what it meant. I kept my eyes on my laptop screen and wrote words I would never be able to look at again.
I am not…I could barely even think of the word.I am notaroused, I told myself, with a firmness that felt brittle even inside my own head.This is clinical. This is a product demonstration. This is underwear.
I thought about Kevin. Kevin Brewer, whom I’d dated for seven months in my sophomore year, who had been sweet and patient. I’d tried. I’d really tried to enjoy it. He’d been gentle, almost too gentle, hovering over me with that anxious expression, askingis this okay?every thirty seconds until I’d wanted to scream—not from pleasure but from sheer confusion, because I didn’t know how I should feel or even, really, how Ididfeel when he put his hard penis inside me.
I told myself on a daily basis that sex with Kevin had been fine. It was bodies and friction and a vague warmth that never quite built to anything before he finished with a groan, rolled off, and asked again if I was okay. And I’d said yes, because I was. I was perfectly okay. I just didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. All those songs, all those movies, all those breathless conversations in dorm hallways—forthat? It hadn’t seemed like all that great a thing. It hadn’t seemed like a big deal.
On the screen, the girl’s back arched. Her fingers moved in small, deliberate circles over the white cotton, and the sound she made this time was unmistakably a moan—low and liquid and helpless in a way that made my throat tighten.
I am not aroused, I insisted to myself again.
But my body was doing something my mind hadn’t authorized. There was a warmth between my legs—faint, insistent, entirely unwelcome—and I pressed my knees together under the conference table in a motion that I realized, with a jolt of horror, mirrored exactly what the girl on the screen had been doing.
I uncrossed my legs. Crossed them the other way. Typed something meaningless—Q3 integration timeline TBD—just to give my fingers something to do.
“The conversion data from our pilot program is compelling,” Dr. Holt was saying now, advancing past the video to a slide of graphs and percentages. The lights came back up. I blinked. “Eighty-three percent of participants reported significantly improved communication with their suitors about physical needs within the first two weeks. Ninety-one percent of suitors reported higher satisfaction with the dynamic. And—this is the number I’m most proud of—the orgasm quality index among participants increased by forty-seven percent compared to our baseline intimates.”
Orgasm quality index.I typed it. I hated myself for typing it.
Penelope, beside me, leaned back in her chair and crossed one elegant leg over the other. She hadn’t spoken once during the presentation, but I could feel her attention like a physical thing: not on the screen, not on Dr. Holt, but on me. I didn’t dare look at her. I kept my eyes on my laptop, my fingers on the keys, andmy expression as neutral as I could manage, which was probably not very neutral at all given that my face felt like it was on fire.
The vice president leaned forward. “What’s the price point looking like for retail?”
And just like that, the conversation shifted to margins and manufacturing costs and distribution channels, and I could breathe again. Except that the warmth between my legs hadn’t gone away. And except that, somewhere beneath the embarrassment, the careful typing, and the memory of Kevin’s earnest, ineffectual hands, a question had lodged itself in a part of my mind I didn’t want to examine.
What would it feel like, the question whispered,to need…that? To need it as badly as Karen clearly did? To need it so badly that I have to ask a… aman?
I deleted the line I’d just typed—it was gibberish anyway—and started a new one, my fingers shaking so slightly that I was sure no one could see it.
No one except perhaps Penelope, whose gaze I could still feel resting on me like a hand on the back of my neck.
That meeting was the worst one I had to sit through in my first two months at Selecta. Or almost the worst. The days that followed blurred into a rhythm I hadn’t expected to settle into so quickly. I arrived each morning at eight-fifteen, logged into my workstation, reviewed Penelope’s calendar, prepared the conference room packets, and attended meetings. So many meetings.
Most of them were about the New Modesty Authority—the NMA, as everyone in the department called it with the easy familiarity of an acronym they’d been using for years. Ilearned quickly that Penelope’s role as Director of New Modesty Program Integration meant she sat at the intersection of nearly every NMA initiative Selecta had its fingers in, and since I was Penelope’s assistant, I sat there too, laptop open, fingers moving, recording everything in meticulous notes I would later organize into summaries she rarely read but always expected to be flawless.
The paddling happened in my seventh week.
I didn’t see it. I heard about it the way you hear about a car accident on a highway you drive every day—secondhand, in lowered voices, with that particular mix of horror and fascination that people adopt when they want you to know they disapprove of something they can’t stop talking about.
