Page 34 of Trained at the Office
“Could we talk about it as part of a scene?” I asked.
The words tumbled out in a rush, clumsy and breathless, and the moment they left my mouth I felt simultaneously horrified at my own audacity and flooded with a relief so profound it made my knees weak. Because what I’d just asked for seemed like a chance to explore the punishment within the framework of the narrative Melissa wanted to build. If I made my disobedience part of the story, maybe it would mean I could understand it better.
I was scared. I was so scared that my hands trembled against his chest where they’d come to rest during the hug. But I also wanted it with a ferocity that frightened me more than the fear itself. The wanting it… that had given me the courage to speak.
I forced myself to look up. To meet his eyes. It cost me everything I had, and the blush that accompanied the effort felt like it might actually set my hair on fire.
What I saw in Master Paul’s face made something open—bloom, even—in my chest.
I saw appreciation, rather than the clinical approval of a trainer whose subject had made a useful suggestion. It seemed like realappreciation, too. It seemed warm and deep and suffused with something that looked, from my vantage point of approximately five feet three inches, like respect.
The brown eyes of the man I couldn’t help calling my new master held mine. In them I could see the acknowledgment of what my offer had cost me, the recognition that I had just taken the raw material of my shame and my disobedience and offered it up as something we could use. Something we could build with.
His mouth curved: not quite a smile, but the ghost of one, the suggestion of warmth at the corners of his lips that transformed his stern face into something that made my heart stutter.
“That,” he said quietly, “is a very good idea, Anne.”
I could hear a warmth in his voice that differed from yesterday’s professional warmth. This seemed personal, as if he had just watched a girl take a step toward something difficult and who understood, with the particular empathy of someone who’d guided hundreds of girls through exactly this kind of threshold, what that step had required.
I felt my eyes sting. Not with the tears of humiliation or of feeling overwhelmed that had become so depressingly familiar over the past twenty-four hours, but with something else. It felt like gratitude. Master Paul hadn’t gotten angry. Or if hewasangry… if the dominant part of him that had growled the wordcuntwhile he fucked my mouth was furious at my disobedience… he had channeled that anger into something constructive. Something that would serve both the scene and whatever strange, terrifying education my body and mind were undergoing.
CHAPTER 20
Anne
“We’ll work it into a scene in the bedroom,” Master Paul said, his voice still pitched low, still for my ears only. “Before the shaving. A girl who disobeyed her suitor’s instructions needs to confess. Then baring her can be part of her training for the marriage bed. It might give the whole sequence an even better emotional arc that?—”
“Paul. Anne.” Melissa’s voice cut across the studio, and I flinched, stepping back from Master Paul with the guilty reflexes of a girl caught in a forbidden embrace. Melissa strode toward us with her characteristic long-legged purpose, her tablet tucked under one arm and her coffee in the opposite hand. She had pulled her dark hair back severely. She had the focused energy I was beginning to recognize as her default state.
“Darlene’s ready on the bathroom set,” Melissa said, reaching us and glancing between Master Paul and me with eyes that missed nothing.
“I think we need to shoot on the bedroom set first,” Master Paul said. His voice had shifted seamlessly from the intimate, low register he’d used with me to the professional authority he wielded with the production team. “Before we get to the shaving. There’s a scene we need to shoot—Anne and I discussed it just now. A confession scene. It’ll set up the emotional context for the bathroom.”
Melissa’s eyebrows rose. Her gaze flicked to me—taking in, I was certain, the violent flush on my face, the brightness in my eyes, the way my hands had found each other in front of my skirt and were holding on for dear life—and then back to Master Paul. Something passed between them, a silent communication that I couldn’t fully decode, but that seemed to carry the weight of professional shorthand developed over years of collaboration.
“A confession scene,” Melissa repeated. Her lips curved. “About what, exactly?”
“Anne broke a rule,” Master Paul said. Simply. Factually. As if he were reporting a weather condition.
The floor seemed to tilt beneath my feet. Hearing him say it aloud, in front of Melissa, in the open space of the studio where anyone could hear, sent a wave of mortification through me so intense that I actually swayed. My hands tightened against each other.
Melissa’s eyes widened fractionally. Then they narrowed, and the smile that spread across her face was the smile of a woman who had just been handed exactly what she wanted.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, that’s perfect. That’s—yes. Absolutely yes. Let me get Darlene.” She turned and called across the studio, her voice carrying with the practiced projection of someoneaccustomed to being heard. “Darlene! Change of plan. We’re going to shoot on the bedroom set first. Is it still up from yesterday?”
Darlene emerged from behind a partition at the far end of the studio, her silver-cropped head appearing first, followed by the rest of her wiry, black-clad frame. She had a light meter in one hand and an expression of mild irritation on her face.
“I’ve been in the bathroom for two hours calibrating the tile reflections,” Darlene said flatly. “What do you mean, bedroom first?”
“Paul wants to shoot a confession scene before the shaving,” Melissa said, already moving toward the monitor bank, her fingers flying across her tablet. “Something came up. It’s going to be incredible—trust me.”
Darlene’s pale eyes moved from Melissa to Master Paul to me, and I watched her perform the same rapid, clinical assessment that everyone in this studio seemed capable of—reading my flushed face, my rigid posture, the way I couldn’t quite stand still. Whatever she saw made her expression shift from irritation to something more calculating.
“The bedroom’s still set up,” she said. She looked at Master Paul. “What’s the blocking? Same bed position as yesterday, or something different?”
“Different,” Master Paul said. He put his hand on the small of my back—a light, proprietary touch that sent electricity racing up my spine—and guided me toward the bedroom set. “Anne’s going to be standing. Facing me. She has something to tell me, and I want her on her feet when she says it.”
Darlene nodded once, already moving toward the lighting rigs. “Five minutes,” she repeated over her shoulder. “Melissa, I want the B-camera on a low angle. If she’s standing and he’s in the chair, I want to shoot up at her face during the confession. The vulnerability reads better from below.”
