Page 7 of Trained at the Office
When it was over—when Melissa had powered down the screen and Stuart had shaken Penelope’s hand and given me one last look that I felt in the pit of my stomach—I followed Penelope back to the thirty-second floor in silence. My laptop was clutched against my chest like a shield. My panties were damp.I wanted to go home and take a shower and never come back to this building again.
Penelope walked into her office and paused at the door. She turned back to me with an expression I couldn’t quite parse—something between warmth and calculation, like a chess player looking at a piece she intended to move.
“Anne,” she said. “Come in for a moment. Close the door.”
I followed her in. I closed the door. The click of the latch sounded very loud.
Penelope settled into her chair and gestured to the one across from her desk. I sat, placing my laptop on my knees, and waited.
“So,” Penelope said. She folded her hands on the desk in that characteristic pose of hers, fingers laced, thumbs touching, the pearls at her collarbone catching the light from her desk lamp. “Stuart’s proposal. The modeling assignment.”
“I don’t?—”
“Let me finish.” Her voice was gentle but carried the weight of someone accustomed to being allowed to speak without interruption. “I want you to think about this seriously, Anne. Not as a knee-jerk reaction, not through the filter of whatever you’re feeling right now—which I suspect is quite a lot—but seriously. This would be a significant career opportunity. Melissa’s Surrender Line is going to be the centerpiece of the Q4 launch for HSG. The models who appear in that campaign will have visibility across the entire NMB platform.”
She paused, letting that settle.
“And,” she added, “it would come with a substantial raise. I’m talking about a bump to your base salary of forty percent, plus aper-shoot stipend. You’d be earning more than most people your age with five years of experience.”
Forty percent.The number hung in the air between us, and I hated myself for the way it tugged at something practical and desperate inside me—the part of me that knew exactly how much my rent was, exactly how much I owed in student loans, exactly how thin the margin was between my current paycheck and the kind of financial stability I’d been chasing since I left home.
“No, thank you,” I said.
My voice came out quiet but clear. I was proud of it. I was proud of the steadiness, even as my hands trembled in my lap.
Penelope regarded me for a long moment. Then she opened a drawer in her desk and withdrew one of her many tablets. She typed briefly on it, then handed it to me.
“Do you know what this is?” she asked.
I looked down. The document displayed on the screen bore the title Employee Wellness Assessment—Preliminary Profile, and beneath that, my name. My full name,Anne Elizabeth Chamberlain, alongside my employee ID number and the date of my hire. Below the header was a series of metrics I didn’t fully understand, arranged in columns with labels likePhysiological Responsiveness Index,Submission Orientation Score, andLatent Arousal Baseline.
The numbers beside each label were high. I didn’t need to understand the scale to know they were high, because each one was highlighted in red, and at the bottom of the column of red numbers, someone—an assessor, presumably—had written a single line of commentary:
Subject displays pronounced submissive physiological responses consistent with deep latent submissive need. Recommend structured integration.
“This reports was compiled from your biometric data during the onboarding health screening,” Penelope said, “and supplemented by observational assessment during your first two months. The assessors flagged your profile almost immediately, Anne. Your body responds to authority dynamics. It responds to imagery of submission. It responds”—she paused, and something shifted in her gray eyes—“to being watched while it responds.”
The heat in my face felt unbearable. I felt like the words on the tablet screen had peeled me open, layer by layer, in the warm light of Penelope’s office, and every layer she removed revealed something I’d spent my whole life trying not to look at.
“I can tell you need this,” Penelope said softly. “The data tells me. Your body tells me. And I think, if you’re honest with yourself, you already know.”
The ache between my legs pulsed. It had been pulsing since the conference room, since the white lace panties with their oval opening appeared on the screen, and it hadn’t stopped—it had only deepened, settling into something heavy and persistent that sat low in my belly like a stone made of heat. My almost-virgin pussy… because that’s what it was, wasn’t it? Two fumbling, unsatisfying encounters with Kevin hardly counted as experience… my almost-virgin pussy was wet, warm, andwanting, and the wanting felt like a betrayal of everything I believed about myself.
“No, thank you,” I said again. My voice was smaller this time. The steadiness had cracked.
CHAPTER 5
Anne
Penelope took the tablet gently from my hands. She set it aside with a careful, deliberate motion, and when she looked at me again, the warmth in her expression had entirely vanished. Her eyes had grown cold, but I could also see resignation there—the look of a woman who had arrived at a destination she’d known was coming and wished she hadn’t.
“Anne,” she said, and sighed. The sigh was long and slow and carried the weight of genuine regret. “I’m afraid I don’t have a choice.”
My stomach dropped. “What do you mean?”
Penelope picked up the tablet again, and tapped through a few menus as I felt my heart begin to race and my forehead developed a deep crease. She handed the device back to me.
This time I saw a document I recognized—the employment contract I’d signed my first day, thick with clauses and sub-clauses in language I’d skimmed too quickly because Yolandahad told me it was all standard. Penelope had scrolled to a page near the end.
