“All right,” Master Paul said. And then he moved.
He didn’t lunge. He didn’t grab. He simply stepped forward with that same measured, unhurried grace I’d noticed when he first crossed the studio toward me, and his hand closed around my upper arm. His grip wasn’t rough, let alone painful; it had a firmness that communicated, without any ambiguity whatsoever, that I was no longer in control of what happened next.
He walked to the nearest set—the living room, with its worn leather sofa and braided rug—and guided me with him. My feetmoved because his hand on my arm gave them no alternative. The call sheet fell from my fingers and fluttered to the studio floor behind us. I heard myself make a small, frightened sound—a kind ofoh—that was swallowed by the vastness of the space.
Master Paul sat down on the leather sofa. The cushion creaked under his weight. And then, with a motion so fluid it must have been practiced a thousand times, he pulled me forward and down, tipping me off balance so that I tumbled across his lap.
I landed hard, my stomach pressed against his thighs, my hands scrabbling at the sofa cushion on the far side. The position felt shockingly physical—the heat of his body beneath me, the solid mass of his thighs under my midsection, the way gravity pulled me forward so that my head hung lower than my hips and my bottom rose behind me like a hill. My skirt had ridden up in the tumble, bunching around my upper thighs, and I felt the air of the studio touch the bare skin above my stocking tops.
“No,” I gasped. “No, please, not here… everyone can see…”
“That’s rather the point,” Master Paul said calmly. His left hand settled on the small of my back, exactly where Penelope’s had, pressing me down into his lap with a weight that felt immovable. His right hand found the hem of my skirt and flipped it up, folding it neatly over my waist.
I was wearing the polka-dot panties again. The blue-and-white ones. I’d put them on that morning out of some pathetic, superstitious impulse—as if wearing the same underwear I’d worn the day Penelope paddled me might somehow inoculate me against further humiliation, the way surviving a disease was supposed to protect you from catching it again.
It didn’t work that way. Nothing worked that way, not at Selecta.
Master Paul’s fingers hooked into the waistband of my panties and tugged them down. He pulled them down just to mid-thigh, the elastic stretching and then settling against my skin in that specific, horrible way that I now recognized as the feeling of being bared. The cool air touched my naked bottom, and I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my face into the leather cushion and felt the tears start again, hot and immediate.
“Ten,” Master Paul said. “If you agree to undress after ten, we stop at ten. If you don’t, we continue until you do. Understood?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. My throat had closed around a sob.
His hand came down.
The sound it made was different from the paddle. Where Penelope’s paddle had cracked—sharp, artificial, the sound of manufactured discipline—Master Paul’s open palm produced a deeper, flatter report, a meatysmackthat seemed to resonate through my entire body. The pain was different too. Not the blazing, surface-level burn of plastic on skin, but something that went deeper, that drove into the muscle of my bottom with a force that rocked me forward on his lap and expelled the air from my lungs in a sharp, involuntary cry.
“One,” he said.
The second spank landed on the other cheek, and I yelped—a high, undignified sound that bounced off the studio walls and came back to me like an accusation. My hands fisted in the sofa cushion. My legs kicked, once, before his left hand pressed harder on my back, pinning me.
“No kicking or I double your punishment,” he growled. “You need to learn to learn your lessons obediently. Two.”
By the fourth spank, I was crying openly. By the sixth, I was sobbing. Each impact of his palm drove a fresh burst of heat into skin that was already burned, and the cumulative effect built into something inescapable, a bonfire that consumed my entire awareness. I couldn’t think about the studio, the technicians, the camera, the silver-haired woman, or any of it—I could only think about the hand, the heat, the rhythm of pain that seemed to reshape my resistance stroke by relentless stroke.
“Seven,” Master Paul said, and his voice hadn’t changed at all. Still calm. Still measured. As if he were counting reps at a gym rather than spanking a half-naked girl across his knee in front of a production crew.
I heard voices. Somewhere behind me, off to the side, women were talking. The words drifted to me through the fog of pain and tears:
“That pussy should have been waxed before she came in.” That was Melissa, her tone sharp with professional irritation. “Didn’t anyone send her prep instructions?”
“Apparently not.” A voice I didn’t recognize—clipped, direct, faintly amused. The silver-haired woman, I guessed. Darlene. “It’s not the end of the world, but it’s annoying. We won’t get as much done today as we wanted. We can probably get her to the aesthetician this afternoon, though.”
They were talking about my pubic hair. They were standing somewhere behind me, watching Master Paul spank my bare bottom, and they were discussing my pubic hair with the detached professionalism of interior designers debating paint swatches. The humiliation hit me like a separate blow, distinct from the physical pain but just as devastating, and I buried my face deeper into the cushion and wailed.
“Eight,” Paul said, and his palm cracked down again, hard enough to make my whole body jerk.
“Please,” I choked. “Please, I’ll do it, I’ll take my clothes off, please stop…”
“Will you?”
He spanked me again.
“Oh… oh, God… it hurts so much. Yes! Yes, I’ll do it, I promise, please…”
“Good girl,” he said, and the warmth in those two words—the approval, the gentleness that lived alongside the iron—undid something inside me that I hadn’t known was knotted. I lay across his lap, sobbing and shaking, my bare bottom throbbing with a heat that radiated down my thighs and up my spine, and the wordsgood girlsettled over me like a blanket laid across a shivering body.
For a moment I thought he wouldn’t give me the final spank he had promised. I had just enough time to feel a fleeting moment of an utterly inappropriate emotion: disappointment. When I felt him press down again with his left hand to keep me in place, and shift his weight slightly as his right hand rose, the sob I let out had in it a conflict I didn’t want to think about.
