She tapped furiously on her tablet, her coffee abandoned on a nearby equipment case, her dark hair falling forward as she bent over the screen. “Okay. Okay, I’m rearranging the schedule. We push the Surrender Line hero shots to this afternoon. The morning block becomes the baby doll-to-shaving sequence. Darlene, can you light the bedroom and the bathroom by—what time is it—can you have both sets lit by ten?”
“Ten-fifteen,” Darlene said, already moving toward her equipment. “I’ll need to recalibrate the bathroom. The tile reflects differently than I’d planned for.”
“Fine. Ten-fifteen.” Melissa looked up from her tablet and fixed me with those sharp brown eyes, and for a moment—just a moment—something flickered in her expression that might have been sympathy. Or might have been excitement wearing sympathy’s mask. “Anne. You’re doing great. Don’t move.”
I didn’t move. I stood in the pool of white light, naked and burning and wet, and waited for whatever came next.
What came next was a young woman—an assistant I hadn’t noticed before, with a headset and a clipboard and the brisk, unfazed demeanor of someone who had seen far stranger things on this studio floor—who appeared at my side holding a garment on a padded hanger.
“You can put this on,” she said, and held it out to me. “I’m Amy.”
It was a baby doll nightgown. Not the champagne silk from Melissa’s presentation—this one was pink. A soft, blushing pink that deepened to rose at the gathered empire waist, with a bodice of delicate lace that would cover my breasts without concealing them and a skirt of sheer chiffon that fell in a whisper-light cascade to what I estimated would be just barely past my hips.
It was beautiful. It was the kind of thing I might have seen in a shop window and touched with my fingertips and then walked away from, because girls like me didn’t wear things like that. Girls like me wore polka-dot cotton panties and modest blouses and kept their armor on.
I took it from the hanger with shaking hands. The fabric weighed almost nothing; it pooled in my palms in a delicate pile that made me think of cotton candy. I gathered it and pulled it over my head, and as it settled over my body—the lace cupping my breasts, the chiffon floating against my thighs, the thin spaghetti straps resting on my shoulders—something happened that I wasn’t prepared for.
I felt like a different person.
Not a better person or a worse person. Adifferentone. The girl who had walked into this studio in her cream blouse and navy skirt and sensible underwear had been Anne Chamberlain,administrative assistant, note-taker, good girl in the way that meant invisible and compliant and safely unsexy.
The girl standing here now, in a pink baby doll that showed the shadow of her nipples through lace and the curve of her bottom through chiffon and—God help me—the triangle of hair between her legs through fabric so sheer it might as well have been candlelight… this girl was someone else. Someone I’d caught glimpses of in Penelope’s office, bent over the desk. Someone I’d felt stirring in the conference room, squeezing her thighs not so that the naughty feeling would go away, but so it would grow.
That girl, that other Anne, was the young woman who looked over to where she knew Master Paul must be, and saw that he had taken his clothes off. Saw that Master Paul’s penis, semi-erect as if at the sight of me in the baby doll nightgown, was absolutely enormous. Had to bite her lip to keep herself from crying out at the sight of that long, rigid cock.
CHAPTER 10
Paul
I saw Anne steal her adorable little peek at my cock as I reached for the silk bathrobe hanging from the wardrobe rack beside the bedroom set. Her eyes darted down—just for a fraction of a second, the way a person’s gaze darts toward a sudden movement—and then snapped back up to some neutral point on the far wall, her cheeks flooding with color so vivid I could see it from ten feet away.
I smiled. Not at her—she wasn’t looking at me anymore, or was working very hard to appear as if she wasn’t—but to myself, a private expression I let settle into the corners of my mouth as I shrugged the robe over my shoulders and tied the sash at my waist. The silk was cool against my skin, a pleasant contrast to the warmth of the studio lights, and I took my time with the knot, letting the robe hang open for a beat longer than strictly necessary. Not to torment her. Or not only to torment her.
The truth was I’d begun to enjoy myself. I’d trained dozens of girls at the Institute and in several of its Selecta-based programs—frightened girls, defiant girls, bad girls, girls who wept and girls who fought and girls who went still and silent like rabbits in the shadow of a hawk. Every one of them had taught me something about the architecture of female submission.
But Anne Chamberlain seemed like something rare. Something I hadn’t encountered in years: a girl whose resistance worked in such perfect balance with her need that every interaction with her felt like standing at the exact fulcrum point of a scale, watching it tremble…makingit tremble.
She’d looked at my cock. She hadn’t wanted to. She’d probably spent the entire time I was changing telling herself not to look, marshalling every ounce of that modest, well-bred willpower against the simple, animal curiosity that lives in every young woman’s body whether she acknowledges it or not. And she’d lost.
Her pretty eyes had gone there of their own volition, pulled by a gravity she didn’t yet understand, and what she’d seen—I knew what she’d seen, because I knew what I looked like, and dominant men like me lose any false modesty early on—had registered in her body before her mind could intervene. The flush. The parted lips. The way her thighs had shifted beneath the chiffon of the baby doll, pressing together in that telltale gesture I’d already catalogued as her primary self-soothing response: a little masturbatory practice that Anne undoubtedly allowed herself because she could dismiss it as a simple reflex.
I planned to take my time with Anne Chamberlain. Even within the fictional framework of the Surrender campaign—the scenes, the lighting, the cameras, the carefully constructed narrative of a suitor discovering and correcting his young future wife’s insufficient preparation—the dynamic between us would be real. Her responses would be real. Her shame, her arousal, hergradual, agonizing capitulation to the needs that lived inside her like a second heartbeat she’d spent twenty years trying not to hear—all of it would be real, because I would make it real, because that was what I did. That was what the Institute had spent years teaching me to do, and I had gotten very, very good at it.
Anne
Master Paul crossed to the bedroom set, where at Melissa’s instructions I stood near the foot of the wrought-iron bed. I had my arms crossed loosely over my midsection in a posture that felt half self-conscious and half protective. The baby doll’s chiffon skirt brushed against my thighs with every breath I took, and I could feel the fabric moving over me like something alive—terribly light, horribly revealing, a garment that existed in some narrow, distressing space between being clothed and being naked. Every time I shifted my weight, the hem drifted, and the air of the studio touched skin that the fabric had momentarily uncovered. I couldn’t tell, without looking down, exactly what was visible and what wasn’t, and the uncertainty represented its own kind of torment.
Master Paul stopped about three feet from me, close enough that I could catch his scent again—the warm cedar and clean-skin scent that had already somehow become a part of my core memories. He had tied the belt of the silk bathrobe, thank goodness. I felt desperately grateful, because the image of what I’d seen before the robe had gone on had seared itself into my mind even deeper than his aroma. I needed… it… that… thing… not to be right there in front of me while I tried to function.
I could see his chest, though, through the robe’s open collar. I saw dark hair, the same salt-and-pepper as his temples, over muscle that looked dense and earned rather than sculpted for display. I made myself look at his face instead, which wasn’t much easier.
“Good,” he said, and the word was quiet, almost conversational, as if we were alone rather than standing on a set surrounded by lights and crew. “You look beautiful, Anne.”
I didn’t know what to do with the compliment. Kevin had called me pretty, sometimes, in the way boys call girls pretty when they’re hoping it will lead to something. This was different: Master Paul said it with a kind of intentionality that seemed to pin me in place, unable to move off the way his voice sounded when it saidbeautiful.
“Thank you,” I whispered, because my mother had raised me to say thank you when someone paid me a compliment, even when the compliment made me want to dissolve into the floor.
“Melissa,” Master Paul called over his shoulder, not taking his eyes off me. “We ready?”
