Melissa’s voice came from somewhere behind the bank of lights. “Darlene’s almost done with the bathroom. We’ve got about ten minutes before we can shoot in there. Might as well do some rehearsal while she’s working on it.”
She appeared at the edge of the set a moment later, tablet in hand, coffee apparently finished or abandoned. She looked at me—at the baby doll, at the way I was standing, at whatever my face was doing—and nodded once, a sharp little dip of her chin that seemed to signify approval.
“Okay,” she said. “Let me explain the philosophy behind what we’re doing. The Surrender Line campaign is going to be a series of short scenes—vignettes, really—that get edited into commercials for the HSG stream and also broken out as stills for marketing materials. Print ads, digital banners, social posts for the NMB subscriber base. The aesthetic ofHer Secret Gardenis that things happen naturally. We’re not posing you. We’re not giving you marks to hit or lines to read. The whole point is that the dynamic between you and Master Paul creates moments that feel organic, lived-in. That’s why we brought in a highly trained Institute trainer to work with you rather than a male model for the images and a director to tell you where to stand and how to pose.”
She turned to Paul. “You’re in control of the scene. You direct her through the dynamic. Darlene captures what happens. The mics in this studio are AI directed and incredibly focused, and the sound can be edited in post, so if we need something adjusted for the shot—an angle, a position, a lighting issue—we’ll call it out, but otherwise, it’s your show. Once we’re rolling, we’ll just keep going, to keep it as real as we can.”
My heart had started to race. I could feel it in my throat, that trapped-bird sensation again, wings beating against the cage of my pulse.You’re in control of the scene. The words seemed to rearrange the air in the studio, shifting the invisible architecture of power so that everything—the lights, the cameras, the people moving at the periphery of my vision—oriented toward the man standing three feet from me in a silk bathrobe, with hands that had spanked me until I sobbed and a voice that had called me good girl and a cock that looked much bigger even than the strap-on my boss had fucked me with.
“Understood,” Paul said. He looked at me, and something in his expression changed. His face didn’t soften, but it seemed to settle. It made me think of a classical violinist I’d once watched in a video, just before he started to play a sonata.
Master Paul seemed toentersomething. A mode, a space, a version of himself that was both the man who’d handed me a monogrammed handkerchief and another, even more ancient kind of man: an elemental man, even.
“Here’s how this first scene is going to work,” he said, speaking to me now but loud enough for Melissa and, presumably, Darlene to hear. “Our names are the same, but we’re fictional versions of ourselves. You’re my future wife, Anne, and I’m your accepted suitor, Paul—though as your character, raised in a New Modesty community, you know you should always call mesir,even if you forget sometimes. I’m visiting you at your home, to train you sexually, the way NM suitors do in most NM towns.”
My lips had parted, and I could feel my chest heaving even as my heart began to race. I knew all this from my work with Penelope, but hearing it applied to me, and above all applied to me by a muscular man whose job entailedtraininggirls like mesexually… I suddenly wondered if I might hyperventilate.
Paul’s brows knit, as if he could sense my distress. His eyes narrowed a little, and I had the impression I could actually see him evaluating the percentage chance I would faint. He clearly thought it was low enough that he could continue, and I felt a perverse wave of something between gratitude and pride that I had passed a minor test.
“We’re in your bedroom,” he went on. “I’ve bought you this baby doll because I want to see you in it—because part of a suitor’s authority in a New Modesty context is choosing what his futurewife wears when he comes to teach her to please him. I’ve chosen this. You’ve put it on for me because I told you to, and you’re standing here feeling shy and exposed, which”—a faint smile—“won’t require much acting on your part.”
A strangled sound escaped me that might have been a laugh if it had more air behind it.
“I’m going to look at you,” he continued. “I’m going to inspect you. I’m going to appreciate what I see, and then I’m going to decide something isn’t right. Something that needs to be corrected before you can wear the kind of lingerie I want you in.”
He paused. His eyes dropped—not to my breasts, not to my face, but lower, to the place where the chiffon of the baby doll’s skirt hung sheer as a veil over my hips, and through which I knew—Iknew, with a sick, hot certainty—that the triangle of my pubic hair was visible. A pale blonde shadow behind pink chiffon, like a secret written in disappearing ink that hadn’t quite disappeared.
“Your hair,” he said simply. “Down there. I’m going to tell you that you can’t wear the lingerie I have in mind for you—the Surrender panties, the thong sets, the pieces that sit low on your hips and show everything—if you’ve got hair between your legs. I’m going to tell you that I want you bare. That I want you to feel bare. That a wife in a New Modesty household should feel submissive between her thighs every moment of the day, and that hair down there is a barrier to that feeling—a last little scrap of modesty that you’re hiding behind, whether you know it or not.”
My breath had gone even shallower. I wondered if Master Paul’s apparent calculation that I wouldn’t faint might be incorrect. Each inhale had become a thin, insufficient pant that didn’tseem to reach my lungs. The wordsfeel submissive between her thighshad hit my body like a club, sending shockwaves upward through my stomach, my chest, the base of my throat.
“Then,” he said, “in the next scene—in the bathroom—I’m going to shave you. Myself. While you hold yourself open, and perfectly still, for me.”
I made a sound. A small, involuntary sound, half gasp and half whimper, that I couldn’t have suppressed any more than I could have suppressed a sneeze. My hands, which had been loosely crossed over my midsection, tightened, fingers gripping my own elbows as if I could physically hold myself together.
“There’ll be a lingerie set featured prominently in the establishing shot for the bathroom scene,” Melissa added from behind me, her voice businesslike and bright, as if we were discussing table settings for a dinner party. “A red lace thong and matching bra. The Surrender set in scarlet. It’ll be laid out on the counter beside the sink, or maybe hanging from a hook on the back of the door—Darlene and I will decide when we see the light. The point is that the audience sees what’s waiting for you. They understand the transaction: he’s taking something away—your hair, your last little hiding place—and replacing it with something he’s chosen. Something that will sit against your bare skin and make you feel what he wants you to feel.”
I closed my eyes. Behind my lids, the image assembled itself with a vividness that felt hallucinatory: the white tile of the bathroom set, the claw-foot tub, the mirror at its calculated angle. Master Paul’s hands between my legs, holding a razor. My hair falling away in soft, pale wisps. The red lace thong hanging from a hook, waiting for me, waiting to be pressed against skin that had never been bare, that had never been touched by anything but cotton and my own tentative, guilty fingers in the dark.
And me. Standing there. Letting it happen. Letting him see everything, touch everything, take away the last scrap of covering I had, because he’d told me to. Because he’d decided I needed to be bare.
The warmth between my legs surged so violently that I had tightened my thighs before I could stop myself; the motion made the chiffon skirt sway, and I knew—Iknew—that everyone in the room could see the way I’d just squeezed my legs together, could read it for exactly what it was. Not discomfort, not modesty, but a girl trying desperately, futilely to manage an arousal that had grown beyond anything she could contain.
CHAPTER 11
Anne
“Anne.” Master Paul’s voice, close now. I opened my eyes and found that he’d stepped nearer while they were closed—close enough that if I reached out just a little ways, my fingertips would brush the silk of his robe. His brown eyes held mine with that focused, unhurried attention that felt like being fixed to a board by someone who intended to study me very carefully before deciding what to do.
“Tell me you understand what’s going to happen,” he said.
My mouth opened. My lips were dry. I ran my tongue over the lower one and saw his eyes track the motion with a precision that made my stomach flip.
“You’re going to…” My voice quavered. I cleared my throat and tried again. “You’re going to… um… you know… look at me? In the… the nightgown. And then you’re going to… you’re going to say my… that I need to be…”
I couldn’t finish. The wordshavedlodged in my throat like a physical object, too intimate, too real, too much like a concretization of an image I didn’t want to admit lay in the depths of my mind.
“Say it,” he said. Not unkindly, but not gently, either. With the patient, implacable firmness of a man who understood that the words mattered as much as the act; that making me say it was itself a form of preparation, of submission. Master Paul, I realized with a swallow, meant to dismantle, systematically, the wall I’d so clearly built between the girl I pretended to be and the girl I was.
