“You’re going to shave me,” I whispered. “My… down… between my legs. You’re going to shave me there. So I can wear the red lingerie. So I’ll feel… I mean… you know… notme, really… the woman I’m… um… you know,playing… she’ll feel…”
“Feel what?” he pressed.
The tears came back. Not the racking sobs from earlier when I’d gotten spanked—these felt quieter, more private, the kind that spill over without permission and run silently down your cheeks while you stand very still and pretend you’re not breaking apart.
“Submissive,” I said. The word came out on a breath, barely voiced, and saying it aloud did something to me that I hadn’t anticipated. The word felt like a physical object, somehow. Speaking it seemed to place its weight on my shoulders. It didn’t feel like it would crush me, or anything, but it definitely feltthere.
Like a hand. Like a big, strong hand, pushing gently but steadily. Pushing me toward something I wasn’t ready to name in my head, but that my body had already begun to move toward. Acompass needle, swinging toward North, not by choice, but by nature, because of physics.
Master Paul watched the word settle over me. He watched the tears track down my cheeks, watched my thighs press together beneath the pink chiffon, watched me stand there, quivering and wet and stripped of what felt like everything, and then he nodded.
“Good,” he said. “Now let’s rehearse. I’m your accepted suitor. We’ll be married in a month or two, but I’ve decided to claim the rights the New Modesty gives an accepted suitor, to enjoy my fiancée’s body as I like.”
He circled me. Slowly, the way he’d approached me when I first arrived, with a measured but predatory stride that gave my nervous system time to register every footfall. I stood still, my arms at my sides now because crossing them felt childish and pointless when the baby doll nightgown concealed nothing, and I tracked him with my eyes until he moved behind me and I couldn’t see him anymore. Then I tracked him with every other sense I had: the whisper of silk as his robe shifted, the faint creak of the set’s floorboards beneath his weight, the warmth of him when he paused close enough that I could feel his body heat against my bare shoulders.
“Turn around,” he said. “Face the bed.”
I turned, my forehead creasing deeply. The wrought-iron bed frame filled my vision—white sheets, white pillows, the fan-stirred curtains moving in their artificial breeze. Domestic. Intimate. A bedroom that belonged to a soon-to-be-wife who had been told to put on a pink nightgown and wait.
“Hands at your sides,” he said. “Don’t cover yourself. A girl isn’t allowed to hide from her accepted suitor, any more than a bride is allowed to hide from her husband.”
I let my arms hang. My fingers trembled against the chiffon at my thighs.
I felt his hands on my shoulders first. Light, almost impersonal—the touch of a man assessing a garment rather than a body. His fingers traced the spaghetti straps, adjusting one that had slipped slightly toward the edge of my shoulder, settling it back into place with a deftness that made my skin prickle.
Then his hands moved down, following the line of my arms, and I felt his thumbs press briefly against the backs of my elbows before continuing to my wrists, where he held them for a moment—encircling each one completely, his fingers overlapping, demonstrating with casual, devastating clarity how much larger he was than me.
“Good,” he murmured. “Keep standing still.”
His hands returned to my shoulders and slid inward, following the lace edge of the bodice across my upper chest. I felt his fingertips graze my collarbones, felt them trace the neckline of the baby doll where it dipped between my breasts, and my breath hitched—a small, audible catch that I couldn’t suppress.
Master Paul…Paul… my accepted suitor… didn’t acknowledge it. His hands continued their inventory, moving down over the lace cups that held my breasts, not cupping them but… assessing them. Feeling the weight of them through the fabric the way a tailor might check the drape of a garment, his palms flat, his fingers spread, and I felt my nipples harden against his hands with a swiftness that shamed me terribly.
He felt it too. I knew he felt it because his hands paused—just for a heartbeat, just long enough for his palms to register the stiffened peaks pressing against them through the lace—and then moved on, sliding down over my ribcage, over the gathered empire waist, onto the sheer chiffon that covered my stomach and hips.
“The baby doll suits you,” he said, and his voice had that quality again—the low, resonant register that bypassed my ears and arrived somewhere in my chest. “The color. The way it falls. You look like exactly what you are, Anne. A modest girl who’s been put in something immodest by a man who wants to see what’s underneath.”
His hands reached the hem. The chiffon ended just below the curve of my bottom—I could feel the edge of it brushing against my upper thighs—and his fingers found that edge and lifted it. Slowly. Gathering the fabric upward, inch by inch, until the cool air of the studio touched my bare rear cheeks and I knew that everyone behind me—Melissa, Darlene, the technicians, anyone—could see the evidence of what had happened to me on the living room set. The redness from Master Paul’s huge hand. The heat that I could still feel throbbing in both cheeks, a deep, pulsing ache that hadn’t faded.
“There it is,” he said quietly. His hand—his bare hand, warm and wide—settled on my right cheek, and I flinched and then immediately pushed back into his palm. Both reactions happened simultaneously and I wanted to die. “A well-spanked bottom. You took your punishment, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes… Master Paul.”
His thumb traced a slow circle on my burning skin. The sensation was extraordinary—pain and pleasure so intertwined that I couldn’t separate them, the tenderness of bruised flesh meeting the warmth of his hand, and my body interpreted the combination as something that sent a fresh pulse of wetness between my legs.
“Call me sir, the way a New Modesty girl does her future husband.”
I swallowed so hard it hurt a little.
“Yes, sir,” I whispered, my mouth feeling somehow dry despite the way it seemed to keep watering.
“Turn around,” he said. “Face me.”
I turned. The baby doll’s hem fell back into place, the chiffon settling over my hips like a whisper. I looked up at him—I had to look up, he was so much taller—and his brown eyes held mine for a moment before they began to travel downward. Over my face, my neck, the lace bodice where my nipples were still visibly hard, my stomach, and then lower, to the place where the sheer pink chiffon did nothing—absolutely nothing, really—to conceal what lay beneath it.
