She set the plastic bag on the vanity table and unzipped it, and I looked down at the contents, garments that were all-too-familiar from my meetings with Penelope. White stretch cotton. Simple. Almost aggressively plain. A halter bra and boy-short panties that looked like they could have come from any department store’s basics section.
I knew better, though: I knew that even without the sensors and vibration modules that featured in the Awareness line, Penelope’s NM integration team had sized and tailored the basics line to feel constricting. To make the wearer feel that her intimate areas were, well, in training. Clean, white, functional underwear that looked like something a girl’s mother might buy her but carried a suitor’s grownup demands.
“I’ll just…” I gestured vaguely at the curtain, meaningturn around, meaninggive me privacy, meaningplease don’t watch me undress because I am currently so aroused that the evidence of it has probably soaked through to my skirt and I will die, I will literally die, if another person sees it.
“Oh, sure,” Amy said, and turned her back, busying herself with something on the rack.
I unbuttoned my pink blouse with fingers that shook. I unzipped my skirt and let it fall. I stood in my underwear—the same polka dots, freshly laundered, that seemed to have become the unofficial uniform of my humiliation—and I reached for the waistband of the panties.
The moment I pulled them down, I knew Amy would know.
The gusset was soaked. Not damp. Not merely moist.Soaked—a dark, obvious stain that had spread well beyond the center panel and into the fabric on either side. The evidence of my arousal was so copious, so undeniable, that the cotton clung to my folds as I peeled the panties away, and a thin, glistening strand connected the fabric to my body for an obscene moment before it broke.
I bunched the panties in my fist and shoved them beneath my skirt on the chair. My face was burning. My whole body was burning. I reached for the training panties with desperate speed, wanting to cover myself before?—
“Oh… here, let me help you with the?—”
Amy had turned around.
Her eyes dropped reflexively, the way anyone’s eyes drop when movement catches their peripheral vision. I watched her gaze land down below my tummy. On the glistening evidence of what my body had been doing since approximately 5:47 that morning when I’d woken from a dream about Master Paul’s belt. On my inner thighs, shining with a slickness I hadn’t been able to wipe away.
CHAPTER 21
Anne
I wanted to die.
In that moment, standing half-naked in a curtained wardrobe area while a girl my own age looked at my aroused pussy, I experienced a shame so total that death seemed like a reasonable and even attractive alternative to continuing to exist in this body that refused, absolutely refused, to stop betraying me.
“Oh,” Amy said softly. Then, with a gentleness that made my eyes sting, “Hey. It’s okay.”
I couldn’t look at her. I stared at the floor, the training panties clutched against my stomach, my free arm crossed over my breasts in a posture of defensive modesty that accomplished nothing because the thing I most needed to hide was below my waist and already thoroughly seen.
“Anne.” Amy’s voice was quiet, matter-of-fact, and entirely without judgment. “Honestly? This happens. Like,all the time.With the girls who work with the Institute trainers especially. I’ve been on wardrobe for six months and I have never once had a girl come back from his set dry. Not once. You have nothing to be embarrassed about.”
A sound escaped me, half laugh, half sob.
“Here,” Amy said, and I heard her move to the vanity table and tear open a packet. She pressed something into my free hand: a cleansing wipe, cool and damp, scented faintly with something clinical. “Clean up a little if you want. Take your time. I’ll turn back around.”
She turned. I wiped between my thighs with quivering hands, knowing it was futile, knowing that the moment I stepped onto that set and looked at Master Paul the wetness would return with the inevitability of a tide. But the gesture felt necessary—a small act of self-maintenance in a life that was rapidly slipping beyond my ability to maintain.
I stepped into my training panties.
They slid up my legs with a whisper of cotton that felt different from any underwear I’d ever worn. The fabric was even softer than it looked, but it fit with a sleekness that seemed almost architectural. The waistband sat high on my hips, not in the low-rise style I was accustomed to but at my natural waist, and the leg openings sat mid-thigh, covering me completely, the gusset settling against my center with a snug, encompassing pressure that left no gap, no slack, no space between the cotton and my skin.
They were the most modest panties I had ever worn. More modest than the polka dots. More modest than anything in my drawer at home. They covered everything—my entire bottom,my hips, the soft lower curve of my belly—in plain, unadorned white cotton that communicated nothing except propriety.
And yet they felt devastating.
I stood in front of the mirror and stared at my reflection and could not reconcile what I saw with what I felt. The girl in the mirror looked like she belonged in a Sunday school classroom. White cotton panties pulled up almost to her belly button. A white training bra that flattened rather than shaped, its halter straps crossing behind my neck with a utilitarian simplicity that erased any hint of seduction. Blonde hair in a ponytail. Green eyes wide with something that didn’t match the underwear at all.
The underwear looked modest. These…intimates(as the marketing materials called them) were the most modest ones I’d ever worn. And I couldn’t stop shaking.
I couldn’t reconcile the sheer, screaming contradiction between what the mirror showed me and what my body felt. The girl in the reflection looked like she’d been dressed by a protective mother for her first day at a faith-based summer camp. Beneath the white cotton, though, my skin burned.
My nipples pressed against the training bra’s flat, unyielding fabric, and every breath made the cotton shift against them in a way that sent tiny, maddening sparks down through my belly. The panties’ gusset sat flush against my center with a completeness that meant I felt the fabric with every micro-movement and the feeling wasn’t neutral.
If this was what the basic line felt like, I thought with a hard swallow, I felt immense empathy for the girls who had to wear the Awareness line. And yet… I had to bite my lip as I thought, a moment later, about how much I wanted to feel that, too.
