I knew what would happen to a girl in those intimates, just as it would happen to me, on that set. And, when it came to the kind of need the underwear made me feel… and what that need would lead to, if I submitted the way my master had begun to train me to do… the more of it the better, as shameful as it seemed.
He would make me confess. He would make me stand in front of him in these plain white panties and tell him what I’d done with my hands in the dark. Then he would punish me. Then he would shave me bare.
The knowledge of all of it—the full sequence of my coming humiliation—transformed the modest cotton against my skin into something that felt even more obscene than the pink baby doll had felt yesterday. The baby doll had been designed to look sexy. These panties were designed to look innocent, and my body’s response to them was anything but.
Amy handed me the jeans and I slid into them. Mid-rise, slightly loose, the kind of jeans a girl wears when she’s not trying to impress anyone. Amy dropped a plain white T-shirt over my head and tucked it in at my waist. In the mirror, the outfit looked so ordinary, so unremarkable, that it made me look like I had nothing important to do. Which was, I realized, exactly the point. A girl waiting at home for her suitor to return from a business trip. A girl who had something to hide.
“You look great,” Amy said, and I almost laughed, because I looked like nothing. I looked like a girl in jeans and a T-shirt and plain white underwear, and I had never in my life felt more naked.
She led me back through the curtains and onto the bedroom set. The bed had been remade with fresh white sheets. Darlene was adjusting a light stand near the doorway of the set’smock hallway, and Melissa stood by the monitors, her tablet in hand, her expression sharp with anticipation. Master Paul was nowhere in sight.
“He’s changing,” Melissa said, reading my searching gaze. “He’ll come through the hallway door when we start rolling. You’ll be sitting on the bed. You’ve been waiting for him.” She looked me over, her eyes traveling from my ponytail to my sneakers with the rapid, assessing scan of a woman who thought in images. “Perfect. The jeans are perfect. Defensive. Ordinary. She knows she’s in trouble and she’s tried to armor herself in normalcy.”
Melissa stepped closer and lowered her voice. “Anne. This is going to be intense. Paul told me the shape of it. Are you okay?”
I nodded. My throat felt too tight to speak.
“Good. Sit on the edge of the bed. Hands in your lap. You’ve been waiting for him to come home and you’re nervous. That’s all you have to play. The rest will happen.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. My hands found each other in my lap and held on, and the gesture felt familiar—I’d been doing it for two days now, desperately grabbing onto myself as if my hands could anchor me against a current that kept pulling me further from shore.
My heart had started to pound. A deep, heavy slamming against the inside of my ribs that I could feel in my temples, my fingertips, and the hollow of my throat. Each beat seemed to push more blood between my legs, feeding the swollen, aching need that had taken up permanent residence there. The training panties’ gusset pressed against me with every heartbeat, keeping me terribly aware second by second of exactly how aroused I was.
“Rolling,” Darlene said quietly.
I heard footsteps in the mock hallway. The confident, measured stride of a man who owned the space he moved through. The bedroom door opened, and Master Paul walked in.
He wore a charcoal suit. The jacket was unbuttoned, the tie loosened, the top button of his white shirt undone—the dishevelment of a man who had just come from a long day of travel and important meetings. He carried a leather briefcase that he set on the dresser with a deliberate, unhurried motion, and then he turned to face me.
His eyes found mine across the set. Brown and piercing and seeing everything.
“Hi,” I said. My voice came out small.
Master Paul didn’t answer immediately. He stood by the dresser, hands in his pockets, and he looked at me the way he’d looked at me yesterday when he’d inspected me in the baby doll. His face wore a slow, thorough attention that made me feel like he was reading a message written on my skin. His gaze moved from my face to my posture to my hands clasped white-knuckled in my lap to the way my knees were pressed together, and I watched something shift in his expression. A tightening around the jaw. A darkening of the eyes.
“Stand up,” he said.
I stood. My legs felt unreliable beneath me.
“Come here.”
I crossed the distance between the bed and the dresser on trembling legs. I stopped in front of him, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to meet his eyes, close enough that I couldsmell cedar and warm skin and the faint, masculine scent of his cologne. My heart was beating so hard I was certain he could hear it.
Master Paul looked down at me for a long, terrible moment. Then he spoke, and his voice was quiet and even and carried the particular weight of a man who already knew the answer to the question he was about to ask.
“Anne. Did you touch yourself last night while I was away?”
The floor tilted. The room seemed to contract around me until there was nothing in it except his face and his voice. My lips parted. A sound came out: not a word, just a breath, a tiny exhalation that carried the ghost of a protest.
His eyebrows rose fractionally. Waiting.
“I…” The word caught in my throat like a fishhook. My eyes dropped to his tie. To his collar. To the triangle of chest visible beneath the loosened button. Anywhere but his eyes, because meeting his eyes while I said this would kill me.
“Look at me,” he said.
I looked at him. The tears had already started—I could feel them building behind my eyes, hot and pressurized, and I blinked against them with the futile determination of someone trying to hold back a tide with their hands.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, sir.”
