“Section fourteen, clause seven, subsection B,” she said quietly. “Read it.”
I looked down. The text swam for a moment before my eyes focused.
In the event that an Employee refuses a lawful assignment as designated by their direct supervisor or other authorized representative of the Corporation, the Employee may be subject to corrective disciplinary action, including but not limited to corporal punishment administered in accordance with Selecta Corporate Governance Policy 14.7, prior to the processing of any resignation or termination request. The Employee acknowledges that such disciplinary action is a condition of the employment agreement and consents to its administration as a prerequisite to separation from the Corporation.
I read it twice. The words didn’t change.
“You signed it,” Penelope said. There was no satisfaction in her voice. Her voice sounded measured, as if she were fascinated by the problem of my failure to comply. “I have to paddle you, Anne. Before I can process your resignation—if that’s what you decide—this has to happen. It’s policy, for a very good reason: it gives girls like you a chance to think hard about their choices.”
The tears came before I could stop them. They welled up hot and sudden and spilled down my cheeks, and I pressed my hand over my mouth to muffle the sound that came with them—not a sob, exactly, but something close. A whimper. The sound of a girl who had walked into a building eight weeks ago thinkingshe was going to answer phones and take notes and instead had ended up here, in this office, being told she was going to be paddled by her boss for refusing to model anal-access lingerie on a streaming platform.
I remembered how Yolanda had said that everyone knew about it, and heard stories about it. I remembered how that girl Trina in data entry had gotten paddled. I felt stupid, but I really hadn’t ever let myself believe it could happen to me.
“I know,” Penelope said gently. “I know. Come here. Let’s get this over with.”
She stood and moved around the desk, and I watched through blurred eyes as she cleared a space on its surface—moving the folder, the contract, a crystal paperweight—with the efficiency of someone who had done this before. The thought made me cry harder.
“Bend over the desk, Anne.”
I stood. My legs felt like they belonged to someone else. I walked the three steps to the desk and leaned forward, placing my forearms on the cool wood surface, and the posture—the submission of it, the vulnerability—sent a shock through me that was equal parts terror and something else, something I refused to name.
“Raise your skirt.”
My hands shook so badly I could barely grip the fabric. I reached back and pulled the hem of my knee-length skirt up over my hips, bunching it at my waist. The air of the office touched the bare skin of my thighs above my stocking tops and I shivered.
“And your panties,” Penelope said. “Pull them down.”
A fresh wave of tears blurred my vision. I hooked my thumbs into the waistband of my underwear—the white cotton ones with the small blue polka dots that I’d put on that morning because they were cheerful and comfortable and because I’d had no idea, no conceivable idea, that anyone would see them today—and pushed them down. They slid over my hips, over the curve of my bottom, and came to rest at mid-thigh. The elastic caught slightly against my skin, and I felt the cool air touch everything—the heated skin of my bare bottom, the backs of my thighs, and the place between my legs where I knew, with a certainty that made me want to die, that I was visibly, unmistakably wet.
The silence behind me lasted two seconds. Three. Long enough for Penelope to see. Long enough for her to look.
“When you finally accept the modeling assignment,” Penelope said, and her voice had changed—thicker somehow, with a texture that hadn’t been there before, “you’ll have your pussy waxed or shaved. They’ll want you smooth for the shoots. Selecta subsidizes aesthetician visits for female employees.”
“I’m not going to accept it,” I said. My voice was thick with tears, muffled against my forearm. “I’m going to resign. After this, I’m going to resign.”
“We’ll see about that,” Penelope said.
I heard the drawer open. I heard a thunking sound, the sound of something being lifted—something solid, with weight to it. I didn’t have to look to know what it was. The stark white plastic. The bold Selecta logo. I’d seen it through the open door of the HR office my first week, and I’d looked away, and I’d told myself it had nothing to do with me.
I felt a puff of air, and then the first stroke landed with a crack that seemed to split the air in two.
The pain was immediate and enormous—a flat, blazing heat that exploded across both cheeks of my bottom and drove the breath from my lungs in a sharp, involuntary cry. My fingers clawed at the edge of the desk. Before I could process it, before I could brace myself, the second stroke fell, overlapping the first, and I heard myself make a sound I didn’t recognize—high and broken and desperate.
Penelope paddled me hard. There was nothing tentative about it, nothing restrained. Each stroke was delivered with a force and precision that spoke of practice, of training, of someone who knew exactly how much a paddle could hurt and had chosen not to spare me any of it. The impacts came in a steady rhythm, one every three or four seconds, and each one built on the last, layering fire upon fire until my entire bottom felt like a single, continuous blaze.
I tried to hold still. I told myself I could hold still, that I could take this with some shred of dignity, I could endure it the way Trina from data entry had apparently endured it and then gone back to her desk and carried on. But by the sixth stroke—or the seventh, I’d lost count—my body betrayed me completely. My hips twisted sideways, trying to escape the paddle’s arc, and my feet scrabbled against the carpet as I pushed myself forward across the desk.
“No,” Penelope said. Just that one word, flat and certain. Her left hand came down on the small of my back—firm, unyielding, pressing me into the desk with a strength I hadn’t expected from her elegant frame. She held me there, pinned like a butterfly on a board, and the paddle kept falling.
I sobbed openly now. The tears ran down my face and dripped onto the polished wood beneath my cheek, and my cries came in ragged, helpless bursts that I couldn’t control or muffle. Each stroke drove a fresh sound out of me: sometimes a scream, sometimes a whimper, sometimes just a guttural exhalation that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than my lungs.
And then, somewhere around what I thought might have been the tenth stroke, or the twelfth, I became aware of something that should not have been possible to notice through the blinding pain, but that somehow cut through it despite its apparent inconsequentiality.
Penelope’s breathing had changed.
It was subtle. Anyone else might not have heard it. But I was pressed flat against her desk with her hand on my back and her body standing close behind mine, and in the microsecond of silence between each crack of the paddle and my answering cry, I could hear it—the slight quickening, the faintest roughness at the edges of each exhale, the way her breath caught just before her arm swung. The hand on my back had grown warmer. Her fingers, which had started out rigid and clinical, had shifted—spreading slightly, pressing not just to restrain but to… tofeel, maybe. The heel of her palm rested against my spine, and through my blouse I could sense the dampness of her skin.
Penelope Gallagher had gotten aroused from punishing me.
