Page 90 of Shamefully Trained

Gowry came closer. I could see his reflection in the dark shine of the desk. He looked interested, in an amused sort of way.

Porter said, in that calm voice that always seemed able to make indecency sound administrative, “It’s a tight little anus. I fuck it every day.”

“Ah,” Gowry replied. “Good to know.”

“Alex has been naughty, though. She played with her cunt and her ass when I was away. I thought it might interest you to see how I correct her.”

I heard the cane tap once against my sponsor’s palm.

My whole body tightened. In the dream I could feel everything with impossible clarity: the cool air on my bare bottom, the strain in my thighs from standing still, the awful pulse between my legs, the knowledge of Gowry’s eyes on me. I wanted to beg Porter not to do it in front of him. I wanted to beg him to get it over with. I wanted to beg Gowry to watch closely.

The first stroke landed and the pain ripped through me so sharply that I screamed and grabbed at the desk. It was worse in the dream than in any waking anticipation: thin, white-hot, exact. Porter made me count. Gowry listened. On the third stroke I had started to sob. On the fifth my legs were shaking. On the sixth I looked up by accident and met Gowry’s eyes in the reflection, and the sight of his calm interest sent such a violent wave of humiliation through me that my pussy clenched.

Porter saw it, of course. Dream-Porter always saw everything.

“You see, Senator,” he said behind me, “how beautifully she responds to the right kind of discipline.”

I cried harder. Gowry came nearer still. He had somehow arrived on the other side of the desk, now, and he put one finger under my chin and lifted my face while I was bent over the desk with my bottom striped red for both of them to see.

“She does,” he said.

That was all. Two words. Deep, unhurried, perfectly certain. And then the dream leaped in the way dreams do, brutal in its logic and seamless in its obscenity. Porter straightened me, turned me, kissed me hard enough to take my breath away, and then put me on my knees at Gowry’s feet.

“For the bill,” I heard myself whisper.

Gowry’s hand came into my hair.

I woke with a gasp, tangled in the sheets, my heart pounding. The hideaway in the Capitol still seemed so vivid to me that for a second I didn’t know where I was.

Then the apartment returned around me: the muted light, the luxurious quiet, the soft comfort of the place. My body, however, remained in the dream.

I shut my eyes again immediately, because the first thing I understood was that I was aroused. Deeply, helplessly, mortifyingly aroused. My nipples felt tight. My thighs wanted to close. Between my legs there was a thick, hot ache that had a direct relationship to the lingering image of Porter caning me while Gowry watched… of Porter sharing my body with Gowry afterward, as a bribe, or perhaps merely as a courteous gesture.

“No,” I whispered, because some vestige of decency wanted to object.

But lying there, breath by breath, I discovered that the objection had no force behind it at all. Worse than that, the thing I tried to resist had somehow grown beyond fantasy. It had taken on a shape in my mind that felt almost practical.

If Gowry wanted power, appetite, spectacle, concession—if he wanted something impossible in policy terms and negotiable only in the uglier currencies men like him always recognized—then perhaps this was what he should be given. Me. Me, specifically as I was. Claimed by Porter. Disciplined by Porter. Offered by Porter.

Some shred of rationality in my mind made a valiant attempt at feeling sickened by the idea.

Instead I lay in the comfortable bed my sponsor had paid for, and felt the wet heat gather between my thighs. I knew, with a clarity that mortified me even as it excited me, that I wanted it that way.

It might work. That mattered. The bill mattered. The veterans Porter had talked about mattered. The disabled people who would be helped mattered. I clung to that, because it gave my desire a moral frame and I needed one desperately.

Beneath that frame, though, there lay the simpler and more dangerous truth: I wanted Porter to cane me in front of Gowry. I wanted Gowry to see what Porter had made of me. I wanted the shame and the display and the political ugliness of it. I wanted to be useful that way—and I wanted to be used.

By the time my phone rang, I had been lying there for perhaps ten minutes in a fever of thought and sensation, too ashamed and terrified to touch myself and too agitated to get up.

Porter’s name on the screen made my stomach flip.

I answered. “Sir?”

“I’ve gone straight from the airport to K Street,” he said. His voice sounded composed, a little tired perhaps, but very much himself. “I’ll need to see Gowry this afternoon.”

The words came out of me before I could arrange them into anything more dignified. “I think you should cane me in front of him.”

Silence.