“This,” Chris said, pulling something free.
He held it up, and the lamp caught the fabric—white, gossamer-thin, with delicate lace at the bodice and a hem that would fall just above my knees. It had tiny ribbon straps and a subtle sheen to the cotton that made it look almost bridal. I blinked at it,trying to place where it had come from. My mother must have packed it with my trousseau—one of those hopeful purchases she’d made before the wedding, tucked away among my things without my noticing.
Then recognition hit me, and my stomach dropped.
It looked so much like Stacy’s nightgown. The one she’d been wearing in the video, when she’d stood before Kevin with her hands twisting in the fabric, her face crimson with the knowledge of what was about to happen to her bottom. The same innocent cut, the same virginal white, the same sheer quality that would show the shape of my breasts and the shadow of my nipples and leave almost nothing to the imagination while still looking, somehow, like something a modest young bride would wear.
“From now on,” Chris said, carrying the nightgown to the bed and laying it across the quilt, “you’re going to wear the kind of nightgowns that lovely young wives like you should wear to bed. Not the kind that cover you from chin to ankle like you’re trying to hide from your own body.” He set the nightgown down and smoothed the fabric with one hand, his fingers lingering on the lace. “And from now on, you don’t wear panties under your nightgowns. Ever.”
I felt my face twist into a theatrical pout. No panties. Under a nightgown that thin, that sheer—I would be completely accessible to him. Every night. Every single night I would climb into bed beside my husband with nothing between his hands and the most intimate parts of my body but a whisper of cotton and lace.
My mind reeled with objections. It wasn’t decent. It wasn’t proper. What if there was a fire and I had to run outside? Whatif I got my period? What if—what if he reached for me in the middle of the night, half-asleep, and found me bare and open and ready for him to just—to just?—
My pussy clenched so hard I nearly gasped.
The ambivalence felt like two hands pulling me in opposite directions. One hand belonged to the girl I’d been raised to be—the modest, proper girl who wore cotton panties to bed every night of her life, who would never dream of sleeping bare beneath a see-through nightgown, who would have been mortified at the very suggestion. The other hand belonged to the girl on the couch, the one who’d touched her own anus while watching another woman get her bottom opened with a dildo, the one who’d soaked through her panties so thoroughly that her husband could smell her sin from the hallway.
Both girls lived inside me. And Chris had spoken to both of them.
“Yes, sir,” I whispered. The words came out so quietly I wasn’t sure he’d heard them. But I saw a slight shift in his posture, an almost imperceptible relaxation of his shoulders that told me he had.
“Good girl.” He picked up the nightgown and held it out to me. “Put this on.”
I took it from him with trembling fingers. The fabric felt impossibly soft—softer than anything I had thought I owned, lighter than air against my hands. I could feel the quality of it, the kind of thing my mother would have spent more than she should have on, imagining her daughter wearing it for her new husband on some romantic evening.
I turned toward the bathroom, already moving on autopilot, the nightgown clutched to my chest. Two steps. That was all I managed.
“Where are you going?”
I froze mid-stride. “To… to change. You know… in the bathroom?”
“No.” The word was simple, final. “You’re going to change right here. In front of me.”
My eyes closed. Of course. Of course he would make me do this in front of him. After everything I’d just confessed—after telling him about Stacy undressing before Kevin, about the way the camera had shown everything, about how the ceremony of it had made me come so hard I soaked through my panties—of course Chris would turn my confession into a lesson.
I turned back to face him. He sat on the edge of the bed, his forearms resting on his thighs, watching me with a patient, steady gaze that made me feel like the most revealed creature on earth.
I set the new nightgown on the dresser and reached for the hem of the one I was wearing—the long white cotton armor I’d hidden inside. I started to haul it up over my head in one brisk, graceless motion, the way I’d pull off a sweater after coming in from the cold. Just get it over with.
“Slowly.”
My hands stopped, the nightgown bunched around my ribs.
“Make it sexy, Valerie.”
