“So,” Penelope said, leaning back in her chair and crossing her legs with a whisper of expensive fabric. “Tell me everything. How was your first session with Master Paul?”
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I closed it. I looked at my hands. I looked at the window behind Penelope’s desk, where the city skyline glittered in the afternoon light. I looked back at Penelope, and her gray-green eyes were watching me with an attention that reminded me, with a pang, of Master Paul’s—that same quality of seeing through surfaces to the thing beneath.
“It was…” I started, and my voice cracked on the second word. I swallowed. “He… we did a… a scene?”
“What kind of scene?” Penelope asked, her eyebrows rising slightly. “Did you get to wear any of those gorgeous new pieces of Melissa’s?”
“A… a nightgown…” I answered faintly. “Pink…”
“The baby doll,” Penelope said, nodding and smiling. “I love that one. Did you…”
Her mouth quirked up in evident amusement.
“Well… did you put up a fuss, about getting undressed?”
Oh, God.I swallowed hard.
“I…” I started. “I…”
Penelope laughed, and the heat rushed to my face.
“You did, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I whispered, staring at my lap. “I said I couldn’t. I said I couldn’t undress in front of everyone, and he…”
“He what?” Penelope’s voice had dropped half a register, and when I glanced up, something had changed in her face—a flush along her cheekbones, a brightness in her eyes that I recognized with a lurch of my stomach because I’d seen it before. In this office. The last time she’d gotten me to talk about things that made me want to disappear.
“He spanked me,” I said. The words came out small and flat. “On the living room set. Over his knee. In front of everyone.”
“Over his knee,” Penelope repeated. She uncrossed her legs. The motion was slow, deliberate, and I watched—unable to look away—as her hands moved to the waistband of her dove-gray trousers. Her fingers found the clasp and unfastened it. The zipper followed. “Tell me more. How did he position you?”
“Penelope, I… please…”
“Tell me.” The warmth in her voice had thinned, revealing the steel beneath it. It made me think again, with a fresh surge of heat to my face, of the day she’d bent me over this very desk.
She lifted her hips slightly and pushed the trousers down her thighs, letting them pool around her ankles where she sat. Beneath them she wore more of the elegant lingerie I had to my distress begun, confusingly, to associate with the New Modesty.
The head of New Modesty integration wore deep burgundy silk panties, cut high on the hip, with a narrow panel of lace at the front through which I could see a dark, neatly trimmed triangle of hair. The sight of it sent a complicated jolt through me—shame, arousal, and something that felt horribly like envy, though I couldn’t have said what I envied. The hair itself? The right to keep it? The authority it signified?
Penelope’s hand slipped beneath the waistband of the burgundy silk.
“He pulled me across his lap,” I said, my voice barely audible. My eyes were fixed on the motion of her hand beneath the fabric—the slow, circular movement of her fingertips against herself, visible as a shifting topography beneath the silk. “Face down. My stomach on his thighs. He’s so… he’s very large, and I just… I couldn’t get any purchase. I couldn’t stop it.”
“Mmm.” The sound Penelope made was low and liquid, and her eyelids had gone heavy. She leaned back further in her chair, her head tilting against the headrest, her lips parting slightly. Her hand moved with a rhythm that was unhurried but purposeful; my boss was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted from herself. “Did he bare your bottom?”
“Yes.” The word was barely a breath. “He pulled my panties down. To mid-thigh. In front of everyone. Melissa and Darlene and the technicians—they could all see.”
“What kind of panties?”
“My… the… the polka-dot ones.”
Penelope’s eyes opened. She looked at me with an expression that combined amusement and hunger in proportions I couldn’t parse.
“The same ones I paddled you in,” she said. “Oh, Anne. You sweet thing.”
Her hand moved faster beneath the silk. I could hear it now—a faint, wet sound that brought a flush so violent it felt like a sunburn.
“How many?” Penelope asked.
