I want you to feel bare.
My fingertips drifted lower. Past the hair, into the crease where my thigh met my pelvis, and then inward—tentatively, as if the territory between my own legs were foreign soil requiring careful navigation. The slickness was immediate and startling. I had stayed wet. Hours later, after the shower at the studio, after thelong afternoon of pretending to do data entry, after the train ride home and the microwaved soup I’d barely tasted and the twenty minutes I’d spent brushing my teeth and washing my face and putting on pajamas with the elaborate, ritualistic care of a girl constructing a barricade against her own body—after all of that, I was still wet. Needy. The evidence of my arousal met my fingertips like an accusation.
I pulled my hand back. I stared at the ceiling. The green numbers on the clock said 11:49.
My hand went back.
This time my fingers slid between my folds—actually between them, parting the outer lips the way Master Paul had parted them with his thumbs, though I made my touch much lighter, and it felt more hesitant, lacking the authoritative pressure that had made me feel simultaneously invaded and understood.
I found the inner flesh swollen and hot and so slick that my fingers glided without friction, and the sensation—God, thesensation—sent a current of pleasure through my lower belly that made my hips lift off the mattress in a reflexive, seeking motion.
I’d never felt that before. Not like that. Or… not with my own hand, because I’d felt it with Penelope and with Master Paul, hadn’t I?
Those few times I’d touched myself in college had been through fabric, muted and indirect, and the pleasure had been vague and diffuse, like hearing music through a wall. And with Kevin… it didn’t compare at all. This seemed like the music itself, sudden and loud and shockingly specific. My fingertip had found a spot—not my clitoris even, but somewhere along the inner fold, aridge of flesh that responded to the lightest stroke with a jolt of feeling so acute it made me gasp.
I stroked it again. The gasp rose again, louder this time, and I pressed my free hand against my mouth because the walls of my apartment were thin and Mrs. Loomis next door went to bed at nine.
My fingers kept exploring. That seemed like the only word for what they did—theyexplored, moving through the wet geography of my own body with wondering, tentative curiosity. I found places that made me gasp, that made me shiver, and that made my toes curl against the sheets. I catalogued each one with a breathless, guilty precision that made my cheeks feel as hot as my pussy.
When my fingertip finally grazed my clitoris, I understood why Penelope had told me to circle hers gently. Why Master Paul had found it with such unerring accuracy on the bedroom set and circled it once, just once, before pulling his hand away. That single revolution he’d given me had been a preview. A demonstration.This is what lives here. This is what you’ve been ignoring. This is the switch you’ve never flipped.
I flipped it.
The sound I made into my palm was not a gasp or a whimper, but something lower and more animal—a moan that seemed to originate in the soles of my feet and travel upward through my entire body before escaping through my pressed-together lips. My hips rolled. My back arched. My fingers circled the swollen nub again, and again, finding a rhythm that my body seemed to already know even though my mind had never learned it, and the pleasure built with a speed and an intensity that terrified me.
I pulled my hand away. I lay there panting, my heart slamming, my thighs quaking, the ache between my legs now so acute it felt like a wound—a throbbing, hollow, demanding emptiness. And it felt like a pussy… or… a… a…
I whispered it out loud, astonished at how impossible it seemed to get used either to the dirtiness of the word or to my own apparent need to say it anyway.
“I have a… acunt… awetlittle cunt…anaughtylittle cunt…”
It felt like that part of me belonged not to me but to someone who wanted things. Someone whose want had teeth.
Master Paul says no. You’re not allowed to come, Anne. Not until he says so.
I tightened my thighs. The compression sent a wave of sensation through my pussy that felt like a cruel half-measure, one my body accepted the way a starving person accepts the smell of food. Not enough. Not nearly enough. But impossible to refuse.
He’ll know if you disobey.
Would he? How would he know? I was alone in my apartment, in my bed, in the dark. There were no cameras here. Master Paul was somewhere else—his home, his hotel, wherever Institute trainers went when they weren’t dismantling girls on photography sets—and he couldn’t possibly know what I did under my own sheets in my own bed at 11:52 on a Tuesday night.
Unless my body told him tomorrow. Unless the particular quality of my presence when I walked into the studio—satisfied versus desperate, sated versus starving—would communicate what had happened the way my blushes communicated my shame, the way the wetness between my thighs communicatedmy need. Master Paul read bodies the way other people read newspapers. Fluently. Automatically. Without missing a single headline.
My hand slid back beneath the waistband, as if it, too, belonged to another woman.
I told myself I was just going to touch the hair again. Just feel it one more time before my master took it away. A farewell, of sorts, to the last scrap of modesty I had—the little covering that Penelope had described as a barrier, a hiding place, a final way of sayingthis part of me is still mine. After tomorrow it wouldn’t be mine anymore. It would be bare and smooth and it would belong to Master Paul, to Selecta, to whatever this new life was that I’d stumbled into with my polka-dot panties and my profound, catastrophic ignorance about what lived inside me.
But my fingers didn’t stay in the hair. They moved through it and past it. They found the hot, wet lips again. This time my body showed not the slightest hesitation. This time my middle finger slid between the inner lips and found my clitoris with the same unerring accuracy that Master Paul had demonstrated, as if my body had memorized the coordinates in the interval since the last touch and now guided my hand there with the efficiency of a homing device.
I circled. Slowly at first, the way Penelope had taught me. I made small circles,gently, without pressing too hard. The pleasure unfurled through my core. My free hand, which had been covering my mouth, moved to my breast. Through the thin cotton of my pajama top, I felt my nipple… hard, aching, so sensitive. I squeezed it between my thumb and forefinger, and the two sensations, clit and nipple, sent a shock through me that made my spine curve.
I thought about my master shaving me.
I couldn’t help it. The image rose unbidden, fully formed, as vivid as if I were watching it on one of the studio monitors: the white tile of the bathroom set, the careful lighting, the mirror positioned at its calculated angle. Me, sitting on the edge of the tub or standing with my legs apart or however he would position me—I didn’t know the logistics, couldn’t picture the specific geometry, but I could picturehim.
Master Paul’s hands between my thighs. The razor. The sound it would make—would it make a sound? A soft, scraping whisper as the blade moved through the fine blonde hair? Would I feel the individual hairs being cut, or would there just be the sensation of the blade against my skin, cool and skillful, while he held me open with one hand and shaved me bare with the other?
My fingers moved faster. The circles tightened, and I felt the pleasure concentrate itself. It narrowed from a diffuse warmth to something pointed and urgent that seemed to gather in a single, exquisite spot beneath my fingertip. My hips moved against my hand in a rhythm that matched the circling, a gentle undulation that I recognized, with a distant flush of humiliation, as the same motion I’d made on my knees in front of Master Paul in my helpless search for friction.
