“Let’s talk wardrobe,” Melissa said.
Master Paul nodded. “I think I’ve just gotten back from a business trip. So, a suit for me.”
My jaw slackened and my eyes went wide as I understood just how good at this he was. Then he glanced at me, and my face blazed anew at the look of assessment in his eyes.
“For Anne… hmm… something I won’t like.”
Melissa cut in, nodding along with him. “New Modesty training bra and panties, under jeans and a tee. She’s retreating… defending… because she knows she’s going to be in trouble. You’ll be displeased. Perfect.”
I looked from her to Master Paul, my stomach dropping. This had been my idea, but the realization of it… I swallowed hard as I thought about the training panties I’d seen in meetings with Penelope.
“Um,” I said.
They both looked at me.
“I… can we… I mean… can I wear, you know, like regular underwear, with a dress, maybe?”
A tiny smile played on Master Paul’s mouth, but his eyes narrowed. He shook his head.
“Don’t make this harder for yourself, Annie,” he said, with a note of firmness in his voice that made my heart quail. “You’ll wear what I decide you should wear, or you’ll be in more trouble than you are already.”
The words landed hard. I almost let out a whimper. They felt like a hand—like mymaster’shand—pressing down on my shoulder, urging me to my knees in front of him. That pressure seemed to grow heavier and more real with every hour I spent in this man’s orbit.
You’ll wear what I decide you should wear.Not a suggestion. Not a negotiation. A statement of fact delivered with the same quiet certainty he’d used when he’d told me my mouth was a cunt in my face, when he’d told me to open my throat and take him deeper, when he’d told Penelope I wasn’t allowed to come.
And just like every other time Master Paul had drawn a line around me and told me to stay inside it, my body responded before my mind could mount a defense. The heat bloomed between my legs and my stomach did a slow, sickening somersault that left me dizzy.
I stood there before him, caught.
Caught…not just in the obvious sense that he had caught me disobeying, caught me touching myself, caught me with my face on fire while two people discussed what underwear I’d be wearing when I confessed to masturbating. Caught in something larger. Something structural that had started to close around me the moment I’d walked into Penelope’s office for my first day at Selecta. It had tightened with every subsequent event until I could feel it pressing against me on all sides like the walls of a slowly shrinking room.
I seemed to be trapped between two versions of my life, and I could no longer tell where one ended and the other began.
In the fiction, the narrative arc that Melissa was constructing forHer Secret Garden’s subscribers, I was a young bride-to-be whose suitor had caught her touching herself while he was away on business. He would scold me. He would punish me. He would shave my most intimate place to remind me who it belonged to. It represented a story. A scene. Something that existed within the bounded frame of Darlene’s cameras.
But the girl who had come five times last night while fantasizing about being belt-whipped wasn’t fictional. The wetness currently soaking through my underwear wasn’t scripted. The way my heart slammed against my ribs when Master Paul saidyou’ll wear what I decide—that wasn’t acting. That was Anne Chamberlain, twenty years old, standing in front of a man who had taken possession of her body and her obedience with a speed and a thoroughness that should have terrified her, and itdidterrify her, it terrified me; the fear was real and present and lived in my chest like a trapped bird.
It was also the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.
The realization arrived without fanfare. It didn’t crash over me the way the orgasms had last night, violent and obliterating. It settled quietly like snow. One moment I stood in the studio feeling the familiar tangle of shame and arousal and confusion, and the next moment I understood something about myself with a clarity that made the lights seem to get brighter.
I was falling in love with him.
Him,not his character as suitor or as trainer.Paul Mason. The man who had wiped a tear from my cheek with his thumband told me my body needed time to process. The man who had heard me ask, shaking and terrified, if we could turn my disobedience into a scene, and had looked at me with an appreciation so warm it had cracked something open in me.
I was falling in love with a man who called my private part a cunt and made me suck his cock on camera and had forbidden me from touching myself. Soon he would dress me in humiliating training underwear—so he could undress me again when I confessed to disobeying him.
I was falling in love with my master.
“Amy!” Melissa called across the studio, and I flinched, dragged back to the surface of the present moment. “Amy, can you take Anne to wardrobe? Training set—NM basics. White. And jeans and a tee from the casual rack.”
Amy appeared, in the black crew polo that all the production assistants wore. She had a small clipboard that she held against her chest like a shield.
“Morning,” she said, smiling at me with an easy warmth that felt, in the context of everything else happening, almost surreal. “Come with me?”
I followed her. My legs moved mechanically, carrying me across the studio floor toward the changing area, which was separated from the main space by a series of heavy black curtains. Amy held one aside for me and I ducked through, entering a smaller space lined with rolling racks of clothing. There was a full-length mirror and a small vanity table scattered with makeup brushes.
“Okay,” Amy said, looking at her clipboard. “So Melissa wants you in the New Modesty training basics. White set. I’ve got your size from yesterday’s fitting notes.” She moved to one of theracks and pulled out a clear plastic bag containing folded white fabric. “Jeans are here.” She gestured to a shelf. “And tees are on the end rack. Grab whatever fits. I’ll help you if you need it.”
