The words hung in the air between us.
“Yes, sir, what?” His voice didn’t rise. It didn’t harden. It stayed exactly where it was—low, controlled, and patient. The patience seemed worse than anger would have, because anger would havelet me hide behind indignation. Patience made me stand in the open with nowhere to go.
“Yes, I… I touched myself.” My voice cracked on the last word. A tear spilled over and tracked down my cheek. “I played with my…” I swallowed. The word felt enormous in my mouth, too big to pass through my lips, but he was waiting and his eyes were holding mine and I couldn’t look away. “I played with my pussy.”
The confession left me hollow. I stood there, emptied out, my face burning, tears sliding down both cheeks now, my hands hanging at my sides because I’d forgotten what to do with them.
Master Paul’s expression didn’t change. He studied me for another long moment. I watched him take in my tears, my blush, and my fear. Then he spoke with a quietness that seemed to fill the entire room.
“That pussy,” he said, “is mine now.”
My stomach dropped through the floor.
“You seem to have forgotten that, Anne. While I was away, working, providing for your future, building a life for us—you forgot who your little cunt belongs to.” He paused. The pause lasted three heartbeats. I counted them against the inside of my ribs. “So let me remind you. That cunt is not yours to play with whenever you feel like it. It belongs to me. To your suitor. To the man who’s going to marry you and take you to his bed and make you his wife. And a girl who plays with her suitor’s property without permission…” He reached up and took hold of his tie. He pulled it loose from his collar in a single, slow motion and draped it over the dresser. “…needs to be corrected.”
His hands went to his belt.
The sound it made—the metallic clink of the buckle, the whisper of leather sliding through the loops of his trousers—was the same sound I’d heard in my fantasy last night. Exactly the same. The same clink, the same hiss, the same slow deliberateness that communicated a man’s controlled intention to discipline a girl who had earned what was coming to her. My fantasy had been so precise, so vivid, that the reality of it now felt likedéjà vu, or like prophecy fulfilled.
He doubled the belt over in his hand. The leather was dark brown, supple, well-worn. It hung from his fist with a weight that seemed to pull the temperature of the room down by several degrees.
“I’m going to give you the belt, Anne,” he said. “Because you need to learn that when I tell you not to touch yourself, I mean it. And after I’ve given you the belt…” He paused again, and this time the pause carried something darker, something that made my breath catch and my inner walls clench around the emptiness inside me. “After that, I’m going to shave you, like I told you I would. Down there. I’m going to take every last bit of hair off that disobedient little cunt, so that every time you reach between your legs—every time you feel how bare and smooth you are—you remember who you belong to. You remember that your cunt is mine.”
A sound escaped me. Small, broken, animal. My hands had found each other again, clasped against my belly, and my fingers were white.
“Turn around,” Master Paul said. “Face the bed. Hands on the mattress.”
I turned. My body obeyed before my mind could form an objection, and I found myself bending forward, my palmspressing flat against the white sheets, my arms quivering. Behind me, I heard him move closer. His hand found the waistband of my jeans.
“These come down,” he said.
CHAPTER 22
Paul
I took my time lowering Anne’s jeans to reveal the training underwear. The white cotton emerged inch by inch as I worked the denim down over her hips, and the effect was exactly what I’d hoped for.
The training panties sat high on her waist, their boy-short legs extending to mid-thigh, covering her completely in plain, unadorned white that made her look like something between a schoolgirl and a penitent. Against the casual defense of the jeans and T-shirt she’d been wearing, this underwear told a different story entirely—the story of a girl whose most intimate places had been claimed, contained, and placed under authority.
I eased the jeans down to her knees and let them bunch there. I didn’t take them all the way off. The restriction was deliberate: denim tangled around her knees would limit her movement, hobble her, remind her with every instinctive attempt to shift her stance that she was not free to go anywhere I hadn’t put her.
“Hands on the mattress,” I repeated. “Flat. Don’t move them.”
Her palms pressed harder into the white sheets. I could see the tendons standing out on the backs of her hands, the knuckles bloodless with pressure. She had drawn her shoulders up toward her ears in a defensive posture I’d come to recognize—the body’s attempt to make itself smaller, to take up less space, to present less surface area to whatever was coming.
I stepped back to look at her. The white cotton stretched across her bottom, pulled taut by her bent-forward posture, and through the fabric I could see the lovely shape of her—the twin curves, the shadowed cleft between them, the way the gusset disappeared between her thighs. The cotton had already darkened at the center. Even from two feet away, in the studio’s carefully calibrated lighting, I could see the spreading stain of her arousal soaking through the training panties’ gusset.
I let the belt hang at my side. The leather made a faint creaking sound as it shifted in my grip.
“Do you know what these panties are, Anne?”
Her voice came out thin, muffled by the fact that her head was bowed between her rigid arms. “Training… training panties, sir.”
“That’s right. Training panties. For girls who need to be trained. Girls whose bodies haven’t learned yet who they belong to.” I reached out with my free hand and traced the waistband where it sat against the small of her back. She flinched at the contact, with a full-body tremor that started at the point of touch and radiated outward. “You’re wearing them because you have an accepted suitor. Plain. White. Modest. The kind of underwear a girl wears when her suitor wants her covered up properly. When he wants her to learn what it means to belong to a man.”
I hooked my thumb under the waistband.
“And now I’m going to take them down. Because a girl who played with her suitor’s cunt while he was away doesn’t deserve to keep her panties up.”
