How I got to Master Paul’s apartment, afterwards… I couldn’t have narrated it. It seemed to exist only in fragments in my mind. Once he had carried me across the threshold and laid me in his enormous bed, I remembered some of it: being wrapped in a soft robe—not the studio’s standard-issue terrycloth but something heavier, warmer, that smelled like my master.
I remembered Amy, earlier, pressing a bottle of water into my hands and the cool glass against my lips. I remembered Master Paul’s hand on the small of my back as he guided me through a door I’d never noticed at the rear of the studio, into a corridor, then an elevator, then into a parking garage where a dark sedan waited.
I remembered leaning against him in the back seat. My cheek against the shoulder of a fresh shirt he had put on. I remembered his arm around me and his voice rumbling in my ear, “Penelope says you can have the rest of the day off.”
“Oh,” I said. “I… I…”
No verb came. My master kissed me softly.
“Shh, Annie,” he said. “Just be, for now.”
CHAPTER 27
Anne
I must have fallen asleep at some point. When the thread of consciousness returned, with me still in my master’s arms, it felt like what had happened in the studio had happened a long time ago, to some other girl. It still felt vivid and real in my body, but in my mind it had softened at the edges with the mercy of a little time and warmth, and the particular safety of being held.
Master Paul’s apartment was nothing like I’d imagined. I hadn’t imagined it, really, because to that point he had existed in my head as a force more than a person. But here I saw the evidence of his personhood: bookshelves lining an exposed brick wall, thick with spines I couldn’t read from this distance. A kitchen that I could see through the bedroom door, with copper pots hanging from a rack. Windows that must face west, letting in the amber light of late afternoon, which meant I’d slept for hours. The bed I lay in was sumptuous, with dark gray sheets that smelled like cedar and clean cotton and him.
His arm around my waist didn’t grip me. It rested against my body, and its weight felt like an anchor holding me to the surface of the world when some part of me still wanted to drift.
“There you are,” he said softly.
I turned my head on the pillow and found his face inches from mine. He’d changed into a plain white T-shirt and dark joggers, and without the suit, without the belt in his hand, without the studio lights carving his features into something monumental, he looked different.
Not smaller, of course… but maybe more human. The lines around his brown eyes were visible in this light, and the salt-and-pepper at his temples caught the amber glow. He looked at me with an expression I couldn’t immediately categorize.
“Hi,” I whispered. My voice came out hoarse and cracked, the vocal cords of a girl who’d spent the afternoon screaming.
“Hi.” His thumb traced a slow circle against my hip through the robe. “How do you feel?”
I took stock. My bottom throbbed with a deep, pervasive heat that pulsed with each heartbeat—not the sharp, immediate sting of fresh welts, but the heavy, bruised ache of skin that had been thoroughly punished and was now settling into the long, slow process of recovery. Between my legs I felt swollen, tender, used in a way that was both uncomfortable and oddly satisfying, like a muscle that had been worked past its limit and was now quivering in the aftermath. My inner thighs were sticky. My jaw ached faintly from how hard I’d clenched it. My eyes felt puffy from crying.
I felt wonderful.
“Woozy,” I said, and a smile spread across my face that I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to. It felt wide and stupid and entirely involuntary. “Happy. Really, really happy.”
Something changed in his expression. The professional warmth—the trainer’s careful, calibrated attentiveness—remained there, but beneath it I saw something else surfacing, something that looked almost vulnerable.
“Good,” he said. “That’s good, Annie.” He paused. His thumb stilled against my hip. “Drink some water for me.”
He reached behind him to the nightstand and handed me a glass. I sat up slowly, wincing as my welted bottom pressed against the mattress, and drank. The water was cool and tasted faintly of lemon, and I drank the entire glass in long, greedy swallows while Master Paul watched me with the particular attentiveness of a man monitoring something he felt responsible for.
When I finished, he took the glass from my hands and set it aside. Then he did something he hadn’t done before. He reached up and brushed a strand of hair from my face, tucking it behind my ear with a gentleness so at odds with everything his hands had done to me today that my breath caught. His fingertips lingered at my temple, tracing the curve of my ear, and the tenderness of the gesture made my eyes sting.
“Anne,” he said. His voice had dropped into a register I hadn’t heard before, as if the words he was about to say were ones he hadn’t rehearsed. “I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear it as me. Not as your trainer. Definitely not as your suitor—I mean the character Melissa’s building. Me. Paul.”
My heart began to hammer. The woozy, floating contentment of a moment ago sharpened into something more alert, morepresent, the way a landscape snaps into focus when you adjust a lens.
“Okay,” I said.
He looked at me for a long moment. His brown eyes held mine with a steadiness that felt different from the commanding gaze he used on set. I watched his jaw work, the muscles tightening and releasing as if he were chewing on the words before letting them out.
“I’ve been doing this for eleven years,” he said. “Training girls. Working with the Institute and Selecta. I’ve maintained control through all of it. Every scene. Every girl. Every situation. Control is what I am. It’s the foundation of everything I do.”
He paused. His hand had moved from my temple to my jaw, his thumb resting against the hinge. I could feel a faint tremor in his fingers. Master Paul’s fingers were trembling against my face.
“Something is happening with you that I don’t have control over,” he said. “And I need you to know that. Because you deserve honesty, and because…” He exhaled. The breath seemed to cost him something. “Because I’m falling for you, Anne. Not for the trainee. For you. The girl who asked me to turn her disobedience into a scene because she wanted to understand herself. The person who looked up at me with her hands shaking and offered me something real.”
