“The Surrender Garter Set,” Melissa said. “The ties at the hips are functional, of course—the husband can undress her without removing the garter belt or stockings. She stays in the aesthetic he’s chosen for her even during intercourse. The visual continuity matters. Our research shows that men in authority-based relationships derive significant psychological satisfaction from the maintenance of presentation even during intimate acts. He dressed her. She stays dressed, on his terms.”
CHAPTER 4
Anne
I pressed my knees together under the table, thinking of Karen, the girl from the first video I’d had to watch, doing the same thing. I’d never tried it before, but I felt desperate to relieve some of the tension in my body. I squeezed my thighs hard. It didn’t help. If anything, the pressure made the sensation worse—a tight, liquid ache that I couldn’t shift away from no matter how I sat. I uncrossed my legs. Crossed them the other way. Typedgarter—visual continuity—presentation maintenanceand bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted metal.
Melissa paused before clicking to the final slide. Something in her expression shifted. I saw in her eyes a kind of anticipatory relish, the look of someone about to play a card they knew would land.
“And this,” she said, “is the piece I’m most excited about.”
Click.
The panties that appeared on the virtual woman on screen were white lace. Bridal white, delicate and intricate, with a scalloped waistband and a fit that looked somehow both demure and devastatingly provocative. They were beautiful—genuinely, artistically beautiful, the kind of garment that could have appeared in a fashion editorial or the highest-end kind of lingerie catalogue.
Except for the…opening.
It took me a moment to understand what I was looking at. The back of the panties—shown in a second image beside the first, the computer-generated model turned to present her rear—featured a cutout. Oval-shaped, framed by a border of the same delicate lace, positioned directly over the cleft of the buttocks. Not a torn seam, not a gap—a deliberate, carefully constructed opening that left the wearer’s most private area exposed while everything else remained covered.
“The Surrender Access Panty,” Melissa said. “Designed specifically for anal intimacy. The gusset has the awareness feedback tech. So does the lace framing around the aperture. She puts them on when her suitor decides he wants her to think about what will happen to her back there, when he decides to use her. And, of course, the opening is sized and positioned so that he can take her anally without removing the panties, without interrupting the aesthetic, without any fumbling or negotiation. She’s wearing beautiful lingerie. She’s also available to him, exactly where and how he wants her.”
The room was quiet for a moment. Stuart Harrington leaned back in his chair, one arm draped over the back as he turned to watch the screen, his blue eyes moving between the image there and Melissa with an expression of frank appreciation.
“That,” he said, “is going to sell well on NMB.”
I couldn’t type. My fingers rested on the keys and I stared at the words I’d written last—garter—visual continuity—presentation maintenance—and I couldn’t make my hands move, because every nerve in my body seemed to have migrated to a single point between my legs that throbbed with a shameful, insistent heat I could no longer pretend was anything other than what it was.
I had gotten aroused. Sitting in a conference room on the thirty-sixth floor of Selecta headquarters, looking at pictures of lingerie designed to make women sexually available to their husbands for anal intercourse, I had become wetter than I’d ever gotten for Kevin. I could feel the slick warmth against the plain cotton of my own underwear, my boring, ordinary, non-sensor-linked underwear that suddenly felt like a flimsy barrier between my body’s honesty and a lie I was trying to tell myself.
“Melissa, this is exceptional work,” Penelope said beside me. Her voice sounded calm, measured, and a thousand miles away. “The integration of the intimates technology into a luxury lingerie context may be exactly the direction we need to build the crossover between HSG and more conventional New Modesty offerings. Stuart, what are you thinking for the NMB angle?”
Stuart hadn’t stopped looking at the screen, but now his gaze shifted—not to Penelope, and not to Melissa.
To me.
I seemed to feel it before I saw it. That weight of attention, that appraising calm I’d noticed when I first walked in, now focused and sharpened into something that made the hair on my arms rise. I looked up from my laptop and met his blue eyes, andwhatever he saw in my face—the flush, the slightly parted lips, the barely concealed panic—made his mouth curve into that same technical smile.
“I’m thinking,” Stuart said slowly, still looking at me, “that we need real models for the launch campaign. Not CGI or even trained subs. The whole point of HSG is authenticity—real women, real dynamics, real responses. If we’re going to introduce the Surrender Line on the stream, we need girls who actually embody what the line represents.”
He turned to Penelope with an ease that suggested the thought had only just occurred to him, though something in the exactness of his timing told me it hadn’t.
“Penny,” he said, “your new girl would be perfect.”
The room went very still. Or maybe that was just me. Maybe the room continued at its normal pace and it was only my own internal machinery that seized and locked, every gear grinding to a halt at once.
“Anne?” Penelope said, and I couldn’t read her tone. Surprise? Consideration? She tilted her head slightly, the way she did when she was evaluating a proposal. “She’s only been with us a couple of months.”
“Which makes her ideal,” Stuart said. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table, and the gesture had the quality of a man laying down cards he knew would win the hand. “She’s new. She’s unpolished. She’s got that quality—that tension between wanting to be good and not quite knowing what good means yet. That’s exactly what the Surrender Line is about. It’s not for women who’ve already surrendered. It’s for women who are onthe edge of it. Who are fighting it.” His eyes found me again. “Who are losing the fight.”
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I closed it.
Melissa was studying me now too, her sharp brown eyes moving over my face and down—not lewdly, but with the frank assessment of someone evaluating a canvas. “He’s not wrong,” she said. “That blush alone is worth a million dollars in ad spend. You can’t fake that.”
“I…” I managed. My voice sounded strangled. “I’m not… I’m just an assistant. I take notes. I don’t?—”
“You don’t have to decide anything right now,” Penelope said, and her hand found my knee under the table—a brief, steadying pressure that should have been comforting but instead sent a jolt up my thigh that made me clench my jaw. “Stuart is getting ahead of himself, as usual. Let’s finish the meeting and we can discuss it properly afterward.”
The rest of the meeting passed in a blur. Melissa presented pricing tiers and distribution timelines, Stuart asked questions about fabric sourcing and durability, and I typed words that my brain refused to process because every synapse I had was still firing in response to the phraseyour new girl would be perfectand the way Stuart’s eyes had settled on me like a hand closing around something soft.
