Page 107 of Shamefully Trained

I wiped at one cheek with clumsy fingers and gave a breathless, embarrassed laugh. “I’m sorry. That’s ridiculous.”

“No,” he said.

Something in his tone made me go still.

He did not move me off his lap. He did not let me gather myself or put distance back into my body. He simply held me there, one arm around my waist, while I sat naked and sated and tear-streaked on the cock that had just come inside me. Then he reached to the side table.

For one wild second I thought he meant to retrieve some object of discipline, and a confused shiver of response went through me before my mind caught up. What he took up was a small dark box.

I stared at it.

My breath stopped.

“Porter?”

He looked at me, directly at me, with an expression I had almost no practice reading because I had seen it so rarely. A kind of gravity that seemed to come from a deeper place than control, and had a softness to it that made a complicated glow rise in my chest.

He opened the box. The ring caught the office light in one white flash.

“I love you,” he said.

The words hit me with a force almost as physical as the orgasm had been. For one second I simply could not fit them into the world as I knew it. Porter loved me. Porter, who arranged and calculated and controlled. Porter, who had acquired me with such cool competence and then trained me with patience, for his sexual pleasure. Who spanked me and whipped me and made me ask to go to the bathroom.

Who had looked at me more accurately than anyone else ever had and turned that accuracy into a structure I had somehow come to live inside, and come to feel so safe and cared for there.

He went on, his voice low and exact. “I want you in my home, in my life, and at my side permanently. I want to make you my wife. Marry me, Alexandra.”

I think I made a sound before I managed an answer. My whole body had gone hot and cold at once. I was still naked on his lap. His release was still inside me. The bill was still being voted on, on the screen. Nothing about the moment seemed sane, proper, or remotely like any proposal I might once have imagined.

And yet the answer was already there. It had arrived before the shock had begun to dissipate.

“Yes,” I whispered.

The End