Page 2 of Shamefully Trained

“You don’t waste time,” he said.

“Should I?”

“No.” He took my empty glass from me though I hadn’t noticed I’d finished it. “I appreciate efficiency.”

There was a pause in which something seemed to change, though the difference didn’t occur in the world around us. The reception hummed on. Glasses clinked. Someone laughed too loudly. My pulse had become absurdly palpable to me.

“My hideaway is upstairs,” he said.

It was not phrased as an invitation. It was a fact, and he followed it with another.

“It’s quieter there.”

I should have said no. I knew that before I answered, while I answered, and afterward too. But in the instant before I spoke, I thought of Hathaway’s cool appraising face, of how little she had given me lately, of how much she expected. I thought of leverage. Access. I thought, stupidly, that I was not a child and could handle an arrogant senator in a closed room—even one of the legendary hideaway offices so prized by senior legislators.

“All right,” I said.

The hallway outside the reception felt too cool after the crush inside. He walked beside me and I matched his pace, my heels sounding small on the marble floor. There was almost no conversation on the way up. That should have warned me too. By the time he unlocked the office door, I had entered a kind of narrowed state in which every choice seemed already made.

His hideaway was larger than I had expected, and darker, with the city spread out in black glass beyond the windows. He shut the door behind us. The click of the latch was very soft. He didn’t lock it. A part of me almost asked him to, because I thought I might decide to seduce him.

Then he turned to me and said, “Take off your clothes.”

For a second I stared at him, because the aggression of it was harder to process than if he’d come at me gradually. No flirtation now, no easing. Command only.

“Senator—”

“Now.”

I wished, even as I started to obey, that I had argued, at least about the terms. Or even that I had gotten frightened enough to refuse. I was frightened, but it came with a strange floating feeling, as if I had stepped outside myself and left some lesser, more pliant girl standing there in my place.

My fingers went to the buttons of my blouse. I watched them undo each one. I folded the blouse because I was apparently ridiculous to the core. My skirt followed, then my bra, then my panties, and all the while his eyes remained on me, cool and proprietary, until I had nowhere to put my hands and no idea where to look.

“Naked means naked,” he said.

I had left my shoes on. My face burned. I slipped them off.

His eyes, to my distress, focused downward.

“You don’t wax,” he said matter-of-factly. “I don’t mind that on a redhead, I suppose, but you’ll need to trim that bush at least. Even better to bare a little pink cunt like that completely though.”

“Oh, God,” I whispered, feeling my face go as hot as the sun.

He nodded at the rug in front of his desk. “Kneel.”

I did that too, as if his lewd, brutal words had cast some kind of spell over me. The carpet fibers pressed into my knees. The room smelled faintly of leather and whatever cologne he wore, spicy and expensive-smelling. I could hear my own breathing. He came around the desk slowly enough to make me feel each step in my stomach.

When he unzipped his trousers and took himself out, I had one absurd thought, not about his body but about the fact that this was happening in a United States senator’s hideaway under framed photographs and a flag. Then his hand was at the back of my head.

“Open,” he said.

I did. I had kissed men—on the mouth. I had let a few touch me, and I’d had sex exactly twice. But I had never done this before, and he knew it at once. He pushed into my mouth with casual arrogance, and the shock of it made tears spring to my eyes. I gagged, trying and failing not to. His fingers tightened in my hair.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “You’re terrible at this.”

I made a miserable sound around him.

He drew back enough for me to breathe. “Have you never sucked cock before?”