Page 53 of Shamefully Trained

Porter continued, “If Gowry helped me on something this visible, it would only be because he saw a larger game.”

I thought of Gowry’s office, of his belt, and of the humiliating knowledge about me—about my pussy, more precisely, and how it responded to discipline—that now existed in two men’s minds. My appetite flickered, then steadied again. I realized that Porter had a way of making even ugly subjects fit into clean lines.

“You sound very certain.”

“I am.”

I took another bite, chewed, swallowed. “Sometimes men like Gowry do things because someone offers them an angle they hadn’t considered.”

Porter’s gaze sharpened. “Do you believe I’ve missed one?”

Maybe I should have backed away from the question. Instead I said, “I think men who enjoy feeling powerful often mistake that feeling for strategic competence. And perhaps men who actually are competent, strategically, sometimes underestimate just how mistaken a self-proclaimed alpha can be about his own intelligence.”

One dark eyebrow lifted.

That was all, but it made my pulse jump. Praise from him had become dangerously potent.

He leaned back slightly. “That’s a useful formulation.”

I looked down at my plate before my face could betray too much pleasure in his words.

We finished the main course in a rhythm that would have seemed almost normal if not for the fact that every shift in my seat made me aware of the thing inside me and sent fresh heat through my lower body. The conversation moved in and out of policy detail. He asked what Hathaway had been like to work for. I answered carefully. He asked which committee staffers actually mattered and which merely enjoyed acting as if they did. I answered that too. At some point I realized, with a kind of dazed alarm, that he was not merely making conversation. He was listening.

He had made me climax in a bath with a plug in my ass and then asked me for my political judgment over boeuf bourguignon.

Dessert arrived from one of the boxes he had set aside earlier: little ramekins of crème brûlée. He cracked the caramelized top of his with the back of his spoon. I watched the motion and immediately, absurdly, imagined the same hand holding the back of my neck while he pushed me down over his desk.

I looked away too late. My body had already reacted.

He noticed, of course. “What are you thinking about?”

I nearly choked on custard. “Nothing.”

“Lying is generally a poor strategy, especially with me.”

I stared at my dessert. “I’m aware.”

“Then answer.”

The command came softly, and because of the softness even more powerfully. I could have refused. I knew that. But I also knew the plug remained inside me because he had decided it should, and that somewhere in the last hour my resistance had become entangled with a strange wish for him to know me.

“I was thinking,” I said, and had to stop because my throat felt hot, “that I can’t stop being aware of it.”

“Of the plug.”

“Yes… sir,” I said, looking down again and remembering his rule about where my eyes should go when his penis was uncovered. I couldn’t see it now, beneath the table and the thick fabric of his robe, but it felt as if he had taken it out, as he made clear the authority he expected to exercise over me. I felt I shouldn’t meet my sponsor’s eye without permission, when I said sir.

“And?”

I shut my eyes for one second. “And what I said.”

When I opened them, I could feel him still watching me.

“What did you say?”

The calmness of the question was devastating. He meant to make me speak it again while eating crème brûlée in his dining room.

My lips parted, and I couldn’t have looked him in the face even if he had commanded me to. “That I’m… I’m the kind of girl…”