Page 86 of Shamefully Trained

That didn’t mean I stopped trying to think about other things. I listened when he talked about the bill. I watched his face when he came home from meetings with senators and donors and various other men and women of the district to whom power came naturally. Sometimes over dinner—at which I was always dressed only in bra and garter belt, if not simply nude—he would tell me how the negotiations were going.

Badly, mostly.

The billionaire whose money supported so much of Porter’s lobbying effort had begun making noises about shifting focus. Senators drifted, postured, hedged. Gowry remained interested in whatever interested him, which was not, apparently, helping disabled people unless something more appetizing to him came attached.

Porter never complained. He stated facts. But I learned to hear the additional tension in his silences, in the extra stillness that came over him when a call had gone poorly.

Then he would turn to me, and no more talk of legislation was allowed to interfere with his dominant pleasure.

He fucked my mouth on the nights when he wanted quiet obedience from me, my hands behind my back or at my sides while he used my lips and throat as if they existed for his convenience. He fucked my pussy when he wanted to watch me lose myself more quickly. And he fucked my ass often enough that the terror of it became something more complicated: still fear, certainly, but fear laced with anticipation and an awful kind of pride in my increasing ability to take him.

I felt certain it would have been enough to satisfy any normal woman, if not to make her never want sex again.

It had the opposite effect on me, though.

During the day, when he was gone and I was left alone in the apartment or sent out into the city with no underwear under my skirt and his rules wrapped around me like invisible hands, I wanted to touch myself more than I ever had in my life. I would stand behind the counter of the café making coffee and suddenly think of his hands spreading me open for his thrusting hardness, in my pussy and then in my bottom. I would cross my legs on the sofa while watching TV and feel the pressure in exactly the wrong way. I would remember his voice through the speaker, or the way he had told me that masturbating without permission meant the cane, and the forbidden quality of the thought would only make it worse.

Sometimes I managed not to. Sometimes I paced, or read, or took a shower with stern deliberate efficiency and my hands nowhere they ought not to go. Sometimes I lay on the bed and simply ached.

A week after that first fucking of my bottom, Porter had to fly to California. The donor had demanded an in-person meeting, and the meeting mattered too much to delegate. He told me this while fastening his cufflinks that morning, already halfway in his professional armor, and I stood there trying to look as if my main feeling about his leaving was mature composure.

In reality my body had reacted first with disappointment and then, almost immediately, with a horrible hot curiosity. A night alone. In my wired apartment. With his rules.

Before he left he gave me instructions in that calm, measured tone that made everything sound settled and inevitable. Work. Meals. Bedtime. And because apparently he knew me too well already, he added, “If you play with yourself, I will cane you, just as I’ve told you before.”

CHAPTER 27

Porter

At least, I thought as I put down my bag in my suite at the Four Seasons, my day can only get better from here. The thought of opening up the surveillance feed from Alex’s apartment made the frankly shitty meeting with Anderson fade into the background of my mind in an instant. I sat down, loosened my tie, and opened the app on my laptop.

Alex’s bedroom filled the screen.

I had texted her my choice for her bedtime attire when I had landed at SFO. I supposed that should have told me something more significant about how I felt about her than it did at the time, but the idea of her in the pale green babydoll with the sheer little skirt and the cups that would barely pretend to cover her breasts had come into my mind with an urgency I couldn’t deny.

She looked irresistible in it, and my forbidding her to wear anything underneath seemed to glow in her eyes. I had chosen that nightgown because I knew the color would flatter her skin and her hair, and because the almost-childish sweetness of it would heighten the naughtiness of her nubile body’s nudity beneath its sheer fabric.

On the screen it did exactly what I had intended: it made her look innocent and pretty and helplessly sexy, all long white legs, red hair, pert little breasts, and those small, expressive movements of her lovely features that gave away, I knew, much more than she wanted.

She sat on the edge of the bed when I opened the feed, but a few seconds later she stood up and crossed to the window, then back again.

She’s restless, I thought immediately, my eyes narrowing a little even as my mouth curved into a smile.

Alex touched the hem of the nightgown. Then both hands went to it, gathering the light fabric in her fists before letting it fall. I watched her press her thighs together and close her eyes.

Very restless. I hardly noticed that my right hand had curled a little, as if in preparation of picking up a punishment cane.

I knew Alex knew I might be watching. I thought I could discern that knowledge in the way she tried to soothe herself, short of the self-soothing she really needed with such obvious desperation.

She paced back and forth for a little while. She paused by the bed and put a hand on the mattress as if she needed the support. The sight of her struggle began to undo the residue of the meeting with Anderson much more effectively than whiskey could have. His oily hints and strategic cowardice, his billionaire’s assumption that every person in the room existed either to flatter him or to be bought by him, all of it receded.

Alex, on the other hand, had become impossible to reduce.

She sat again, this time more slowly. One knee came up onto the bed. The little nightgown slid up her thigh. She took a breath that visibly lifted her breasts, and for one irrational instant I felt as if I could hear the thought moving through her.

No touching.

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