Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
“When you finally accept the modeling assignment,” Penelope said, and her voice had changed—thicker somehow, with a texture that hadn’t been there before, “you’ll have your pussy waxed or shaved. They’ll want you smooth for the shoots. Selecta subsidizes aesthetician visits for female employees.”
“I’m not going to accept it,” I said. My voice was thick with tears, muffled against my forearm. “I’m going to resign. After this, I’m going to resign.”
“We’ll see about that,” Penelope said.
I heard the drawer open. I heard a thunking sound, the sound of something being lifted—something solid, with weight to it. I didn’t have to look to know what it was. The stark white plastic. The bold Selecta logo. I’d seen it through the open door of the HR office my first week, and I’d looked away, and I’d told myself it had nothing to do with me.
I felt a puff of air, and then the first stroke landed with a crack that seemed to split the air in two.
The pain was immediate and enormous—a flat, blazing heat that exploded across both cheeks of my bottom and drove the breath from my lungs in a sharp, involuntary cry. My fingers clawed at the edge of the desk. Before I could process it, before I could brace myself, the second stroke fell, overlapping the first, and I heard myself make a sound I didn’t recognize—high and broken and desperate.
Penelope paddled me hard. There was nothing tentative about it, nothing restrained. Each stroke was delivered with a force and precision that spoke of practice, of training, of someone who knew exactly how much a paddle could hurt and had chosen not to spare me any of it. The impacts came in a steady rhythm, one every three or four seconds, and each one built on the last, layering fire upon fire until my entire bottom felt like a single, continuous blaze.
I tried to hold still. I told myself I could hold still, that I could take this with some shred of dignity, I could endure it the way Trina from data entry had apparently endured it and then gone back to her desk and carried on. But by the sixth stroke—or the seventh, I’d lost count—my body betrayed me completely. My hips twisted sideways, trying to escape the paddle’s arc, and my feet scrabbled against the carpet as I pushed myself forward across the desk.
“No,” Penelope said. Just that one word, flat and certain. Her left hand came down on the small of my back—firm, unyielding, pressing me into the desk with a strength I hadn’t expected from her elegant frame. She held me there, pinned like a butterfly on a board, and the paddle kept falling.
I sobbed openly now. The tears ran down my face and dripped onto the polished wood beneath my cheek, and my cries came in ragged, helpless bursts that I couldn’t control or muffle. Each stroke drove a fresh sound out of me: sometimes a scream, sometimes a whimper, sometimes just a guttural exhalation that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than my lungs.
And then, somewhere around what I thought might have been the tenth stroke, or the twelfth, I became aware of something that should not have been possible to notice through the blinding pain, but that somehow cut through it despite its apparent inconsequentiality.
Penelope’s breathing had changed.
It was subtle. Anyone else might not have heard it. But I was pressed flat against her desk with her hand on my back and her body standing close behind mine, and in the microsecond of silence between each crack of the paddle and my answering cry, I could hear it—the slight quickening, the faintest roughness at the edges of each exhale, the way her breath caught just before her arm swung. The hand on my back had grown warmer. Her fingers, which had started out rigid and clinical, had shifted—spreading slightly, pressing not just to restrain but to… to feel, maybe. The heel of her palm rested against my spine, and through my blouse I could sense the dampness of her skin.
Penelope Gallagher had gotten aroused from punishing me.
The realization hit me like a second paddle—not painful but shocking, disorienting, a blow to some internal structure. My boss, this immaculate, controlled, pearl-wearing woman who organized her desk in geometric lines and never had a hair out of place, was getting turned on by paddling me. By holding me down and making me cry and watching my bare bottom turn—I could feel it, and in my mind’s eye I could see it much too vividly—scarlet under the white plastic of Selecta’s official disciplinary implement.
And the worst part? The truly worst part, the part that I thought I would lie awake thinking about for nights and weeks and possibly years to come, was what that realization did to me.