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)
I opened my mouth to reply, but nothing came out. The words real submission echoed in my skull. I thought of Penelope’s office. The desk. The paddle. The strap-on. The orgasm that had torn through me like a natural disaster while my boss held my hips and drove into me. Was that real submission? It had felt real. It had felt like the most real thing that had ever happened to me, and in the week since, I’d lain awake every night replaying it with a mixture of horror and longing that left me tangled in my sheets, my hand between my legs, my face burning in the dark.
“I’m not…” I tried again. “I’ve never done anything like this. I’m just… They said it would be a photo shoot. Melissa and Penelope said I’d try on some lingerie and they’d take pictures. She didn’t say anything about…”
“About me,” he finished. His voice was gentle, but I could sense it was the gentleness of a man who understood exactly how frightened I was and had decided not to pretend otherwise. “I know. And I know that makes this harder. But I want you to hear something, Anne, and I want you to hear it clearly.”
He took a half step closer. He didn’t quite move into my personal space, but he came close enough that I could smell him. Cedar. Something warm and slightly spiced beneath it. Clean skin.
“Nothing is going to happen in this studio that you don’t need,” he said.
He waited, as if to let his words sink in. Need… not want.
“What you want right now is to run. I can see it. Your body is screaming it—your shoulders, your jaw, the way you’re holding that call sheet like a life preserver. You want to turn around and walk out and go back to your desk and pretend none of this is happening.”
The accuracy of his statement made my eyes sting. I blinked rapidly, refusing to cry. Not here. Not in front of him.
Not in front of the people I could see moving around the sets behind him: technicians adjusting lights, someone carrying a garment bag, a woman with cropped silver hair crouched beside a camera on a tripod, peering through the viewfinder with clinical concentration.
“But what you need,” Paul continued, and his voice dropped, just slightly, into a register that seemed to bypass my ears entirely and arrive somewhere in the center of my chest, “is to stay. To trust the process. To let someone who knows what he’s doing guide you through the thing that’s been building inside you since long before you walked into Selecta.”
I stared at him. My lips had parted. My breath came in shallow little sips that I couldn’t deepen no matter how hard I tried. The call sheet wavered in my hands.
“How do you…” My voice cracked. “How do you know what’s building inside me?”
Something shifted in his expression. Not softening—he didn’t seem like a man who softened—but something opened, briefly, like a door left ajar.
“Because I’ve spent my career working with girls exactly like you,” he said simply. “Girls who feel too much and don’t know what to do with it. Girls who’ve been told their whole lives that wanting to submit is weakness, or sickness, or something to be ashamed of. Girls who walk into rooms like this one shaking and fighting and telling themselves they don’t want what their bodies are begging for.” He paused. “I’ve never been wrong about one yet.”
CHAPTER 8
Anne
The tears came. I couldn’t stop them. They spilled over my lower lashes and ran down my cheeks in hot, silent streams, and I hated them, hated the weakness they represented, hated the way they proved everything he’d just said. I swiped at them furiously with the back of my hand, still clutching the call sheet, and the paper crumpled against my cheek.
“I’m fine,” I said, which seemed like the most absurd thing I’d ever said in my life.
Paul didn’t contradict me. He simply reached into his pocket and produced a clean, folded handkerchief—actual cloth, white cotton, monogrammed with a small PM in the corner—and held it out to me. The gesture was so unexpectedly old-fashioned, so incongruously gentlemanly in the context of everything else, that I almost laughed.
Instead I took the handkerchief and pressed it against my eyes. The cotton smelled of cedar, like him, and the intimacy of that, of holding something that had been in his pocket against my face, made my stomach flip in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
“Better?” he asked after a moment.
I nodded, even though I wasn’t better. I felt like a catastrophe. I was a twenty-year-old girl standing in a pornography studio holding a strange man’s handkerchief, with tear tracks on her cheeks and a damp spot forming in her sensible cotton underwear because the strange man’s voice had done something to her nervous system that she couldn’t explain and couldn’t reverse.