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 tried to pretend I hadn’t heard. I pulled my hand from my backside slowly, trying not to make it seem like I was jerking it away. I unzipped my skirt while Melissa continued talking, because stopping felt much worse than continuing.
The skirt pooled at my feet and I stepped out of it, still rubbing my bottom with one hand, and now I stood in nothing but my already pulled-down polka-dot panties—the ones Master Paul had tugged to mid-thigh before spanking me. They sat crookedly there, nothing more than a humiliating twist of fabric.
I stooped and pushed them all the way down my thighs, and I stepped out of them and stood there, naked, in the middle of a film studio on the twenty-first floor of Selecta headquarters. It seemed like my mind had decided to pretend it just wasn’t happening, because I suddenly noticed that now I had put both my hands behind me to rub my spanked bottom.
I couldn’t help it, or at least my body, given free rein, definitely couldn’t. The throbbing wouldn’t stop, and the gesture was the only comfort available to me in a world that seemed to have stripped away every other kind.
And then—to my absolute, bone-deep dismay—I felt it. Warmth. Treacherous, damning warmth that had nothing directly to do with the heat in my punished cheeks and everything to do with the place between my legs. It crept in like a tide, slow and inexorable, pooling low in my belly and spreading downward until I could feel the slickness gathering at my center, my body reacting to my nakedness, to my vulnerability, to the echo of Master Paul’s palm and the sound of his voice saying good girl. My pussy responded with an arousal so inappropriate, so mortifying, that I wanted the floor to open beneath my feet and swallow me whole.
I pulled my hands away and pressed my thighs together. I still had the strange idea that it could help preserve my modesty, it seemed, but I found again that the pressure made the problem worse, just the way it had in the conference room, the way it always did. My body had learned its own terrible lesson about what squeezing my thighs actually accomplished, and the lesson was: nothing good. Nothing that reduced the wanting. Only things that made it more specific, more urgent, more impossible to deny.
“Light her,” Darlene said to someone I couldn’t see, and suddenly the studio around me shifted. Banks of soft white light angled toward me from three directions, bathing my naked body in a glow that felt almost warm on my skin.
Darlene appeared in my peripheral vision, crouching low with a light meter, moving around me with the detached efficiency of someone measuring a room for furniture. She held the meter near my hip, my breast, my collarbone, each time checking the reading and making minute adjustments to the nearest light panel.
“Turn toward me,” she said, and I did, and the lights hit the front of my body—my breasts, my stomach, the triangle of blonde hair between my legs—and I closed my eyes because looking at Darlene’s face while she looked at me there was more than I could bear.
“Skin takes the light beautifully,” Darlene said, apparently to Melissa. “Very fair. She’ll photograph warm. The blush pattern is a gift—see how it runs from the clavicle down through the sternum? In the right lingerie, with the right emotional state, that flush line is going to sell the entire narrative. Anne, honey, rub your bottom again for me? And put your other arm across your chest, like you don’t want your suitor to see your nipples. Perfect, thanks.”
I stood there, naked and lit like a specimen, rubbing my burning bottom with my right hand while my left arm crossed uselessly over my breasts, and I felt the wetness between my thighs with a clarity that made me want to scream. Every second I stood here, exposed under these lights, being discussed in the third person by women who saw me as visual material rather than a human being, my body betrayed me more thoroughly.
I could feel myself swelling, could feel the slippery heat increasing, and I knew—I knew—that if anyone looked closely enough, if the light hit me at the right angle, they would see it. The evidence. The glistening proof that Anne Chamberlain, who had said no, thank you twice in Penelope’s office and I can’t three times in this studio, was standing here dripping wet.
“You know what,” Master Paul said, and his voice came from somewhere to my left. I opened my eyes and found him leaning against the edge of the kitchen set’s butcher-block island, arms crossed, studying me with that deep, assessing gaze that seemed to see through every defensive layer I’d ever constructed. “I think there’s a narrative arc here that we’re not taking advantage of.”