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 pulled my hand back. I stared at the ceiling. The green numbers on the clock said 11:49.
My hand went back.
This time my fingers slid between my folds—actually between them, parting the outer lips the way Master Paul had parted them with his thumbs, though I made my touch much lighter, and it felt more hesitant, lacking the authoritative pressure that had made me feel simultaneously invaded and understood.
I found the inner flesh swollen and hot and so slick that my fingers glided without friction, and the sensation—God, the sensation—sent a current of pleasure through my lower belly that made my hips lift off the mattress in a reflexive, seeking motion.
I’d never felt that before. Not like that. Or… not with my own hand, because I’d felt it with Penelope and with Master Paul, hadn’t I?
Those few times I’d touched myself in college had been through fabric, muted and indirect, and the pleasure had been vague and diffuse, like hearing music through a wall. And with Kevin… it didn’t compare at all. This seemed like the music itself, sudden and loud and shockingly specific. My fingertip had found a spot—not my clitoris even, but somewhere along the inner fold, a ridge of flesh that responded to the lightest stroke with a jolt of feeling so acute it made me gasp.
I stroked it again. The gasp rose again, louder this time, and I pressed my free hand against my mouth because the walls of my apartment were thin and Mrs. Loomis next door went to bed at nine.
My fingers kept exploring. That seemed like the only word for what they did—they explored, moving through the wet geography of my own body with wondering, tentative curiosity. I found places that made me gasp, that made me shiver, and that made my toes curl against the sheets. I catalogued each one with a breathless, guilty precision that made my cheeks feel as hot as my pussy.
When my fingertip finally grazed my clitoris, I understood why Penelope had told me to circle hers gently. Why Master Paul had found it with such unerring accuracy on the bedroom set and circled it once, just once, before pulling his hand away. That single revolution he’d given me had been a preview. A demonstration. This is what lives here. This is what you’ve been ignoring. This is the switch you’ve never flipped.
I flipped it.
The sound I made into my palm was not a gasp or a whimper, but something lower and more animal—a moan that seemed to originate in the soles of my feet and travel upward through my entire body before escaping through my pressed-together lips. My hips rolled. My back arched. My fingers circled the swollen nub again, and again, finding a rhythm that my body seemed to already know even though my mind had never learned it, and the pleasure built with a speed and an intensity that terrified me.
I pulled my hand away. I lay there panting, my heart slamming, my thighs quaking, the ache between my legs now so acute it felt like a wound—a throbbing, hollow, demanding emptiness. And it felt like a pussy… or… a… a…
I whispered it out loud, astonished at how impossible it seemed to get used either to the dirtiness of the word or to my own apparent need to say it anyway.
“I have a… a cunt… a wet little cunt… a naughty little cunt…”
It felt like that part of me belonged not to me but to someone who wanted things. Someone whose want had teeth.
Master Paul says no. You’re not allowed to come, Anne. Not until he says so.
I tightened my thighs. The compression sent a wave of sensation through my pussy that felt like a cruel half-measure, one my body accepted the way a starving person accepts the smell of food. Not enough. Not nearly enough. But impossible to refuse.
He’ll know if you disobey.
Would he? How would he know? I was alone in my apartment, in my bed, in the dark. There were no cameras here. Master Paul was somewhere else—his home, his hotel, wherever Institute trainers went when they weren’t dismantling girls on photography sets—and he couldn’t possibly know what I did under my own sheets in my own bed at 11:52 on a Tuesday night.
Unless my body told him tomorrow. Unless the particular quality of my presence when I walked into the studio—satisfied versus desperate, sated versus starving—would communicate what had happened the way my blushes communicated my shame, the way the wetness between my thighs communicated my need. Master Paul read bodies the way other people read newspapers. Fluently. Automatically. Without missing a single headline.
My hand slid back beneath the waistband, as if it, too, belonged to another woman.
I told myself I was just going to touch the hair again. Just feel it one more time before my master took it away. A farewell, of sorts, to the last scrap of modesty I had—the little covering that Penelope had described as a barrier, a hiding place, a final way of saying this part of me is still mine. After tomorrow it wouldn’t be mine anymore. It would be bare and smooth and it would belong to Master Paul, to Selecta, to whatever this new life was that I’d stumbled into with my polka-dot panties and my profound, catastrophic ignorance about what lived inside me.