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)
That girl had begun to understand herself.
The defiance didn’t come from resistance to me. It wasn’t even, really, resistance to what would happen to her bottom this morning. It was the last reflex of a self that knew it was about to surrender something irrecoverable, and insisted on being met with sufficient force to make the surrender feel like the real thing. Anne didn’t want coaxing through this threshold. She wanted, and deserved, to have the master who loved her take her through it. She needed the rebellion to find an answer in language strong enough to convince her body of the reality of her transformation.
I knew all that. I’d expected it. What I hadn’t expected—what I couldn’t have prepared for, what no amount of experience had furnished me with a protocol to manage—was what I felt when Darlene said rolling and I looked at Anne standing at the foot of the bed.
She had her back to me. She was staring at the bolster the way a person stares at something they’ve been told not to touch. Her hands had twisted where they gripped the dressing gown’s belt, and her shoulders were set in a line so rigid the corset from yesterday’s scene would have been redundant. The white cotton fell to mid-thigh and the backs of her bare legs below the hem were close together, pressed at the knee, as if she’d decided that keeping her legs closed was a small act of resistance still available to her.
She was terrified. Genuinely, thoroughly terrified. I could see it in the set of her spine and the angle of her head and the absolute, superhuman stillness of a body that was fighting with everything it had to simply remain standing in the place it had been told to stand.
And still she stood there.
It went through me like electricity. She hadn’t walked off the set, or pulled the curtain of the changing area shut and refused to come out. She had put on the white panties with the cutout and she had belted the dressing gown over them. She had stepped onto the white set and gone to the foot of the bed. She had looked at the bolster when I told her to, with the knowledge of what the panties and the bolster were for evident in the sheer stiffness of her stance.
And I was in love with her.
With this girl who understood, at some level that ran deeper than conscious thought, that the fear and the need were the same thing, and who was brave enough—God, so much braver than she knew—to let both of them be true simultaneously.
I stepped through the doorway.
* * *
Anne
The door of the set’s mock entryway opened and closed. His footsteps crossed the floor behind me—measured, unhurried, the sound I would know anywhere.
“I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” he said, from somewhere behind my left shoulder.
The scene had begun.
“No,” I said. My voice came out smaller than I intended. “Not long, sir.”
He came to stand at my side, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his body through the dressing gown. He looked at the bed, at the bolster, with the expression of a man surveying something he has arranged with care.
“Are you wearing what I gave you?” He didn’t look at me. His eyes stayed on the bed.
The lace-framed oval pressed its satin border against my skin. I could feel it. I would always be able to feel it.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Sir.”
He turned his head and looked at me. The brown eyes moved over my face with an attention that felt like being read, and I looked back at him and felt the rebellion cresting inside my chest like a wave that had been building since the changing area, and I couldn’t stop it, didn’t want to stop it.
“Good,” he said. “Take off the dressing gown, Annie. And then lay yourself over the bolster. It’s time.”
The wave broke.
“Please.” The word came out before I’d decided to speak, urgent and soft and nothing like the obedient response the scene required. “Please, sir. I… can I… please let me…”
My eyes dropped to his lap, to the shape of him beneath the elegant lines of his evening trousers, and the flush that climbed my face felt volcanic.
“Please. I want to do that instead. Please let me kneel for you. I’ll be so good, I’ll—”
“No.” His voice cut across mine cleanly, without heat, but the single syllable landed with a weight that silenced me mid-breath. His brown eyes had cooled into something flat and attentive and entirely without flexibility. “That’s not what’s happening tonight.”
“I’m not…” My voice shook. My fingers twisted in the dressing gown’s belt. “I don’t think I’m ready. I don’t think… sir, I’m not sure I can…”
“Anne.” He said my name in a way that should have been enough. On any of the previous four days, it would definitely have been enough. “Remove the dressing gown and lie over the bolster. Now.”