Page 13 of Shamefully Trained

Porter B. appeared near the top now, whether by algorithm or fate or because I had spent too much time on his profile before, I didn’t know. His photograph looked the same: jaw, mouth, gray at the temple, control in every line of him. His profile’s text opened with the same concise certainty that made the others seem sloppy.

I read it again more slowly than before, in my lingerie on my bed with my own newly softened profile live on the same system that hosted him. That changed the words. Or maybe it changed me. I no longer read them as a spectator peering at some other kind of woman. I read them as a candidate.

I am generous with a woman who pleases me and consistent with one who requires correction.

My hand drifted between my thighs of its own accord.

CHAPTER 5

Alex

I disliked how immediately my imagination supplied the rest. A man’s hand closing around the back of my neck. A low voice telling me what I’d done wrong. The heat in my face and between my legs as punishment became the mainspring of my imagination.

I rubbed my much-too-warm pussy through the mesh lace of my naughty panties. I bit my lip, and a little whimper emerged from my throat.

In my mind, to my horror, I went back, helplessly, to Gowry’s office. His hand in my hair came back to me first… just the feeling, without any of the details of the room where it had happened… the feeling of being held in place by a man’s certainty that his pleasure mattered more than my comfort… while I knelt and tried, and failed, and choked around him. I bit my lip and squeezed, down there, tightening the muscles in a helpless way that made my forehead crease. My fingers slipped under the damp lace because there was no point pretending I meant to stop. My clit felt swollen already, oversensitive, and when I touched it I gasped.

I remembered the shame of it with sickening clarity. My tears. His disgust. The way he had told me I was awful at it, as if my body existed for grading. I should have recoiled from the memory. Instead I found myself rubbing faster, circling the little aching knot while my other hand gripped my own thigh hard enough to leave marks.

I could hear him in my head. Jesus Christ. You’re terrible at this.

That should have killed any trace of arousal. It didn’t. The humiliation made it worse. It made my stomach clench and my nipples ache under the ivory bra. I slid my fingers more firmly against myself, through wetness that had already soaked the gusset of my lacy panties, and felt my face burn with the knowledge of what I was doing.

Then the scene in my mind lurched onward, obedient to whatever lewd little current had seized me.

Bent over the desk. The cold wood under my breasts. The first stripe of pain across my ass. I let out a tiny cry into the empty room and pushed my fingers harder between my pussy lips, rubbing in rough, desperate strokes that made my whole body tense. I could almost feel the belt again, hot and sharp, could almost feel the humiliating spread of heat after each blow.

You earned this.

“No,” I whispered, though it was not really a protest. It sounded too much like pleading.

I pictured myself over that desk, naked and exposed, and in the picture my hand had strayed between my legs before he gave me permission. In my mind that became the reason. Not my bad head now, though that had started it. Playing with myself. Being caught with my own fingers where they should not have been. The belt coming down because I was shameless and needy and couldn’t leave myself alone.

My body answered that thought with a surge of wetness so intense it made me groan.

I rubbed furiously, no rhythm to it now, only friction and shame and the horrible, delicious inevitability of my own response. My hips started to move against my hand. I hated that. I hated the needy little motions of my own body, the way I would have despised them in another woman and yet could not stop making them.

And somewhere in the middle of it, so gradually I didn’t realize it at first, the man at my back changed.

The hand on me was still hard, still possessive, but no longer cruel in the same way. The voice I heard was lower, calmer, more controlled. Not Gowry’s open contempt but something worse for me because it reached deeper. Correction without contempt. Authority that did not need to sneer.

By the time I understood that the face in my mind was not the senator’s anymore, my pulse was hammering and my fingers were slick and frantic.

Porter.

I actually stopped for one heartbeat, shocked enough to go still.

Then I touched myself again.

That was the worst part. I knew now whose voice I was hearing when I imagined being told what I had done wrong, and instead of recoiling from it I arched into my own hand with a little broken sound.

In my head he had found me like this in the lingerie, spread out and pink and already wet from reading his profile and disobeying before we’d even met. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded exact.

Did you touch yourself without permission?

The imagined question made me clamp my lips together so hard they hurt. I nodded to no one. My hand worked faster. I could almost see him taking in the state of me and deciding, with that cool male certainty, that I needed to be taught a lesson before anything else.

The whip in my mind was no longer Gowry’s belt. I didn’t know what Porter would use, only that I imagined it landing with deliberate spacing, each stroke given for a reason. I pictured myself bent over, cheeks burning, listening while he told me why girls who played with themselves behind their sponsor’s back ended up with sore bottoms… bottoms on which they couldn’t sit down for a day… a week… a month…