Page 18 of Shamefully Trained

By the time I had gotten the conditioner out of my hair, my breathing had changed. I became aware of it in that embarrassing, bodily way where I knew exactly what was happening before I admitted it. I was thinking about meeting him. About him knowing what I wore under my clothes because he had ordered it. About the possibility that he might ask to see. About the fact that if he did, I had all but agreed in advance.

My hand slid between my legs before I had made any kind of decision to touch myself.

The first brush of my fingers over my clit made me gasp, but not from pleasure. It was too much at once. I was still sore from the day before, rubbed raw by my own hand and my own ugly imagination. I tried more gently, circling, then pressing lightly through the slickness the shower had not caused, and still the oversensitive ache stopped me almost at once.

“Oh,” I said under my breath, half in frustration, half in shame.

I leaned my forehead against the tile and tried again because apparently that was the kind of girl I had become overnight: one who stood in a shower on a workday morning trying to make herself come while thinking about a rich man she had never met telling her what underwear to wear. But the soreness only sharpened. The arousal remained, embarrassingly intact, while my poor overused body refused to cooperate.

That felt somehow more depraved than if I had simply gotten off.

I turned off the water and stepped out, dripping, my skin prickling with cold and awareness. As I dried myself, I kept thinking about the drawer where I kept the ivory underwear. The same set I had used for the photographs. They were the only things I owned that could reasonably be called nice lingerie.

I stood wrapped in a towel in front of the dresser for a full minute before opening it.

No one was making me wear it, I told myself. He had told me to, yes, but until I chose to obey, the choice remained mine. That distinction mattered. I wasn’t sure why, but it mattered enough that I repeated it silently while I took out the bra and panties.

When I put them on, my hands were less steady than they should have been.

The bra lifted my breasts and made them look fuller than usual. The panties, low and pale and indecently delicate, made me feel as if my own body had suddenly become visible to me in a new way. I turned toward the mirror and then wished I hadn’t.

I did not look like myself.

Or rather, I looked like myself in the face, flushed and blue-eyed and red-haired and far too aware, but from the throat down I looked like the kind of woman I had spent weeks pretending I had not become, that night in Senator Gowry’s office: displayed, expectant, dressed to be evaluated. There was nothing especially vulgar about the set. It was tasteful, even pretty. That only made it worse. I looked prepared.

A pulse went through me low in my body.

Almost without thinking, I let my hand drift down over my stomach and between my thighs. The lace shifted under my fingers. I pressed once, experimentally, over the little hot ache there.

Again the soreness stopped me, but not before my body had answered with a deep shuddering throb that made my knees weaken.

I drew my hand away and just stood there, staring at the woman in the mirror with one palm half-lifted and her mouth parted in a way I would have found theatrical in anyone else. She looked flushed and nervous and excited. She looked as though being told to wear pretty underwear under her dress had reached directly into her and touched something hidden.

I think what frightened me most wasn’t that I could see it.

It was that seeing it excited me more.

CHAPTER 7

Alex

For a second I had the dizzy, detached sensation of watching a stranger. A young woman in ivory lace, thighs faintly tensed, cheeks pink, trying not to touch herself again because she had already made herself too sore. A woman about to go sit in a café with a man who had informed her, in perfect calm, that if he chose he might ‘sponsor’ her, both of them knowing what ‘sponsor’ meant.

Fucking. When he chose, how he chose… including…

That strange spectator feeling… the sensation that it wasn’t me in my body… made me clutch the edge of the dresser.

I should have changed then. I knew I should. Put on plain cotton underwear, message him some excuse, reclaim some scrap of ordinary dignity. Or… I would change my underwear but I would go to the café, and I would push back against Porter B. I would play hard to get and make him give me five thousand dollars a month just for the pleasure of my company. And maybe a blowjob once in a while. And he definitely wouldn’t get to see my underwear today, whether it happened to be plain cotton or anything else.

Instead of changing, though, I got dressed carefully over the lingerie, choosing a skirt and blouse that were neat enough to seem intentional, but not so severe that I looked as if I were headed to a committee hearing. Every movement reminded me what lay underneath. The bra straps on my shoulders. The lace at my hips. The knowledge that I had obeyed.

By one-thirty I had redone my makeup and changed earrings three times. By two I was so wound up that I left early because I could not bear another minute in the apartment. On the walk to the Metro, every step made me aware of the panties in a way that felt absurdly intimate. I kept imagining him asking what I had worn. I kept imagining having to answer truthfully. Worse, I kept imagining him not asking at all and somehow still knowing.

The train ride felt unreal. Across from me, a woman in scrubs read something on her phone and yawned. A man in a suit nodded off with his briefcase between his knees. Ordinary life went on all around me while under my skirt I wore the nicest underwear I owned because a stranger on an app had told me to.

Not a stranger, exactly, I corrected myself, and then hated that too. I knew his voice from a profile, his rules from a list, his wealth from a little metallic badge on a screen. But… that wasn’t knowing him, obviously.

Still, when I came up out of the Dupont Metro station and started toward the café, my pulse began to race.