Page 20 of Shamefully Trained

“So are you,” I tried.

“I prefer not to keep people waiting.”

Up close his eyes were darker than I had expected. His face was not soft anywhere. Not severe in a cruel way exactly, but disciplined. He looked like a man who had spent a long time making sure he was not ruled by impulse. The fact that he was sitting in a Selecta Arrangements meet-up with me made that restraint feel much more charged, not less: his decision to buy a younger woman for his bed seemed to rest on a bedrock of closely reasoned points.

He let the silence stretch just long enough to make me aware of it. Then he said, “You’ve had a difficult week, I’m guessing.”

The understatement of it, along with the strange intimacy, made me let out a short, incredulous breath. I wondered suddenly if he knew more about me than I had revealed in my SA profile.

“You could say that,” I finally replied.

“I could,” he said. “But I’d rather be precise.”

The server set down coffee and water. Porter thanked him without looking away from me. Once we were alone again, he said, in the same even tone, “You worked for Senator Hathaway until a couple of weeks ago. You were dismissed after Senator Gowry fucked you in his hideaway.”

For a second I genuinely forgot how to breathe.

The room did not change, and yet everything in it seemed suddenly remote. Cups clinked somewhere. Someone laughed softly near the window. I sat frozen with my fingers tightening around nothing in my lap, staring at him.

My face went hot so fast it hurt.

“How,” I said, and then had to stop because my throat felt too tight. “How do you know that?”

He did not answer immediately. “Washington is a small city when it comes to certain kinds of information.”

Humiliation hit me in a hard wave, sharper because I had let myself imagine, stupidly, that whatever had happened in Gowry’s office still belonged in some contained private chamber of shame, rather than circulating among men with influence and women with reasons to look away.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

Porter regarded me for one beat, two. Then he nodded as if I had told him something useful.

“All right,” he said. “Then I’ll make this simpler.”

Nothing about him suggested that simplification would have anything to do with mercy. I felt it at once: I wasn’t going to like whatever he would do next.

“I am willing to sponsor you,” he went on. “For ten thousand a month, plus a nice apartment in Selecta’s subsidized housing scheme.”

I stared.

Ten thousand. Plus housing.

The number had enough force to cut through even my shame for an instant. Ten thousand a month. My debts… breathing room… savings… the possibility of stepping out of panic and into something like stability. The figure opened in my mind like a door and then, just as quickly, I understood that with Porter there would be something hard and exact on the other side of it.

He set his coffee cup down with quiet precision.

“But only,” he said, “if you stop pretending that what happened with Gowry is irrelevant to your future. You will tell me the truth of it. All of it. And if I take you on, you will submit to proper training as a sexual servant.”

My jaw had slackened fully by the time he reached the phrase that flipped my heart end over end: sexual servant. Every syllable seemed to strike a different exposed place in me.

“I—” I swallowed. “That’s a very strange way to talk to someone you’ve just met.”

“It’s a very unusual app that brought us together this way.”

I had no answer to that.

His gaze dropped, just briefly, to my blouse, my throat, my face again. “You wore the lingerie.”

I felt my thighs tense under the tablecloth.