Page 32 of Shamefully Trained

He glanced at me, not unkindly, but with that same terrible steadiness. “First, I’ll decide whether you’ve earned the toilet.”

The words made me stop walking for half a second. That, in turn, made the problem worse. To my horror, I started shifting from foot to foot, unable to stop myself.

He stopped too, turned, and looked at me on the crowded sidewalk as if there were nothing unusual in our conversation.

“You can still leave,” he said.

There it was again, the fact I kept trying to bury. I could leave. I could turn around right now and go back to my apartment and keep my pride, or what remained of it.

But beneath that clear possibility lay another truth, just as clear now and much uglier: I didn’t want to leave badly enough.

I found that knowledge highly distressing. I wanted to hate him for making me face it. I despised myself though, instead, for standing there on a public street, desperate to pee and half mad with arousal, and not walking away.

But, I told myself, I couldn’t really leave, could I? His apartment obviously had the closest toilet. I bit my lip, my forehead creasing hard. I shifted my weight again, exactly like a little girl who needed the potty.

Then, to my abject humiliation, the pressure down there became too much. I felt myself let go, just a little.

“Oh, no,” I whimpered.

Porter’s eyes moved downward. Terrified, I followed his gaze to where, between my feet, the sidewalk had developed a tiny pool of moisture. My eyes rose to meet his again. The expression I saw in his face, of evaluation, mixed with sympathy, mixed with unmistakable masculine hunger, brought a warmth to my chest that I could never have untangled in a million years.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re almost there. When we get to my place we’ll deal with you properly.”

I nearly wailed at the effect those words, in that voice, had on my body. Porter had turned to walk quickly onward, and I couldn’t do anything but follow, because walking seemed to be the only thing that would distract me from the shameful pressure between my thighs.

The building had one of those old Washington facades that hid money behind restraint. We had passed through the lobby and into a private elevator before I had really taken it in. I stood beside him with my thighs clenched and my whole body vibrating with the effort not to lose control completely. The elevator seemed to move too slowly and too smoothly. I fixed my eyes on the numbers and tried not to squirm.

“Please,” I said, very quietly, because there was no dignity left in me to support any other tone. “Please, I really can’t⁠—”

“I know,” he said.

That was all. Not comfort. Just knowledge.

The doors opened onto a space so beautiful that under any other circumstances I would have stopped dead and stared. Dark wood. Long windows full of late afternoon light. Rugs that looked too expensive to step on. Everything controlled, sumptuous, masculine in a way that made me understand at once that nothing in it looked that way by accident.

I barely saw any of it, though. Porter’s hand came to my elbow, not roughly, just directing, and he guided me down a hall and into a bathroom that looked larger than my bedroom. Marble. Brass. A soaking tub. A glass shower big enough for three people. Soft lighting that ought to have made the room soothing and instead made it feel staged for my humiliation.

“There,” he said, indicating the toilet.

I gave a little choked sound and all but ran for it. My fingers were on my skirt already, my knees bending.

“Stop.”

I froze.

It was extraordinary how completely I froze. One word, in that tone, and my body locked in place despite the desperate ache in it.

I half turned, wild-eyed. “I can’t.”

“If you sit on that toilet,” he said evenly, “I’ll cane your bottom until you don’t even want to look at it in the mirror.”

For one second I just stared at him. The room seemed to tilt around me. Then the meaning hit in full. Not if I made a scene. Not if I refused some larger instruction. If I sat down to pee. He was making even this part of his insane system.

My eyes filled at once. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I wailed.

“No,” he said. “But you’re going to do as you’re told anyway.”

The pressure inside me had become agony. I was crying now in earnest, shaking and furious and so aroused that the fact of it made me want to die. I looked at the toilet. I looked at him. I knew with hideous clarity that he meant it.