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)
He wore dark trousers and a fitted charcoal shirt, open at the collar, sleeves rolled to the forearms to expose his thick wrists and hands that looked like they could break things or build things with equal competence. He was broad across the chest and shoulders, tapering to a trim waist, and he carried himself with the absolute stillness of a man who had nothing to prove to anyone in any room he entered.
I suddenly remembered the brief conversation I had had with Yolanda the previous night. She and I had drifted apart, I supposed, over my time at Selecta—mostly because I didn’t think I wanted to tell her about the embarrassing nature of my work for Penelope.
“Annie,” she had said, her voice breathless in the way that it always got when she wanted to dish the dirt, “what happened with your boss? No one seems to know the real story!”
“Oh,” I had said, my face burning as I paced my tiny apartment, “don’t believe everything you hear.”
But if I didn’t want to admit how humiliating and, well, intimate my job had gotten, the thought of telling Yolanda about the effect the man walking in my direction had on me… that seemed even worse, though I couldn’t have said why.
My heart had started to race. I could feel it in my throat, in my wrists, in a place behind my sternum that felt like I had a small bird trapped there.
“Anne,” he said when he reached me, and the sound of my name in his voice—deep, resonant, with a warmth that seemed at odds with the sheer physical authority he projected—made something flutter low in my stomach. “I’m Paul Mason. I’ll be working with you on the campaign.”
He extended his hand. I had to peel one arm away from the call sheet to take it, and when his fingers closed around mine—warm, dry, engulfing—I felt the size difference between us. My hand disappeared inside his. He held it for what seemed to me exactly the right amount of time. It felt long enough to be personal, but not long enough to be threatening. Then he released it with a slight, almost imperceptible squeeze.
“It’s… it’s nice to meet you, Mr. Mason,” I said, and my voice came out thin and reedy and nothing like the voice of a woman who was ready to do whatever was about to happen in this studio.
“Paul,” he corrected. Then, after a beat, “Actually, we should get started on the right foot. You’ll call me Master Paul.” He said it with a faint smile that might have been humor, but his eyes didn’t smile. His eyes watched me the way a doctor watches a patient—cataloguing symptoms, reading signs, arriving at a diagnosis before the patient has even finished describing what hurts.
Master Paul. The title seemed to enter my mind, and then somehow my body, like a physical thing, sending signals outward through my body that I felt in places I didn’t want to feel them. I knew what that title meant. I’d learned enough in my employment at Selecta to know that Institute trainers—men and women certified through Selecta’s behavioral training program—used the honorific Master or Mistress as a marker of their authority over the young women assigned to their ‘care.’ I’d read about it in meeting briefs. I’d typed notes about it. I’d filed it away in the same mental compartment where I kept all the other impossible things I’d learned since walking through Selecta’s gleaming doors.
But I hadn’t expected to encounter one. And definitely not here, today. The call sheet—which I’d read six times on the elevator ride down to the twenty-first floor, my eyes skipping over the words as if speed-reading might make them less real—had said nothing about an Institute trainer. It had listed wardrobe, lighting setups, set locations, and a brief note about talent direction that I’d assumed meant a photographer telling me where to stand.
“I didn’t…” I started, and stopped. I could feel the crease forming between my eyebrows, the one my mother used to smooth away with her thumb when I was a teenager, telling me that frowning would give me wrinkles. “I didn’t know there would be a… that you were…”
“A man?” he supplied, with that same faint smile. “Or a trainer?”
“Either,” I whispered.
He studied me for a moment. That focused, unhurried gaze moved over my face—my eyes, my mouth, the blush I could feel climbing from my collarbone to my jaw—and then down, briefly, to my white-knuckled grip on the call sheet. He didn’t leer. He didn’t let his eyes linger anywhere they shouldn’t have. But the assessment was thorough, and I had the unshakable sense that he had already seen things about me that I hadn’t shown anyone, things I hadn’t even shown myself.
“Melissa asked me to participate,” he said. “She thinks the material will be best served by a dynamic that’s authentic. Not posed. Not directed in the traditional sense. Her Secret Garden is about real responses, Anne. Real submission. You can’t get that from a photographer saying ‘turn left, tilt your chin, look vulnerable.’ You get it from a dynamic that creates the conditions for those responses to emerge naturally.”