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)
When it finally subsided—when the last aftershock had trembled through my thighs and my hand had gone still between my legs and my breathing had begun the long, ragged descent toward something resembling normal—I lay in the dark, stared at the ceiling, and felt the full, devastating weight of what I had just done.
Five times.
I had come five times. In less than—I turned my head to look at the clock—in less than an hour. The green numbers read 12:41. I had been masturbating for almost an hour. I, Anne Chamberlain, who had never in her life brought herself to orgasm, who had barely brought herself to touch herself through her underwear in the dark like a guilty child, had just experienced five orgasms in rapid succession while fantasizing about being spanked and belt-whipped and fucked by a man she’d met that morning.
CHAPTER 19
Paul
The moment I laid eyes on Anne in the studio the next day, I knew what she’d done in bed the previous night. It wasn’t anything as crude as a telltale sign like dark circles under her eyes. She’d dressed and made herself up with exactly the same meticulous, defensive care she had the previous day: a blouse, pink this time, buttoned to the collar and a fresh navy skirt. She’d gathered her blonde hair into its neat ponytail. She looked, to anyone without my particular training, like a girl who’d slept soundly and arrived prepared.
But I’d spent twenty-three years reading the bodies of young women who’d been told not to touch themselves and had touched themselves anyway. I could read the signs as easily as a newspaper.
Her walk told me everything. Yesterday she’d walked in the slightly tentative way of a girl entering unfamiliar territory. This morning’s stride carried a different weight. Her hips moved with a fraction more fluidity, a looseness in the hips that comes from a female body that has recently discovered what the regions between those hips can do.
Anne Chamberlain had become aware of herself between her legs in a way she hadn’t been twenty-four hours ago. I could see it in the micro-adjustments she made with each step. She tightened her thighs in a barely perceptible way. Her weight shifted slightly forward onto the balls of her feet as if her center of gravity had migrated south overnight.
Her eyes looked different, too. This morning they held something deeper than they had yesterday. I could see a sort of heaviness behind the green irises that spoke of hours spent in the dark with her own thoughts and her own hands. I even thought I could detect the urgent education that a real first orgasm can give a girl.
She also couldn’t quite meet my gaze. That provided the most telling sign of all. Yesterday’s avoidance had been general—the shyness of a modest girl in an immodest situation. This morning’s avoidance seemed specific. She’d look at my chin, my shoulder, the open collar of my shirt, anywhere but directly into my eyes, and each time her gaze skated past mine I could see the faintest bloom of color along her cheekbones.
“Good morning, Anne,” I said, keeping my voice warm and even. Professional. The voice of a trainer greeting his trainee, nothing more. I opened my arms. “Come here.”
I gave hugs as much as a diagnostic tool as a way to comfort a girl. It was one of the oldest techniques in my repertoire and I’d taught it to junior trainers at the Institute for years. You embrace the girl. You hold her against your body with appropriate firmness—not sexual, not aggressive, but encompassing. Enveloping. You press her chest to yours and settle your hands against her upper back and you hold her for three seconds longer than a casual greeting warrants, and in those three seconds her body tells you everything.
Anne stepped into the hug with an involuntary, full-body softening that began at her shoulders and rippled downward through her ribcage, her waist, her hips. Her arms came up around my torso with a hesitancy that lasted approximately one second before her hands flattened against my back and pressed, pulling herself closer.
Her forehead found the hollow below my collarbone and settled there, and I felt the small, shuddering exhale she released against my shirt; the breath of a girl whose body had spent the night in a state of heightened arousal and was now in the presence of the man who’d caused it.
I held her. My hands rested on her upper back, wide and steady, and I let the silence do its work. Against my chest I could feel her heart rate—elevated, rapid, the hummingbird pulse of acute nervousness. Her breathing became shallow and slightly irregular. And lower, where her hips pressed against my thighs through the layers of her skirt and my trousers, I could literally feel the heat.