Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 86432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
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.
It was one of those places that seemed designed to transport you to Europe. Dark wood, brass, expensive pastries under glass, little marble tables close enough together to encourage quietness. I had a look, and kept walking, then stopped half a block away and checked the time on my phone. 2:47.
Too early.
I stood there anyway, pretending to examine the menu in the window of a different café while my heart pounded. I wondered if he was already inside, watching. The thought made my nipples tighten abruptly under the bra. I looked around, suddenly self-conscious about the way I stood, the way I held my bag, the possibility that every man in a good coat might be him.
At 2:55 I could not justify waiting outside any longer, so I went back to Café Fleur and went in.
The bell over the door gave a discreet little chime that still felt to me like an announcement.
The warmth hit first, then the smell of coffee and butter and sugar. I took in the room in one sweep that I hoped looked casual: couples, two women with laptops, an older man alone with a newspaper, a pair of young staffer-looking types in shirtsleeves, their suit jackets over the backs of their chairs.
Then I saw him.
He sat at a table near the back, where he could see both the door and most of the room without being in the middle of it.
For half a second I stopped walking.
The photograph on the app had been accurate in a functionally useless way. Yes, the jaw, the mouth, the dark suit, the silver at the temple. It had omitted the effect.
In person Porter B. was tall, but lean rather than bulky, not imposing in the crude way some men were. He sat with such complete self-possession that the space around him seemed to arrange itself accordingly. His suit was charcoal, his shirt white, his tie dark blue. He looked wealthy without looking decorated.
His gaze was on me already, and I knew at once that he had recognized me, though I couldn’t have said exactly how I understood that. Perhaps he had narrowed his eyes, but so very slightly that only my unconscious mind perceived it.