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)
“In here,” he said, moving down a short hall, “is the bedroom.”
It was beautifully done in creams and slate blue, with a wide bed, crisp linens, a long dresser, and heavy curtains over tall windows.
Next he showed me the closet.
I stared.
It was full. Dresses, skirts, blouses, slacks, sweaters, coats, shoes in boxes below, all in sizes that looked very much as though someone had expected them to fit me. I touched the sleeve of a cashmere cardigan with stunned fingertips.
“There are more items coming,” he said.
I turned toward him. “You already had all this arranged?”
He did not answer the question directly. Instead he went to a lower drawer in the dresser and pulled it open.
Lingerie.
“For when I want you in something nice,” he told me. “After I’ve had you waxed.”
Silk. Lace. Satin. Bras and panties, garters, stockings, little scraps of things that looked less like clothing than like a humiliating form of decoration. My face went hot as I looked down at them.
He slid the drawer shut and led me into the large bathroom. The space itself was lavish, with pale stone and mirrors and brushed gold fixtures. Inside the cabinet were rows of products: skin care, hair care, makeup, razors, bath oils, tampons, hair ties, toothpaste, body lotion, even a curling iron.
“This is too much,” I murmured.
“No,” he said mildly. “It’s efficient.”
Then he took out his phone and tapped into the SA app. He showed me his home screen, which had options mine definitely did not. He tapped the one labeled Associate supervision.
His screen filled with six thumbnails depicting an interior, including—I realized with a lurch of my tummy—a view of the two of us, standing in the bathroom.
Another view displayed the entry. Another the living room. The kitchen. The bedroom, from two different angles.
I stared at the screens. “You can see all of it.”
“Yes.”
“All the time?”
His gaze rested on me. I looked down, my stomach tightening, thinking about his eye contact rules, though of course I didn’t have to, then, because he had his jeans on.
“Right. Of course,” I mumbled.
He showed me the lock controls. The shades. The climate settings. How deliveries would be made. How I could request items in my own SA app. He did it all with the same practical tone he might have used to orient a new employee, if new employees were expected to sleep plugged and under surveillance one floor below the man who had just fucked them senseless over a dining table.
Then he put the phone away and looked at me as if the tour had concluded.
“Be in that bed in fifteen minutes,” he said. “Naked.”
My pulse jumped. “And then?”
“I’ll decide what to do with you.”
He left. The door shut behind him with a soft sound that somehow emphasized the fact that I was alone only in what seemed like a technical sense.
I stood in the middle of the living room for one stupid second, feeling the plug inside me, the soft sweats against my bare skin, the invisible cameras, the proximity of him one floor above. Then I moved.
I went first to the bedroom because it seemed most urgent. The bed looked too neat to touch. I stripped off the sweatshirt and sweatpants with clumsy hands and left them in a heap on the bench at the foot of the bed. The air touched every place the fabric had warmed. My nipples tightened at once. The plug shifted when I bent to pull the pants fully off, and I had to close my eyes for a second.
Bathroom. I brushed my teeth because I needed to do something normal. I splashed water on my face. In the mirror I looked strange to myself, as if Porter had somehow rearranged me at the cellular level. My hair, half dry from the bath, had gone wild at the ends. My cheeks still held too much color. My mouth looked swollen.
My eyes looked… not happy, certainly, but dazed in a way that suggested wonder and enchantment—which, paradoxically or not, frightened me. The remaining rational part of me, anyway.
I checked the time twice, then padded back to the bedroom. I got under the covers and lay on my back, naked except for the thing inside me, and tried not to think. The sheets were cool and high-thread-count smooth. The mattress felt so comfortable it seemed indecent.
At what must have been exactly the moment when fifteen minutes had elapsed, a speaker somewhere in the room came alive.
“Open your legs.”
I jerked so hard the sheets rustled. Porter’s voice, disembodied but perfectly clear, made the room change shape around me. It wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be.
“Yes, sir,” I whispered, though I had no idea whether the system could hear me. I spread my knees.
“I can hear you,” he said, “even at that volume. And I can see you. Turn over. Knees apart. Take the covers down and present your bottom.”