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 made it to the stairs before I started crying again.
By the time I got outside the Capitol, though, I had my face under control. Not because I felt better. Because I knew now, with a clarity I hated, that I had just fucked up my life beyond belief, and if I were going to move forward from this point I would have to figure out how it had happened.
And worst of all, beneath the shame and the fear and the sick twisting awareness of how badly I had played this, there was still a pulse low in my body when I thought of his hand on my back, the command in his voice, and the instant, terrible quiet in me when I obeyed.
I walked all the way back to my apartment in Adams-Morgan feeling terribly marked. By the lingering soreness in my backside. By my shameful lack of panties. Things hidden by my skirt, and yet I felt as if everyone who glanced at me could tell what I had done, and had done to me, in a senator’s office… and just how steep a fall from grace I had just taken.
CHAPTER 3
Alex
When I woke up the next morning, I felt desperate enough about my prospects to download the Selecta Arrangements app. I lay in bed with my phone in my hand and my stomach in a knot, and within ten minutes I understood that Gowry hadn’t been taunting me with some exaggerated private vice of rich men. The app was real, polished, legal-looking, and far more explicit than I would have believed possible if I hadn’t been reading it myself with sleep still crusted in my eyes.
Selecta Arrangements called the men members or sponsors and the women associate members, which was bad enough in itself. The language tried to sound sleek and contractual. Lifestyle compatibility. Expectations. Structure. Allowance. Discretion.
But the more I read, the worse the euphemisms fared in my head. Sponsors could set curfews, approve clothing, require location sharing, require availability on specified nights, and, under a section so carefully written it made me feel cold, impose ‘agreed-upon’ corrective discipline.
Corrective discipline.
There were sample profiles. A few of the men were almost blandly gross—businessmen wanting ‘grateful feminine companionship’ and ‘a beautiful girl who understands her place.’ Others were simply open about it.
I believe in a firm hand. Bratty behavior will be corrected. I expect obedience, physical affection, and a willingness to accept consequences.
The women’s sample profiles made me want to throw my phone. Some of them read as if they had been written by interns in a department dedicated to male fantasy.
I want to serve and please. I respond to confident leadership. I appreciate a man who isn’t afraid to discipline me.
One girl, who looked about nineteen, smiling in pearls and nothing else, had actually written that she found being spanked grounding.
I stared at that word for a long time.
Then I closed the app, deleted it, and sat up in bed as though I had narrowly avoided swallowing poison.
“No,” I said out loud to my apartment.
I would not do that. I would not become one of those girls, no matter how pretty and polished the app made them look, no matter how much money sat beside the monthly allowance estimates, no matter how humiliatingly clear it was that men would pay very well to own pieces of beautiful women.
Especially not after Gowry. Especially not because of Gowry.
I spent the rest of the morning making more and more coffee in my kitchen and applying for jobs with the intense, punitive energy of someone trying to prove something to herself. Not policy jobs. That world had closed over me with shocking speed. I sent applications to communications firms, nonprofits, admin pools, boutique consultancies, and when none of that yielded anything more promising than automated replies, I broadened the search until I hated myself for how quickly my standards had collapsed.
Three days later I was wearing a green apron in a café on Connecticut Avenue and learning how to steam oat milk without scorching it.
It was not beneath me. I kept telling myself that until I almost believed it.
In truth, I had been lucky to get it so quickly. The manager, a woman named Denise with sleeve tattoos and a practical ponytail, cared less about my resume than about whether I could show up on time and not cry if customers were rude. I told her yes. The irony of that nearly made me laugh.
The work exhausted me in a different way than the Hill had. My feet hurt. My hair smelled like coffee at the end of every shift. Men in expensive coats snapped their fingers less often than I would have expected, but when they did, I had to smile at them instead of drafting memos about why they were idiots. Still, I found some relief in the simplicity.