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)
Melissa looked up from her tablet. “Go on.”
“Her pussy,” Paul said, nodding toward me—toward the place between my legs, as casually as if he were pointing out a design flaw in a piece of furniture. “She came in unshaved. That’s an oversight in terms of prep, sure, but in terms of story, it’s a gift. If we shoot her first with the hair—in the baby doll, let’s say, in the bedroom set—and then I discover it during the scene and make the decision that it needs to go so she can wear the Surrender panties properly, we can make baring her pussy an integral part of the story. It’s not something that happened off screen before the campaign’s story began. It happens to her, on camera, as part of her submission.”
My stomach dropped. I opened my mouth but no sound came out, because the words baring her pussy had short-circuited something essential in my ability to form language.
Melissa’s eyes widened slightly. Then they narrowed, and the expression that crossed her face was one I recognized from the conference room on the thirty-sixth floor—that anticipatory relish, that look of a card player who’d just been dealt an ace she hadn’t expected.
“That’s brilliant,” she said. “That’s—yes. That changes the whole first act of the campaign. We were going to open with the lingerie reveal, but if we open with the baby doll and the discovery and the correction—God, that’s so much better. That’s the whole thesis of HSG in a single sequence. She’s not ready. He makes her ready. She submits to being made ready, and finds that she needed it more than she could ever have admitted.”
She tapped furiously on her tablet, her coffee abandoned on a nearby equipment case, her dark hair falling forward as she bent over the screen. “Okay. Okay, I’m rearranging the schedule. We push the Surrender Line hero shots to this afternoon. The morning block becomes the baby doll-to-shaving sequence. Darlene, can you light the bedroom and the bathroom by—what time is it—can you have both sets lit by ten?”
“Ten-fifteen,” Darlene said, already moving toward her equipment. “I’ll need to recalibrate the bathroom. The tile reflects differently than I’d planned for.”
“Fine. Ten-fifteen.” Melissa looked up from her tablet and fixed me with those sharp brown eyes, and for a moment—just a moment—something flickered in her expression that might have been sympathy. Or might have been excitement wearing sympathy’s mask. “Anne. You’re doing great. Don’t move.”
I didn’t move. I stood in the pool of white light, naked and burning and wet, and waited for whatever came next.
What came next was a young woman—an assistant I hadn’t noticed before, with a headset and a clipboard and the brisk, unfazed demeanor of someone who had seen far stranger things on this studio floor—who appeared at my side holding a garment on a padded hanger.
“You can put this on,” she said, and held it out to me. “I’m Amy.”
It was a baby doll nightgown. Not the champagne silk from Melissa’s presentation—this one was pink. A soft, blushing pink that deepened to rose at the gathered empire waist, with a bodice of delicate lace that would cover my breasts without concealing them and a skirt of sheer chiffon that fell in a whisper-light cascade to what I estimated would be just barely past my hips.
It was beautiful. It was the kind of thing I might have seen in a shop window and touched with my fingertips and then walked away from, because girls like me didn’t wear things like that. Girls like me wore polka-dot cotton panties and modest blouses and kept their armor on.
I took it from the hanger with shaking hands. The fabric weighed almost nothing; it pooled in my palms in a delicate pile that made me think of cotton candy. I gathered it and pulled it over my head, and as it settled over my body—the lace cupping my breasts, the chiffon floating against my thighs, the thin spaghetti straps resting on my shoulders—something happened that I wasn’t prepared for.
I felt like a different person.
Not a better person or a worse person. A different one. The girl who had walked into this studio in her cream blouse and navy skirt and sensible underwear had been Anne Chamberlain, administrative assistant, note-taker, good girl in the way that meant invisible and compliant and safely unsexy.
The girl standing here now, in a pink baby doll that showed the shadow of her nipples through lace and the curve of her bottom through chiffon and—God help me—the triangle of hair between her legs through fabric so sheer it might as well have been candlelight… this girl was someone else. Someone I’d caught glimpses of in Penelope’s office, bent over the desk. Someone I’d felt stirring in the conference room, squeezing her thighs not so that the naughty feeling would go away, but so it would grow.