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)
“Happy wife, efficient life,” Gerald said, and several people laughed.
CHAPTER 3
Anne
I did not laugh. I typed energy efficiency up—household compliance and stared at the words until they stopped looking like English.
Paddle sales, I learned at a Thursday afternoon product review, were steady. Not growing, not declining—steady, in the way that suggested the market had reached a saturation point where every household that wanted an official Selecta discipline paddle already had one. The product team seemed untroubled by this.
“Paddles are a gateway,” said a woman named Lorraine from consumer insights. “They get us in the door—into the kitchen, really. Community surveys tell us that seventy percent of paddle households have the paddle hanging in the kitchen where she can see it every day. But the growth categories are where it gets interesting.”
The growth category that was getting the most attention, it turned out, was anal training supplies.
I remember the exact moment I first heard the phrase anal training supplies spoken aloud in a professional setting, because my fingers actually stopped moving on the keyboard. A man named Philip from the product analytics team brought up a slide showing a steep upward curve—anal plug sales, rising quarter over quarter with no sign of plateauing.
“We’re seeing thirty-two percent growth in the anal training category across NMA communities,” Philip said, clicking to the next slide. “And here’s where it gets really interesting.” A scatter plot appeared, dense with data points, showing a correlation line that climbed unmistakably from lower left to upper right. “We’ve identified a strong positive correlation between anal training supply sales and household energy-efficiency scores.”
He paused, letting the slide speak for itself, and then continued with the air of someone presenting a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.
“Our theory—and we’re still gathering data, so I want to flag this as preliminary—is that the correlation reflects a broader pattern of wifely obedience. A wife who is undergoing regular anal training is, by definition, submitting to her husband’s authority in the most intimate and demanding way possible. That level of submission doesn’t stay in the bedroom. It permeates the household dynamic. When her husband tells her to turn off the air conditioning at nine p.m. or to limit her shower to five minutes, she does it. Not only because she cares about the electric bill, but because she’s been trained to obey.”
Several heads nodded. Someone made a note. Penelope, beside me, uncapped her pen and wrote something in the margin of her printed agenda with a neat, unhurried hand.
I typed anal training sales—energy correlation—obedience theory and felt something inside me crack, just slightly, like a hairline fracture in porcelain. Not because I was shocked—I was past shock by then, or thought I was—but because the logic was so clean, so tidy, so presented-without-apology that it left no room for the outrage I kept expecting to feel.
These people weren’t villains twirling mustaches. They were analysts reading data. They were professionals doing their jobs. And the data said that women whose husbands put things inside their bottoms to teach them obedience were also women who turned off the lights when their husbands told them to.
I didn’t know what to do with that. So I typed it into my notes and moved on.
Eight weeks and two days after my first day at Selecta, I followed Penelope into a conference room on the thirty-sixth floor—two floors higher than our usual meeting rooms, which I’d learned by then carried significance. Higher floors meant higher stakes. The thirty-sixth floor had thicker carpet, heavier doors, and artwork on the walls that looked like it belonged in a museum rather than an office building.
The room was smaller than the one where I’d watched Karen press her thighs together on screen. An intimate round table rather than the usual oval, set with crystal water glasses and a small arrangement of white orchids at the center. Only four chairs.
Two of them were already occupied.
I noticed the man first. He was impossible not to notice. Tall even while seated, with the broad-shouldered build of someone who had been athletic in college and had maintained it with the discipline of someone who maintained everything. His blond hair was styled with precision, and his eyes—sky blue, startlingly vivid—moved to Penelope and then to me with an appraising calm that made me feel, instantly and irrationally, like I’d been weighed and measured before I’d taken a single step into the room. He wore a dark suit so perfectly fitted it might have been sewn onto him that morning, and his watch caught the light with the quiet gleam of jewelry that cost more than my annual rent.
“Penny,” he said, and his voice was deep and smooth and carried the easy authority of a man who had never once had to raise it. “Good, you’re here. And this must be your new girl.”