Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 80699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
My phone beeped and I fished it out of my handbag. I had to stand under the awning of a boutique to read it, the sun was so bright, and I drew a sneering look from an elegantly dressed woman just going in to buy, I felt certain, a three thousand dollar skirt or at least a five hundred dollar t-shirt. Wondering if I would ever stop blushing, I read the message from the man who had apparently watched me pleasure myself for the first time.
5:30 at the Beverly Hills Hotel bar. I’m putting a little something in your account so you can buy yourself something special to wear. Nothing fancy, but make sure your lingerie is prettier than those gray panties.
My heart had started beating wildly even before the alert came in from my bank. A little something. Five thousand dollars. More than my first week’s subsidy.
For a moment I considered just taking the money and running. That little something represented a few weeks at least in a non-corporate town. Even in a corporate town, it could serve as a bridge to let me find an actual job worth having, in an office or a factory, where I wouldn’t have to think about the fabulously wealthy, sneering people of Beverly Hills, or about the photographer’s story, or about the dark eyes of Christian G, the gorgeous, arrogant movie mogul.
A little something?
Less—maybe much less—than he would give me for an allowance, right? If Christian G said that represented ‘a little something,’ surely he would supply much more than that as my sponsor.
But that message. The last sentence. Against the will of what felt like more than half of my mind, I read it again, and I felt the blood rush to my cheeks as my forehead creased very hard. Worse—much, much worse—I felt warmth down below, too. The ‘story’ seemed to enfold me again, and instead of Mary the photographer as the narrator, I felt like Christian G had taken over. The man who clearly wanted to fuck me had just assumed control of the plot.
The sneering woman emerged from the boutique, carrying a shopping bag that looked to me like it might cost five thousand dollars all by itself. She gave me another look, this time all the way up and down, then literally put her nose in the air and walked away down Rodeo Drive.
I turned toward the window of the shop, and saw the olive green romper I had to wear, there in the window. The urge to go into the store, buy it, wear it out of the store, and chase the haughty woman down rose inside me. If I could have done it without sweating so profusely I would probably stain the romper, I would have; I had run track in high school.
Trying to remember the old movie I had apparently started to reenact—a story about a hooker who falls in love with a rich guy who takes her shopping, something like that—I went into the boutique. When I saw the saleswoman look me up and down, the same way the customer had, I remembered it vividly, though I couldn’t recall the title. The millionaire had made a similar saleswoman grovel, I thought.
I almost wanted this woman to act in a similarly unprofessional way, but my story didn’t really seem likely to track closely with that movie, and she instead plastered a pleasant smile on her face. She helped me find the romper in my size. Rather to my surprise it only cost fifteen hundred dollars.
Standing in the dressing room, looking at myself in the mirror wearing the beautiful, not-too-fancy but also stunning-in-its-own-way romper, I felt that the story had come to some sort of important moment, and I watched the red come into my cheeks yet again. If I bought the romper, I would have to go to the waxing appointment, wouldn’t I? And if I went to the aesthetician and got myself bared between my thighs, as highly recommended by Selecta, I would have to go to the lingerie shop right next to this boutique and fulfill the first command ever given me by a dominant man.
Christian G couldn’t be anything else, could he? Dominant. Arrogant. A natural alpha.
I watched in the mirror as my right hand again developed a will of its own. I didn’t seem to have any power to stop my fingers as they found their way inside the loose leg of the romper, questing for a way to soothe away the tingle that had become so dismayingly persistent, inside my panties.
I swallowed hard. What the eff is wrong with you? my brain demanded of my body. You don’t do this! Especially not in front of a photographer. Especially not in a dressing room.
My fingertips encountered the cotton of my panties. I had somehow, lost in the mortifying moment, expected a different fabric: silky, or lacy, or something.