Page 14 of His to Correct

He took a deep breath through his nose. My whole upper body felt like I had gotten an instant sunburn there.

“Ah, yes. Smell, too. And your cunt has a very sweet aroma, Melissa. But as I was saying, there’s no point in denying how wet your pretty cunt is, just at the moment. While we’re on the subject… have a Brazilian wax this weekend, please. We subsidize those fully—just submit the receipt to Heather. The next time I inspect you, I want you smooth and tidy.”

I opened my eyes to see that in front of me, on the desk, my hands had curled into white-knuckled fists. Stuart’s hands left me. I waited for a sound I suddenly felt absolutely sure would follow: his zipper being lowered. I was certain I was about to be fucked by my new boss.

The way Jacob fucked Grace. The way they do it, on New Modesty Blue.

“You may pull up your panties and go,” Stuart said, though. “I want you to spend your first month just learning the business. Ask questions, explore our offerings. I’m available to fill in any blanks. Mandy handles my calendar.”

CHAPTER 8

Melissa

I walked out of Stuart’s office on shaky legs, trying to pretend none of it had happened. Inside my head, the voice of my reason yelled the same thing, over and over.

You weren’t actually aroused. Your body had some strange, horrible reaction. You arenotfrustrated. You arenotunsatisfied.

By the time I reached my new desk, I had begun to believe it. What happened the rest of that day, and over the next two weeks, made it almost plausible. I settled into my new job. By the end of that first day I could pretend that the soreness from the paddle actually came from my miles on the treadmill. The eye-popping splendor of the Selecta executive fitness center didn’t get in the way of that idea, either.

I kept a towel around my waist in the locker room—and at home in my apartment—until I felt certain the bruises had faded completely.

I learned the business, just as Stuart had told me to do. I saw no paddles, nor any other woman sitting in a way that suggested she had experienced the same kind of ordeal I had. I got the Brazilian wax, and my lingerie collection grew, but I managed to tell myself that those things represented part of my ongoing professional development.

Sure, before the Corporate Laws women probably didn’t have to worry about their appearance underneath their clothing, but what if I actually decided I wanted to date one of the wealthy guys who bought me and Heather drinks when we hung out after work, a week after my arrival? I knew I’d be grateful to have something attractive on, like the purple mesh bikini panties or the white lace thong I’d bought with only the slightest of blushes—or the red garter belt that had raised a bit more heat in my face at checkout.

I classified those blushes with the similar reaction I had to New Modesty Blue. Thankfully, after the video with Grace and Jacob, I didn’t have to watch any more of it. To keep the office efficient, my coworkers who were responsible for content on NMB watched the streams in one of the viewing rooms that lined the inside of our floor. The production of the streams happened on location in New Modesty towns, and the control room for the channel as a whole was on the floor below us, fifty-one.

“If you don’t want to watch NMB,” Heather told me that evening, once we had told the drink-buyers thanks but no thanks, “don’t go to fifty-one, at least until you have to.”

“Do you…” I tried to figure out how to phrase what I needed to know.

Heather got me, though.

“I don’t go there,” she said, her face becoming oddly wry.

A surge of relief went through my chest, though Heather’s expression confused me. I was about to follow up, when she continued.

“I don’t need to get that turned on during the work day.”

I swallowed hard, heat filling my face. Did Heather think that the reason I didn’t want to watch NMB was the same as hers?

Isn’t it?whispered a voice at the back of my head.

I had to concentrate hard to keep myself from biting my lip. For a moment, Heather and I gazed into each other’s eyes. I looked away.

“How about… um… I mean… I bet we get perks, don’t we? Like, you know, sports tickets and concert tickets and that kind of thing?” I asked, so desperate to change the subject that I spoke the first words that came into my head. I couldn’t meet Heather’s eyes; I felt sure she could see straight through me. At that moment, it didn’t matter: part of me wanted to keep talking about NMB—yearned for it—but the rest of me screamed that nothing good could come from any additional information on the topic. Nor from thinking about my lacy green thong and the helpless clench that had just happened inside it as the vision of Grace and Jacob had once again risen unbidden into my mind’s eye.

But thankfully, as I got up to speed, I didn’t have to go to fifty-one and I gradually got used to the near-omnipresence of NMB in the reports I read. It helped somewhat that the channel’s assessment team, who evaluated the channel’s performance from both a production-value and an audience-response perspective, wrote about any relevant specifics in a dispassionate, clinical way.

The report that changed everything for me, for example, seemed entirely innocuous when I started to read it, two weeks after my disastrous arrival at Selecta.

On 18 March, StreamGeorgette and Michael: a Dairymaid’s Storyfeatured a toileting punishment in the new communal bathing facility built by NMB in Bradford, a Northern Division NM town. The facility cost roughly $2m to build. ROI seems likely to be high, however: the audience response was universally positive. Sample group A (ageplay-specific) showed an arousal rate of 92%, which obviously tracks with that group’s interests. More interestingly, sample groups B and C (more generally dominant clients) weren’t far behind, with arousal rates of 86% and 89% respectively.

I had to gulp at the wordstoileting punishment. The rest of the report, however, fascinated me. The simple fact of having such fine-grained data with which to shape the division’s offerings got my brain going in ways I hadn’t experienced since the heady days of case studies in my business courses. In discussing case studies, I had always felt, I could let my creativity out—think about Gibbon and Carlyle and Darwin, even, and what they would make of the case, how really brilliant minds would deal with a minor matter like adjusting a corporation’s portfolio to meet the market’s emerging needs. Even if the kind of data collection I had imagined didn’t exist, when working on a case study I could pretend it did, and shape my response accordingly.

Here at Selecta, though, it seemed like everything was possible. When I read a report like the one aboutGeorgette and MichaelI felt as if back in school I wouldn’t even have been able to imagine the level of detail the NMB assessment team had at their disposal. Every time I drilled down in the report—like on the eighty-six percent figure for Group B—I got another, even more finely grained array of numbers. Blinking, as I clicked, at what showed up on my screen, I realized I could see everything about each member of each sample group—hundreds of wealthy men and women—except the names involved, whether of the clients themselves or of their locations.

Icouldsee their level of education, their income, their field, the socioeconomic makeup of their community, the general location of that community, their family size and composition, their five most recent takeout orders… it went on and on.

---