Nanny's Little Secret

I locked the door from the inside. That was the part I kept coming back to later, the small useless fact of it, because a locked door is supposed to mean a man gets to decide what happens to him.

The drawer in my closet had a false bottom. I had built it myself, sanded the edges so the panel sat flush, and under it I kept the things I told myself I would throw out. Pale pink silk. A camisole with a band of lace at the hem that had cost more than I would admit. I only ever took them out on the nights the house was empty, and the house was supposed to be empty, because Margot had said she was driving back to the city until Sunday.

I had the camisole halfway over my head when I heard her car in the drive.

My hands went stupid. The fabric snagged on my ear and I stood there in the lamplight with my arms up like a man being arrested, listening to the front door, listening to her keys, listening to the particular weight of her step on the stairs that I had learned in the four months she had run my household. She did not call out. She never called out. That was the first thing I should have understood about her and the last thing I let myself believe.

The closet door was open. I had left it open because I was alone.

Margot stood in the frame of it with her coat still on and her eyes went over me once, slow, top to bottom, the way you look at a delivery to check nothing came broken. I waited for disgust. I had rehearsed disgust a hundred times in my head, the face people would make, and I had used it to keep myself in line for years.

She did not make that face. She tipped her head, and the corner of her mouth moved, and she said, “There you are.”

Two words. My stomach dropped through the floor and something else, lower, woke up hot and immediate and wrong, and I hated it. I was thirty four years old. I owned the house she was standing in. My cock was already thickening under the silk and there was nothing I could do to call it back, no muscle for that, no lock for that, and the shame of it ran up my neck and into my face while she watched it happen.

Pull it off, throw it down, laugh, say it was a bet. The excuses lined up and not one of them made it to my mouth.

“Don’t,” she said, when I reached for the hem. “Leave it. You picked it. Wear it.”

I left it.

I want to be honest about that, because the easy version of this story is that she made me, and that version is a lie I would have loved. She did not cross the room. She did not raise her voice. She set her bag down on my dresser and took off her coat and folded it over the chair like she had all the time in the world, and I stood in front of her in pink silk with my heart slamming and I did not move because some part of me had been waiting four months for someone to tell me to leave it.

“Turn around,” she said.

I turned around.

The camisole stopped above my hips. I knew exactly how I looked from behind and the knowing burned, the bare backs of my thighs, the way the lace cut across my lower back, and I felt her come closer now, heard the floor take her weight, and then her hand was flat between my shoulder blades, warm through the silk, pressing me forward until I had to catch myself on the dresser.

“Look at you,” she said, not unkind, which was worse. “All this control downstairs. The man who corrects the cleaner. The man who timed my drive. And up here you are this.”

Her thumb hooked the lace at my hip and snapped it lightly against my skin and my cock jumped, visible, obvious, tenting the silk out in front of me where the mirror caught it, and she saw, and she let me see her see.

“Say what you are,” she said.

I shook my head. Not a refusal. I could not get my voice to hold.

“You will.” Her hand slid from my back down the curve of my ass, claiming, unhurried, and I pushed back into it before I could stop myself and she made a low sound that meant she had expected exactly that. “Look how pretty you go when someone finally takes the wheel. You have been so tired, haven’t you. Holding all of it up alone.”

That landed somewhere I kept locked tighter than the drawer. My eyes stung and my hips kept moving and both things at once, the wet heat building behind my balls and the burn of being read like a page, and I bent further over the dresser because standing straight had stopped being mine to choose.

“Margot.” Her name came out wrecked.

“No,” she said. “Not Margot. Not from you. Not anymore.” She turned me by the shoulder, slow, until I had to look at her, until I had to let her watch my face do the thing it was doing. “From you it’s Nanny. And we are going to take very good care of this little secret of yours. All of it. The wanting, the hiding, the part of you that just went soft and sweet the second I walked in. I am going to make her behave.”

Her. She said it like a fact already filed.

I should have laughed. I should have been a grown man and laughed it off and walked her to the door and changed the locks. Instead I stood there in pink with my cock aching and leaking a dark spot into the silk and I felt the floor of my whole life tilt toward her, and the part of me that knew better, the part that ran the meetings and paid the mortgage, stood off to the side watching the rest of me go willingly and could not get a word in.

“Hands behind you,” Nanny said.

I put my hands behind me. She took both wrists in one of hers, gathered them at the small of my back, and the silk pulled tight across my chest and I had never felt the lace so much, every thread of it, my nipples gone hard against the fabric. With her free hand she reached into the bag she had set down so casually and I heard a zip and a small plastic click and I did not let myself look.

“I came back early,” she said against my ear, “because I sat in traffic for an hour thinking about this drawer. You think you built it well. You think I have not opened it every Sunday since March.”

My knees went.

She held me up by the wrists, easy, like I weighed nothing. “Every week I put it all back exactly how you left it. Folded the way you fold it. And I waited for you to be standing in it when I came through that door, because a man only locks something this carefully when he is praying to be caught.”

I made a sound I did not recognize.

“There she is,” Nanny said, soft, pleased, and her hand came around the front of me at last, palm flattening over the silk where I was hard and soaked through it, not gripping, just covering, owning the shape of it, and my whole body bowed into her hand and a sob caught in my throat because it was relief, the worst kind, the kind you cannot take back once you have let someone hear it.

“You don’t get to come from me touching you over your little nightie,” she said. “Not tonight. Tonight you learn what this is going to cost.” Her hand left me and I almost begged, the word right there, and the shame of how close it came scalded me.

She let go of my wrists. “Stay bent. Don’t you dare straighten up.”

I stayed bent. I heard her step back, heard her set something on the dresser by my face, and I looked because I could not help it.

A cage. Pink, of course, because she would have made sure of that, a small curved thing of medical plastic with a tiny brass lock beside it, the key already on a thin chain she was fastening around her own throat where I would have to look at it across every dinner for the rest of however long this was.

“From tonight this stays on,” Nanny said, lifting it, turning it in the lamplight so I had to watch it catch. “Pretty things don’t get to make their own mess. Pretty things get kept. You’re going to thank me when it clicks, and you’re going to mean it, and then we are going to start your first proper lesson on how a good girl behaves for the woman who runs her house.”

She crouched in front of me where I was bent over my own dresser in pink silk with my hands shaking against the wood, and she reached for the wet straining length of me with that cold pink cage open in her fingers, and she looked up into my face and waited, because she wanted my eyes on her when she did it.

“Hold still for Nanny,” she said.

And God help me, I held still.