Sit Still, Little One

Margot was the name on my law license, the one that closed deals before lunch, and right now it meant nothing because I was kneeling on a hardwood floor with my spine screaming and a man behind me counting.

“Five,” Theo said. “You dropped on five. We were going to ten.”

I had been holding the position for what my thighs swore was an hour. Knees apart, back straight, hands flat on the tops of my legs, chin level. He called it sitting pretty. I called it, in the part of my head that still wore a suit, a humiliation dressed up with a soft word.

My arms shook. That was the truth of it. Forty years old, a corner office, and I could not hold my own body still for a man in a button-down.

“Up,” he said.

He did not raise his voice. He never did. That was the thing about Theo that I had not braced for, the quiet. I had prepared for a brute. I had a whole speech ready for a brute. He just stood there with his hands in his pockets and waited like the floor and my knees and my pride were all on his clock, not mine.

I pushed my shoulders back. The line of my spine pulled tight and a sound came out of me I did not give permission for.

“There,” he said. “That is what good looks like. Hold it.”

I held it.

This is insane, I thought, and then under that thought, lower, where I did not look, was the other one. The one that liked being told. I shoved it down the way you shove a drawer that will not close.

He walked a slow circle around me. I kept my eyes forward like he had taught me, on the leg of the table, the grain of the wood, anything. His shoes came into the bottom of my view and stopped.

“You’re wet,” he said.

My whole face went hot. “I’m not.”

“Margot.” Just the name. The way he said it made my stomach drop. “I have not touched you. You held a position for four minutes and your thighs are slick and you want to tell me you’re not.” He crouched. I could feel the warmth of him near my shoulder. “We are going to have a problem if you lie to me about your own body. Your body is the one thing in this room you cannot argue your way out of.”

I hated that he was right. I hated the slow throb that had started low in me somewhere around minute two, the way the ache in my back fed it instead of killing it. My pussy was wet. I had not decided to be. It happened the way weather happens, over me, without my vote.

“It’s the position,” I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted.

“I know what it is.” He stood. “It’s that you’re not in charge for the first time in years and your cunt figured it out before your mouth would admit it.”

The word in his calm mouth landed somewhere it had no business landing. I clenched and he saw me clench, I knew he saw, because something moved at the corner of his jaw that was almost a smile and was not quite.

“Stay,” he said, and crossed the room.

I stayed. That was the part that would keep me up later, in my own bed, in my own clean apartment with my own framed diplomas. Not that he told me to stay. That I did.

He came back with a folded towel and something thick and white and I knew what it was before my brain would say the word and my brain, the good lawyer, would not say the word. He set it on the floor in front of me where I had to look at it.

“No,” I said.

“You’ve held your posture for four minutes and you couldn’t get to ten.” He crouched again, unhurried. “Grown women who can sit pretty get to keep their dignity in the bathroom. You haven’t earned that yet. So we do it my way, and my way means you wear what I put on you, and you stop pretending the rules are negotiable.”

“I am a partner at a firm that bills more in a week than you” My voice broke on the word and I despised it for breaking.

“I know exactly who you are out there.” He tipped my chin up with two fingers. His hand was warm and dry and certain and I leaned into it before I caught myself, a fraction, a lean I would deny to my grave. “In here you’re mine to settle down. There is a difference between the woman on the door of that office and the girl who can’t hold still on my floor. We are going to spend a long time on the second one.”

Girl. The word should have made me laugh. I had clawed past men who used that word my whole career. In his mouth, low, patient, it went straight through the floor of me and pulled.

I want to go, I thought. I did not move toward the door. My knees stayed exactly where he had set them, apart, open, presenting, and the want pooling under that posture was not the kind that drove me to my feet. It pinned me. The wrongness of it was the whole heat of it. The smarter I knew I was, the harder my body wanted to be handled, and the two facts ground against each other and threw off something I had no clean word for.

“Hands,” he said.

I gave him my hands. I do not know why except that the alternative, choosing, deciding, being the one in charge, suddenly felt like more weight than my arms could carry, and his voice took it off me one syllable at a time.

He guided me onto my back on the towel. The ceiling. A water stain near the light I had never noticed because I had never been flat on this floor before. He worked with a care that was worse than rough would have been, rough I could have hated cleanly. This was patient. This was a man who had done this before and would do it again and had all night.

“Lift,” he said, a palm under the small of my back.

I lifted. The drawer in my head burst open and everything I did not look at came out at once, how badly I wanted his hand to stay there, how the cool of the powder and the warmth of his fingers made me clench around nothing, how the soft thick weight of it between my thighs when he fastened it should have been the most humiliating thing of my adult life and instead set my clit pulsing so hard I had to bite the inside of my cheek.

“Breathe,” he said. “You’re holding it like you hold everything.” He pressed flat against the front of me, over the padding, a slow firm pressure that drove the heat up into my belly. “Let it go.”

A noise came out of me. Wrecked. Nothing like the voice that ran meetings.

“Good girl,” he said, and my hips rose into his hand on their own, chasing, shameless, and I heard myself make that noise again and did nothing to stop it.

“You feel that?” His thumb found the spot through the padding, steady, knowing, the most maddening pressure, close to where I needed it and not on it, never quite on it. “That’s not yours to rush. You come when I decide you’ve been good enough to. Right now you have been on the floor for ten minutes failing to sit still.”

“Please,” I said. The word was out before I could kill it. I had not said please and meant it in longer than I could count.

“Please what.” Calm. Relentless. His thumb circling, denying, the ache climbing my spine like the posture had, like he had built the whole thing to lead here. “Use your words. The real ones. You know the words. You’ve been swallowing them all night.”

And I felt it crack, the last clean wall between the woman with the license and the thing kneeling open on his floor, felt my mouth start to shape the filthy true word he was waiting for, felt his hand go still and patient over the place that wanted him most, waiting, the whole room narrowed down to whether I would say it out loud.

“Say it,” Theo said.

I opened my mouth.