Page 7 of Shamefully Trained

CHAPTER 3

Alex

When I woke up the next morning, I felt desperate enough about my prospects to download the Selecta Arrangements app. I lay in bed with my phone in my hand and my stomach in a knot, and within ten minutes I understood that Gowry hadn’t been taunting me with some exaggerated private vice of rich men. The app was real, polished, legal-looking, and far more explicit than I would have believed possible if I hadn’t been reading it myself with sleep still crusted in my eyes.

Selecta Arrangements called the men members or sponsors and the women associate members, which was bad enough in itself. The language tried to sound sleek and contractual. Lifestyle compatibility. Expectations. Structure. Allowance. Discretion.

But the more I read, the worse the euphemisms fared in my head. Sponsors could set curfews, approve clothing, require location sharing, require availability on specified nights, and, under a section so carefully written it made me feel cold, impose ‘agreed-upon’ corrective discipline.

Corrective discipline.

There were sample profiles. A few of the men were almost blandly gross—businessmen wanting ‘grateful feminine companionship’ and ‘a beautiful girl who understands her place.’ Others were simply open about it.

I believe in a firm hand. Bratty behavior will be corrected. I expect obedience, physical affection, and a willingness to accept consequences.

The women’s sample profiles made me want to throw my phone. Some of them read as if they had been written by interns in a department dedicated to male fantasy.

I want to serve and please. I respond to confident leadership. I appreciate a man who isn’t afraid to discipline me.

One girl, who looked about nineteen, smiling in pearls and nothing else, had actually written that she found being spanked grounding.

I stared at that word for a long time.

Then I closed the app, deleted it, and sat up in bed as though I had narrowly avoided swallowing poison.

“No,” I said out loud to my apartment.

I would not do that. I would not become one of those girls, no matter how pretty and polished the app made them look, no matter how much money sat beside the monthly allowance estimates, no matter how humiliatingly clear it was that men would pay very well to own pieces of beautiful women.

Especially not after Gowry. Especially not because of Gowry.

I spent the rest of the morning making more and more coffee in my kitchen and applying for jobs with the intense, punitive energy of someone trying to prove something to herself. Not policy jobs. That world had closed over me with shocking speed. I sent applications to communications firms, nonprofits, admin pools, boutique consultancies, and when none of that yielded anything more promising than automated replies, I broadened the search until I hated myself for how quickly my standards had collapsed.

Three days later I was wearing a green apron in a café on Connecticut Avenue and learning how to steam oat milk without scorching it.

It was not beneath me. I kept telling myself that until I almost believed it.

In truth, I had been lucky to get it so quickly. The manager, a woman named Denise with sleeve tattoos and a practical ponytail, cared less about my resume than about whether I could show up on time and not cry if customers were rude. I told her yes. The irony of that nearly made me laugh.

The work exhausted me in a different way than the Hill had. My feet hurt. My hair smelled like coffee at the end of every shift. Men in expensive coats snapped their fingers less often than I would have expected, but when they did, I had to smile at them instead of drafting memos about why they were idiots. Still, I found some relief in the simplicity.

Orders. Cups. Change. Milk. Wipe, rinse, repeat.

No one asked me to meet a senator, or to go up to his office. No one expected leverage. No one looked at me as if my body might be useful to a legislative strategy.

At least not at first.

It was a little after two on a Thursday, in the lull between lunch and the first wave of people wanting an afternoon caffeine resurrection, when a girl came in wearing a cream sweaterdress that was just modest enough to signal it had been chosen carefully. She looked to be my age, maybe younger, with dark glossy hair and a soft pink mouth that seemed to me somehow to vacillate between innocence and experience as she contemplated the café. She checked her phone twice before a man in a charcoal coat entered and went directly to her table.

I noticed them because I was supposed to notice everyone, and then I kept noticing them because of the way he looked at her and the way she sat up straighter under his gaze. She smiled, but not casually. He did not smile much at all.

Denise called my name from the pastry case, and I turned away. By the time I’d boxed a croissant and taken two orders, they had coffees and had moved to the corner table near the window.

I wished I had I recognized the dynamic as quickly as I did because of some new, hard-won sophistication. The truth felt much uglier. I recognized it because I knew that particular current now. Not romance. Negotiation with sex under it. Appraisal. Terms.

When I cleaned up the adjacent table a little later, I heard the girl laugh and say, in a low voice that still carried, “I’m not asking for twelve. I’m not insane. But if you want exclusivity, and if you expect responsiveness, weekends, travel, all that? Five.”

My hand nearly slipped on a saucer.