For a second the words did not fit inside my mind. Punishment… sponsorship… finger in your anus. The sink felt too hard under me. My knees had gone weak. The tip of his finger remained there, not pushing, only promising, and the combination of fear and arousal was so violent it was almost indistinguishable from dizziness.

I nodded.

At once his hand left my mouth.

“Good girl,” he said quietly. “Hold still.”

I clutched the edges of the sink. My entire body seemed to become the point of contact where his fingertip rested. He did not force his way in immediately. He let it stay there, as if testing my resolution to obey.

I tried to stay still. I really did. But then he began to press inward, and my whole body jerked.

“Still,” he said again.

I bit my lip hard enough to hurt. The pressure increased, strange and shamefully intimate and not at all like anything I had ever actually felt. My body resisted on sheer reflex. He did not hurry. He only kept that calm inexorable pressure until the muscle yielded a little, then more, and the tip of his finger slipped inside me.

A broken sound escaped my throat.

It didn’t matter that I had, mortifyingly enough, done the same thing to myself while masturbating the previous night. The sensation when another person—a gorgeous man—did it to my bottom hole felt so foreign that for a second I could hardly process it. Intrusion, yes, and stretch, and the acute embarrassment of knowing exactly where he was touching me. But threaded through all of it was a frightening pulse of pleasure, not direct exactly but translating instantly into wet heat between my legs.

He paused there, just the tip inside.

“Breathe.”

I dragged in air. My face was burning. My hands were white-knuckled on the sink.

“That’s it,” he murmured. “You’re taking your consequence.”

Then he eased farther in.

I whimpered again, louder this time, and he put his free hand flat between my shoulder blades, not pinning me so much as informing me that movement would be pointless. The finger inside me felt impossibly large, though some rational corner of my mind knew that was ridiculous. It was the intimacy of it, the forbiddenness, the fact that he had placed it there as punishment and I had nodded for it that made every sensation seem magnified.

“Oh, God,” I whispered.

“No,” he said. “Sir.”

The answer should have outraged me. Instead it sent such a hot humiliating shiver through me that my thighs trembled.

He did not thrust. He let me feel the fullness of him there, the undeniable reality of what I had consented to, and then he moved his finger just slightly inside me, enough to make me gasp and press my forehead nearly against the mirror.

“You disobeyed a simple instruction,” he said. “You chose a consequence instead. That’s the first thing you need to understand about me, Alex. I mean what I say.”

Another tiny movement of his finger. I closed my eyes.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Yes, what?”

My mind felt ragged around the edges. “Yes… sir.”